What the Mirror Said
BY Lucille Clifton,
listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a no place
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body!
Gwendolyn Brooks’s neighborhood library. Union Stock Yards, where Chicago became Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher for the World.” The Green Mill, home of slam poetry. Maxwell Street and Chess Records, inspirations for bluesy poets. Haymarket Square, memorial to the labor movement.
The Chicago Poetry Tour, produced by the Poetry Foundation, is a chance to explore the history of the city through poetry. The online version of the tour features archival and contemporary recordings of poets and scholars, local music, and historic photographs. You can take the tour in numbered order, starting downtown, or jump around from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Or, if you’re in Chicago, let us take you on a guided tour: download the downtown portion, tour stops 1-6, hosted by NPR’s Scott Simon, into your MP3 player and take the walking tour beginning at the Chicago Cultural Center and ending at Harold Washington Library.
Whether virtual or actual, the Chicago Poetry Tour is a unique new way to introduce yourself to the Windy City and its great poetry.
The Cook and the Lady
BY David Bruzina
The cook and the lady must be more than friends.
Notice he keeps glancing through the swinging double doors?
Notice how his Chicken Curry Special makes her grin?
Later, at her house, he’ll slip off her dress, whispering
something in her ear about her complicated breath—
for which she’ll credit (in part) him and his spices.
Already, she’s anticipating the sixteen paradises.
And how she’ll fall asleep at last, beneath the wet silk covers,
her body indistinguishable from her lover’s.
If I could, I’d release the cook from his kitchen.
I’d let the lady take him home. I’d cook our chicken.
But my chicken always lacks precisely that necessary something.
So, of course you could only imagine my glee when my secret Santa, again, surprised me with a Write Bloody book. This time, Taylor Mali's The Last Time as We Are. They just keep rolling out with the hottness and, since I'm on a bit of a Taylor Mali kick right now, I wanted to put in my own little plug for this book. I just started reading it and absolutely cannot put it down...but I must...to eat. and shower. and work...but, you get the point. 
More about Write Bloody from Write Bloody
We publish and promote great books of fiction, poetry and art every year. We are a small press with a snappy look dedicated to quality literature. We have offices in LA, NYC and Murfreesboro, TN. Our design team has been pulled from all over America. We are proud of our unique style by utilizing modern painters, photographers and rock album designers for all our book cover art. We publish and promote 8-12 tour savvy authors per year. We are grass roots, DIY, boot strap believers . Our employees are authors and artists so we call ourselves a family.
...and I was going to write a poem
about how fire is the only thing
that can make a person jump out a window.
And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—
call me her knight in shattered armor—
could have loved her more,
or told the truth about children.
But depression, too, is a kind of fire.
And I know nothing of either.
All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.
1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people's work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author's work.
2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.
3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications.They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.
4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry's gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse's property for professional favors.
5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.
It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.
American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.
What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.
The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.
But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture.
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My mandarin fell from my mouth and it drowned inside this poem
I can't find it in my broken Chinese or my father's dusty notebook
So Asia America, you need to call me
Let me know where you've been hiding
I've torn apart too many paper cranes
Trying to find you in their wings
And I have gone searching
I've scoured every inch of every city
Looking for the hints and trails and clues
The black ink
The passports
The photographs
Whatever would lead me back to you
I've followed the smell of cooking rice and fish
Searching for a city that would be home to me
But all I've found is MSG impostors and gold Buddha statues waving greedily...
Alvin Lau is a spoken word poet from Chicago, Illinois. He is of Chinese ancestry and the son of immigrant parents. He has placed 7th place at the Individual World Poetry Slam and 6th place at the National Poetry Slam when he was 20 years old. He is also Amnesty International's "Poet of Conscience". He is very active in the poetry slam scene and also an activist for social justice.
A Kol Nidrei
BY Mark Belletini
Let’s set it all down, you and me.
The disappointments.
Little and large.
The frustrations.
Let’s open our fists and drop them.
The useless waiting.
The obsession with what we cannot have.
The focus on foolish things.
The pin-wheeling worry which wears us out.
The fretting.
Let’s throw them down.
The comparisons of ourselves with others.
The competition, as if Domination
was the best name we could give to God.
The cynical assumptions.
The unspoken, shelved anger.
Let’s toss them.
The inarticulate suspicions.
The self-doubt.
The pre-emptive self-dumping.
The numbing bouts of self-pity.
Let’s sink them all like stones.
Like stones in the pool of this gift of silence.
Let’s drop them like hot rocks
into the cool silence.
And when they’re gone,
let’s lay back gently, and float,
float on the calm surface of the silence.
Let’s be supported in this still cradle
of the world, new-born, ready for anything.
Aftershock
BY Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
the week the tsunami hit
i started reading the Bible again
for the first time
since I was five years old
so cried CNN, the Associated Press,
Reuters, and the BBC
so cried the Red Cross
and nations across the world
glaring at each other
to up the ante
to loosen their purse strings
i turn on the morning radio
and there is so much laughter
the mouths are huge
monstrous
as prayers and exhausted sighs of relief
sounded from every phone call,
every family member:
i am alive
i survived
i can hear you
a sober vision
as i close Bible pages
take it by the spine
and throw it against the wall
it breaks open
leaves trembling like lips
i don’t understand you God
but i do understand that
it’s not your fault
I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair
BY Pablo Neruda
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
Evey year, hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.
Old words. Wise words. Hard working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved, and unwanted.
Today, 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words
you can change that. help save the words.
