National Poetry Month 2023 Feature
We are thrilled to be featured in the McGill University Faculty of Arts newsletter for the National Poetry Writing Month, with interviews from professors, students, and poets involved with our work. Read the complete feature here.
"'People are thinking about poetry much differently, as a kind of life current that helps us pay attention to the things that matter in our world,' says Professor Hickman. 'It’s a means of ‘knowing’, ‘knowing’ through feeling.'
We asked Anushree, Jana and James to share some of poets and poems that have stayed with them over the years. Happy reading!
James recommends:
'Bruce Snider is a poet I feel a particular kinship with. He was among the first contemporary poets I read in high school, and I pored over and imitated his style. Most of all, I love the dimensions of his poems. They are transparent, small, and dense; reading one is a little like adding drops of water to a coin until the surface tension breaks.'
Anushree recommends:
'The poem that has been on my mind since the pandemic a lot, especially since my last birthday has been Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”. I love this poem because I am a generally pessimistic and cynical person, and my struggle with anxiety doesn’t make it any easier for me to see the good in things that happen to or around me. And in the world that we inhabit, with natural calamities, political terror, and cultural conflicts of all kinds, it can get really tough to see the hope in the world. This poem knows all of this, it doesn’t negate it, and yet it is incredibly hopeful in choosing to turn to kindness as a possibility for change. I love that, and I think we all need to be told sometimes: “This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.'
Jana recommends:
'I have a real fondness for some of the first poems I encountered as an undergraduate. Whitman’s “Learn’d Astronomer,” for example — a poem of just 8 lines, which really isn’t very Whitman-esque in its style and doesn’t offer any revolutionary insights into the human experience. And yet, I still feel a rush of recognition whenever I return to re-read it, because it was one of the first texts that demonstrated to me just how effectively poetry can serve as a medium for conveying information, emotion, and experience.'"
Black History Month 2023: A Reading List
We offer to you a list of recommended readings by Black poets and writers. Drawn from the suggestions of poets, students, and faculty with connections to Poetry Matters, McGill, and Montreal, we bring forward this list not as any kind of definitive inventory, but rather as a snapshot of a few of the writers who currently inspire our communities’ thinking, teaching, learning, and creating. We seek to share the writers below and their representative works with a view toward awareness and appreciation of their work.
Clicking the hyperlink associated with a poet’s name will take you to their personal website, if available, or if not, to biographical information elsewhere. Hyperlinks associated with the indicated work will take you to a webpage where that work can be read or purchased.
Many thanks to all those whose thoughtful contributions of experience and expertise went into the development of this list. Your engagement is invaluable.