AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

With its own budget (as well as receiving donations), a cultural foundation manages scholarships and awards. In its American headquarters (namely in Chicago), there is an association that deals with poetry. His name is Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ where a staff of people updates the poetic horizon in the lives of its readers. The golden age of American poetry? The twenties and thirties. The literary movement metaphysics could not monopolize America. Everything went on in the tradition, with the exception of the epigrams of Hilda Doolittle http://www.ndbooks.com/author/hilda-doolittle-h.-d/ psychological excavations of Conrad Aiken and the nihilism of Robinson Jeffers. We like to identify in Merrill, Merwin and Bishop, the voices of the last generation. Without forgetting Plath and Sexton. A positive fact is that some poets of our time are published in mass-mailer editions (even without having received international recognition.

LINES – Martha Collins

Draw a line. Write a line. There. Stay in line, hold the line, a glance between the lines is fine but don’t turn corners, cross, cut in, go over or out, between two points of no return’s a line of flight, between two points of view’s a line of vision. But a line of thought is rarely straight, an open line’s no party line, however fine your point. A line of fire communicates, but drop your weapons and drop your line, consider the shortest distance from x to y, let x be me, let y be you.

EASTER MORNING – Amy Clampitt

A stone at dawn, cold water in the basin. These walls’ rough plaster imageless, after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming, after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet, of the unnamed the faceless.

LESSON 1 – Julie Hill Alger

At least I’ve learned this much: Life doesn’t have to be all poetry and roses. Life can be bus rides, gritty sidewalks, electric bills, dishwashing, chapped lips, dull stubby pencils with the erasers chewed off, cheap radios played too loud, the rank smell of stale coffee yet still glow, with the inner fire of an opal, still taste like honey.