Poetry News For November 28, 2007
Poetry News:
- — Poets Marched in the Van of Irish Revolt; Pearse and MacDOnagh, Executed Last Week, Well Known for Their Verse;;-Other Writers Prominent in Sinn Fein Ranks — By Joyce Kilmer —
- — Interview: Author Kim Addonizio is fearless in verse and prose —
- — The search continues for Missouri’s first poet laureate —
- — Eleanor Rees enjoys the engagement with specific, sensual experience in the responses to this month’s workshop —
- — American leaders have a history of writing, and inspiring, poetry that is mediocre or just plain bad. Ariel Ramchandani encourages poets, and presidents, to do better when the next inauguration comes round … —
- — View from the lab: Science’s debt to William Blake —
- — Bombed Baghdad book market turns the page —
- — Workshop practices poetry as one of the healing arts —
- — Kipling’s India home to become museum —
- — Anne Shelby embraces Appalachian language in her daily life, writing and music —
- — Ondaatje, Domanski win Governor General’s Lit Awards —
- — The Iron Man who had a heart after all —
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Tags: ae, Anne Shelby, books, Don Domanski, Eleanor Rees, Joseph Plunkett, Kim Addonizio, Padraic Pearse, poet, Poetry, Poetry News, poets, Thomas MacDonagh, william blake
Rethabile responds:
Posted: November 28th, 2007 at 2:57 am →
“…many of them take for granted the idea that melting down their thoughts into forceful, poetic kernels and writing an ode to the bladder or poems about awakening from anesthesia or nursing a spouse can be healing in some way.”
That’s from number 8 upstairs, about the workshop. Sure, that sort of thing can heal. I know this for a fact, first hand. Well, I’m not healed (violent political death of two family members, one of them just three years old. I’ll never forget it, nor them), but through poetry one learns to get by. Poetry (or perhaps some other form of art) becomes then a steam-releasing valve, a means of understanding what this acrid feeling is and why one has it. I used poetry to stare down the question, “What is death?”
I have my own answer, which may not be yours at all. No matter. Those folks in the article who describe bladders and anaesthesia with poetry find their own answers and are better off for it. That’s the therapeutic power, not of words, but of the act of asking questions and stitching words together with the knowledge gained, or with the feelings encountered.