Why is April called poetry month? Why now, in a precarious early spring? Ross Gay and Robert Hass remind me that poetry is physical. Immediate. Close as skin or rain on birchbark.
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Rambling with poets in the hills
In all my years in the Berkshires, I’ve talked with poets in all kinds of times and places — on spring nights after readings, on quiet days in writing residencies, in bars and meadows and coffee shops … In honor of National Poetry Month, here are some who move me strongly.
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Writers at the Mount move between worlds
Cat Wei invokes the energy of a summer night on a raw almost-spring day, as she and Parvati Ramchandani and Mario Giannone meet in Edith Wharton’s innermost rooms.
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New Orleans poets inspire North Adams art
Los Angeles artist Lorenzo Baker sets a man and woman resting together, and a collective of Black poets from 1845, at the center of his new installation with MCLA’s Art Lab.
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Kali takes courage in the 21st century
The bass hums low, and a woman is dancing — Mythili Prakash performs contemporary movement in a form more than a thousand years old.
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Men on the Amistad speak out in Kevin Young’s ‘Ardency’
Fifty-three people of the Mendi from Sierra Leone captured a slave ship. Each one of them had been kidnapped from a rice field or a house where he slept beside his wife.
Read articleIzhar Patkin honors poet Agha Shahid Ali in light (throwback)
On a spring night, Izhar Patkin’s ‘Veil Suite’ fills the long gallery with rooms of translucent paintings, illuminating Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry.
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Charles Coe brings poetry to Close Encounters (flashback)
Cambridge poet Charles Coe can write with the crowd-surging energy of hot summer nights, soul and sweat … and with the warmth of holding hands.
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Writers revive lost languages at the Mount
The stories move from inlets of red mangrove and sea grass to worn tarmac in northern Alaska on long nights, and a family looking across city skylines between Tehran and Boston …
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Phillip B. Williams reforms worlds in ‘Mutiny’
Nationally awardwinning poet Phillip B. Williams has published his newest book, moving through a space where myth and story and lived experience charge the air — a place of persistence, anger and beauty.
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