February 2023
“Sing Me”: An Appreciation of Philip Gerard, AWP Advocate & Friend
Martin Lammon
On November 7, 2022, our community lost a dear friend. For most of a decade, Philip Gerard’s service to our association was unparalleled, as I learned firsthand when I joined AWP’s Board of Directors at the 1998 annual conference in Portland, Oregon. Philip was completing a two-year stint as Board President, after serving for years as Program Directors Council Chair and as a board advisor.
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A Conversation With Mark Tredinnick
Chikodi Adeola Olasode
Mark Tredinnick is an Australian poet, teacher, and essayist who has won major prizes including the Montreal International Poetry Prize, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, Ron Petty Prize, Newcastle Poetry Prize, and Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Recently, he won the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) at the 2020 Australia Day Honors for his service to literature and education.
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In Working Order, or Proxemics & the Poetry Book
Anna Leahy
In an article by culture writer Allyssia Alleyne titled “This Is Your Brain on Tidiness: The Psychology of ‘Organization Porn,’” photographer and Instagrammer Emily Blincoe says, “‘You could take a photo of a bouquet of flowers or you could spend five hours clipping the tops and arranging them by gradient.’ ”
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Craft Inc.
Christopher Kempf
I’d been a house painter before I became a poet.
When I entered the MFA pro¬gram at Cornell, therefore, I under¬stood with some clarity, I thought, what my work there would entail. The planing and polishing of line, the shaping of poetic structure, the tinting of tone—this was work I’d been doing for years, albeit in a different medium, and I came to relish the image of myself, no doubt hubristically, as a worker in the gouache and gesso of language.
“Craft” we called that work, a metaphor, of course, which carries over the experience of manual labor into the mystical and elusive procedures of art.
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Iambs & Isotopes
Elizabeth Bradford, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, & Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
The conversation that follows grew out of a panel, Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, that was presented at the virtual AWP Conference in March 2021. The panelists’ original remarks, along with additional poems, appeared in a book of the same title from Scarlet Tanager Books in November 2021. In the conversation below, the five panelists—Elizabeth Bradfield, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke—go beyond their presentations to probe the nature of science and poetry and examine what poetry brings to such issues as the ethics of science, science education, environmentalism, and cultural change.
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Negotiating to Keep the Poem Alive
Brian Brodeur
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered, a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize, and Cain Named the Animal, both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. McCrae lives in New York City, teaches at Columbia University, and he is the poetry editor for Image.
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Two Roads to the Ruins
Deborah Bacharach & Dia Calhoun
I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence. The unsaid for me, exerts great power … the power of ruins. 1
—Louise Glück
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Let Them Write
Tim Waggoner
Imagine a group of people sitting on metal folding chairs in a small meeting room, maybe in the basement of a church, maybe in a rec center. Picture one of the members, a middle-aged man with a mustache and goatee much whiter than his still more-or-less blond hair, standing up and saying, “My name’s Tim, and I’m a genre writer.”
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