Posts Tagged ‘poetry’
John L. Stanizzi, Poet: “Teaching didn’t do anything for my soul. It gave me a soul.”
“Teaching didn’t do anything for my soul. It gave me a soul.”
Read MorePostcard From Pakistan: Cross-Cultural Friendships Drown Out the Silencing
Many American friends might be even surprised to know that despite a big public outcry about US drone attacks and high civilian casualties, a large number of Pakistanis don’t blame or hate the American people. They understand that Americans are as much victims of this present ‘war’ as we are. This understanding, this acceptance, is born of the deep spirituality permeating most of our society.
Read MoreLauren Berry: The Lifting Dress
As award-winning poet Lauren Berry takes us through the after-effects of the sexual trauma experienced by her young narrator, the reader is chilled by the depth of the girl’s vulnerability. But then there is another layer which the author weaves in with equally potency: the growing sense that here is a girl who, despite everything, remains the narrator of her own self-identity. Colorful and eccentric and steeped in lush, figurative language, this story, however difficult, is unmistakably her own.
Read MoreWriting and Sacred Spaces: Dawn Thompson, Portland, Oregon
“I have come to believe that the ‘fiction’ which arises from my imagination holds as much ‘truth’ as my lived experiences.”
~Dawn Thompson, poet, Portland, Oregon, USA
Dorianne Laux: “All Poetry is Preparation for Death”
“Poetry allows us access to the quotidian mysteries. It allows us to revere the miracle of our lives as we live them, so that when death comes, we’ll be grateful.”
~Dorianne Laux, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Paulann Petersen, Oregon’s Poet Laureate
“There are achingly empty spaces, spaces waiting for us to fill them with our creativity.”
~Paulann Petersen, Oregon’s Poet Laureate
“All I Want Is to Be Opened” Interview with Joseph Fasano
“A poem might end up looking terribly mysterious—I hope it does—but if it’s resisted baring itself, it’s failed. Fragmentation and ellipticism may be aesthetic strategies, but resistance isn’t. All I want is to be opened.”
~Joseph Fasano
Samuel Peralta: The Physics of Poetry
“A poet looks at the world a little differently from others, and so does a scientist. I am very fortunate to be both. I find beauty in the cosmological consequences of dark matter, as much as I do in the written and spoken word. I appreciate the beauty in Heisenberg’s principle as much as Matisse’s economy of line. I’m probably one of the few poets in the world who literally dreams about tensor equations.”
~Samuel Peralta, physicist and award-winning author of Sonata Vampirica
Read MoreJohn Siddique, British poet, essayist, author
“No one lives a bloodless existence. Everything that is repressed eventually finds a way out, even if it is only in the deepest of unremembered dreams. Though I’d rather it was with honesty, acceptance, a bold step, forgiveness and joy. Otherwise we tend to get all twisted up. Art, like love, does keep us alive; and, like love, it has the power to return us to our humanity when nothing else can.”
~Interview with British poet, essayist, author, John Siddique