Tag Archives: Featured Festival Poet
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Tracy K. Smith
October 6, 2014We rarely think of such kitschy science fiction films as Omega Man, Soylent Green and the many sequels to the original Planet of the Apes as poetic. But in a PBS NewsHour interview, Tracy K. Smith has said she drew … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Robert Pinsky
September 13, 2014In The Sounds of Poetry, three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky writes, “The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Jamaal May
September 9, 2014Detroit poet Jamaal May’s poem “I Do Have A Seam,” which he reads in the video above, is three poems in one. The form, called a contrapuntal poem, is made up of two columns. The reader can read the first … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Marilyn Nelson
September 5, 2014Listen to Marilyn Nelson read poem 10 from the “The Fish in the Sea Is Not Thirsty” section of The Kabir Book, translated by Robert Bly. Her commentary on why she read the poem, and her reading of her own … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Alex Lemon
August 22, 2014Choosing My life, I drop Quarters in The slot & select The worst Song on The jukebox & then sneak Out to Watch Through the rain- Streaked glass. excerpt from “All of the Made Roads” in Fancy Beasts There is … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
August 2, 2014Photo from rachelelizagriffiths.com Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and photographer, with a keen ability to capture the essence of a subject’s character in both mediums. Griffiths is also a reader, and her book of poems Mule & Pear is … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Ona Gritz
August 1, 2014Photo courtesy of MainStreetRag.com No corner of Ona Gritz’s house is closed to the public. When Gritz writes a poem, she invites readers to sit at her kitchen table, on her living room couch, at the foot of her bed. … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Kevin Goodan
July 30, 2014Photo courtesy of Lewis-Clark State College Kevin Goodan’s poetry has roots planted firmly in the earth, and leaves reaching towards the sky. Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Goodan worked at a slaughterhouse and fought forest fires before … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Claudia Emerson
July 25, 2014Watch the Cortland Review’s Poets in Person with Claudia Emerson and her husband, musician Kent Ippolito, for a delightful introduction to one of our 2014 Festival Poets. The tour of her home is, in many ways, a brief tour of … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Camille Dungy
July 25, 2014Photo by Ray Black, University of Georgia, courtesy of PoetryFoundation.org To get to know Camille Dungy, watch her read “before her heart, a mechanical aperture, closed” which starts at 7:50 here: The poem risks heading into the world of cliché—a … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Rita Dove
July 23, 2014Listen to Rita Dove read “American Smooth” at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival. It’s widely known that poet Rita Dove is the youngest person, and the first African-American, to be appointed United States Poet Laureate. Her biographies inevitably offer some … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Sean Thomas Dougherty
July 23, 2014“There are arias everywhere, my brother.” That might as well be Sean Thomas Dougherty’s mantra. Growing up in working class New Hampshire, laboring at blue collar jobs throughout his life in factories and warehouses, Dougherty eventually set his sights on … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Brendan Constantine
July 15, 2014Photo courtesy of Indelible Ink on Flickr Commons Brendan Constantine reimagines the familiar and the mysterious, delicately balancing playfulness and poignancy, to create intriguing poems worth reading again and again. His performance style, meanwhile, is just as arresting. Watch him … Continue reading
2014 Featured Festival Poet: Dave Caserio
July 13, 2014Listen to Festival Poet Dave Caserio read “Forensic Love” with musician Parker Brown. His relishing of the sheer physicality of language is evident from the first through the last word of his poem. For Caserio, poetry begins in the breath, … Continue reading