Chicken Spaghetti

Lady Liberty

It's fascinating to see where poetry pops up in public spaces. Here Nathalie Handal's poem "Lady Liberty" watches over Zang Toi's hand-beaded New York City skyline cape and Enrique Torres's graffiti jacket; all constitute a display in the super-fun exhibition "This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture," at the Museum of the City of New York.

If the print is too small to see in the photo, you can also read the poem at the Poetry Society of America.

Handal, a French-American poet with Palestinian roots, also translates, edits, and writes plays. And teaches! She's the author of  "The City and the Writer" column for Words Without Borders. You can read more about this multi-talented woman at the Poetry Foundation and at her own website.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 23rd is at Tabatha Yeatts's blog, The Opposite of Indifference.

Photo by ST (2024).

Poet Evie Shockley

Length of video: 2 minutes, 16 seconds

Evie Shockley recorded this poem a while back as part of the Art for Justice project at the University of Arizona. According to the project's website, 

The University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice grant funds a three-year project that commissions new work from leading writers in conversation with the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, with the goal of creating new awareness and empathy through presentation and publication.

I wanted to include the video here to introduce Shockley's poetry to folks who might not know it yet. You can hear how powerful it is. Every morning lately I read a few poems from her new collection, suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), and savor them. Prose poem fans will want to add "the lost track of time" (no online version available without registration/subscription) to their mentor-text lists, and the same applies to those inclined toward ekphrastic works, with "perched." Fortunately, that poem appears on the book's website, which is linked above.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 16th is at Margaret Simon's Reflections on the Teche. Here's a shout-out to Margaret, our host and my fellow Jacksonian!

Poetry Books to Look For, 2024

If you want to move to the city, you can, Miss Grehan said. And studying poetry at university is a wonderful thing to do. But more important is to read poetry, and write poetry, every day. It doesn't have to be for long. If just once a day, people would read a poem instead of picking up their phone, I guarantee you the world would be a better place.

from The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

*****

Maybe you're like me and enjoy both a good list and the idea of being well-organized. (Write every day? Ha!) Here are some places to read about new poetry titles.

Literary Hub

Sylvia Vardell's Poetry for Children. Sneak Peak List 2024.

Publishers Weekly. A long list and a Top Ten for spring 2024.

The Millions. Winter 2024.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 2nd takes place at A(nother) Year of Reading; our host is the most marvelous Mary Lee Hahn.

Photo by ST. Part of the mural at LifeBridge Community Services, Bridgeport, CT.