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.
Read articleRambling 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.
Read articleWriters 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.
Read articleNew 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.
Read articleKali 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.
Read articleMen 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.
Read articleCharles 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.
Read articleWriters 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 …
Read articlePhillip 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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