Poetry & Poetics

What I Am Thankful For…

By Kevin ⋅ November 27, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Language…

Your Revolution

By Kevin ⋅ October 23, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I was reminded of this song on this thread over at Jack and Jill Politics. So good. It’s a remix, as it were, of Gill Scot-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and takes on misogynistic lyrics in Hip Hop. I’m kinda pissed now, though. I just spent half an hour digging through my records [...]

Poet Mahmoud Darwish Has Died

By Kevin ⋅ August 10, 2008 ⋅ 3 comments

Ugh. I just learned from Theriomorph in comments that Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has also passed on. Theriomorph is right. This has been a bad weekend for art.
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry encapsulated the Palestinian cause, will get the equivalent of a state funeral in the West Bank on [...]

Happy Bloomsday!

By Kevin ⋅ June 16, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Grab yourself a bottle of Powers and celebrate the best novel of the 20th century that no one but a handful of English majors and Joyce scholars have ever read.

Sunday Poetry Review

By Kevin ⋅ May 18, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

Because sharing poetry is sharing love and peace and all that is good with the world.
“All the World Moved” by June Jordan1
All the world moved next to me strange
I grew on my knees
in hats and taffeta trusting
the holy water to run
like grief from a brownstone
cradling.
Blessing a fear of the anywhere
face too pale to be [...]

In Memory of Aimé Césaire

By Kevin ⋅ April 19, 2008 ⋅ 6 comments

On Thursday, 17 April, the Martinique poet, activist, politician, and post-colonial theorist Aimé Fernand David Césaire died.
Césaire was a central figure in what can be considered the French version of the Harlem Renaissance. While in school at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , he helped found L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), a literary journal dedicated to [...]

Melvin B. Tolson - The Great Poet

By Kevin ⋅ January 2, 2008 ⋅ 6 comments

Reading the various blogger reviews of The Great Debaters has me even more pumped to go check it out. Now y’all know that I can’t let all this talk of Melvin B. Tolson go on without reminding folks that, in addition to being an inspirational teacher, he was a great Modernist poet, whose epic poem, [...]