Poems

PLACE By Jorie Graham Ecco, 96 pp. $15.99 ALIEN VS. PREDATOR By Michael Robbins Penguin, 71 pp. $18 As titles go, "Place" offers a useful conceptual center of gravity for Jorie Graham's new collection. It's full of poems that wrangle with where we find ourselves — in time, in the space of our bodies (or the space of the cosmos), and most urgently, in the experience of our own experience. "Place" is unstable, breathtakingly fleeting.

AMHERST — When Peter Krasznekewicz took his English literature AP exam earlier this month, he offered some thoughts on Emily Dickinson and her disregard of punctuation in one of the essay questions. Little surprise, considering that two days later the 17-year-old Deerfield Academy junior was the star of a modest gathering at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst where a project that took root the summer after his freshman year was ready for its public debut. A blend of installation art, literary analysis, and architecture, Krasznekewicz's "Little White House Project" is a collection of 34 houses,...

Gulf Music By Robert PinskyFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 96 pp., $22 Many of us recognize Robert Pinsky as an "ambassador of poetry," a one-man conduit between that intimate art and the whole sweep of American public life. During his three terms as poet laureate, Pinsky worked to bring the already thriving energies of poetry to greater attention. In the last few years he's appeared not only on PBS's "NewsHour" but also on "The Simpsons" and "The Colbert Report. " Yet anyone who knows Pinsky simply as a public figure is missing the real deal.

A woman's poem about being bullied in a California school 25 years ago has brought her former classmates to tears. Now, they've created a scholarship fund in her name and raised $800 to fly her back to California for a class reunion. NBC San Diego ( http://bit.ly/JACpRw) says Lynda Frederick recently wrote a poem talking about her pain and loneliness in the 1980s while attending Orange Glen High School in Escondido. Former classmates say they were reduced to tears after reading the poem on a school reunion Facebook page.

J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of fantasy tales like “The Hobbit’’ and “The Lord of the Rings.’’ But some may not know that he was an academic first and writer second. The reclusive British scholar, lexicographer, and Oxford don was, in a way, the original geek. He specialized in the rather arcane field of philology (the history of languages), and pored over Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse texts. To Tolkien (1892-1973), Icelandic sagas and 1,000-year-old poems like “Beowulf’’ were the finest stuff ever written.

Teri Buford O'Shea still dreams about the "White Nights. " In her dreams, she's back in Guyana, back in Jonestown, reliving the terror. Jim Jones is on the loudspeaker telling the community they're under attack. "We will take our lives on this night in a revolutionary suicide!" Jones yells. Mothers feed cyanide-laced Kool-Aid to their children, then drink it themselves. Gunfire sounds in the dark of the jungle. O'Shea drinks the Kool-Aid. Jones laughs maniacally. "It's only a rehearsal," he tells everyone.

UNSEEN HAND By Adam Zagajewski Translated by Clare Cavanagh Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 107 pp. $23 Adam Zagajewski’s “Unseen Hand,” the Polish poet’s latest book to be translated into English, can make you feel more like an intruder than a reader. The collective calm of these poems creates an odd tension: Within his clear, contemplative lines, the indifference of time can always be felt drifting unstoppably by, even as we attempt to scaffold it with history or cage it with memory.

By Boston.com Staff Boston's poet laureate Sam Cornish has joined forces with Roxbury Repertory Theater to create an upcoming, unique show that will combine selected poems and prose he's written and putting them to movement and music. Gathered from his collection An Apron Full of Beans , Cornish's "eloquent, witty and thought provoking words" will be used by the theater group to create the "moving performance piece," said an event announcement . The free performances will premiere at noon on Feb. 28 at...

Common Threads, uncommon poems MassPoetry.org's Common Threads initiative is pushing Massachusetts residents to put a little poetry in their lives. It is distributing nine poems, available on the group's website and at Harvard Book Store, with a goal of getting 10,000 people to read and discuss them this month. The poems by writers with deep ties to Massachusetts tackle love, death, racism, baseball, and other subjects. The oldest poem is "The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet, a work from the 1600s that poet...

Japanese haiku is a a rare thing in the world of poetry: a world-famous, universally beloved verse form, practiced both by serious poets and schoolkids. Its present-day popularity is especially incredible given its ancient history. In Haiku Before Haiku , Steven Carter , a professor of Japanese literature at Stanford, charts the emergence of haiku as an art-form, and offers new translations of 320 poems from the period in which haiku was developing out of an earlier form called hokku . Matsuo Basho's "Frog Haiku ," one of the earlier haiku ...

WHO Jim Vrabel WHAT This Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Oberon, author Jim Vrabel will perform a staged reading of his one-man one-act play, "Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman's ‘The Dream Songs.' " Berryman's sprawling, challenging, 387-poem masterpiece follows an imaginary character named Henry (whom Berryman was given to clarifying was "not the poet, not me") through multiple stages of his life and through many lenses of identity. The reading will be followed by an open mike hosted by Harris Gardner of Tapestry of Voices; all proceeds will go to benefit Grolier Poetry...

‘Don't think too hard. Think with your heart. Let's go. " Marc Bamuthi Joseph is conducting a WallTalk workshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art's theater. The kids are middle and high school students from Young Achievers Pilot School, Dorchester Academy, Urban Science Academy, and McKinley South End Academy; WallTalk is an ICA art and writing program designed to improve their critical thinking and verbal literacy. On his easel, Joseph has written the title of Ntozake Shange's 1975 choreopoem "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the...

The late poet Ruth Stone spoiled her granddaughter Bianca Stone with junk food and Barbie dolls and gave her a typewriter for her 10th birthday. The two wrote poems side by side. And they did readings together, with Ruth shouting "Louder!" from the audience as Bianca, at age 16, fumbled with the microphone. The bond between grandmother and granddaughter is being celebrated with a new CD, "Look to the Future," produced by Paris Press, a tiny Western Massachusetts publisher.

The following was submitted by Abbot Public Library: On Sunday, May 20th, the Abbot Library's monthly Poetry Salon with Claire Keyes will focus on Philip Levine's The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. The poems of this current United States Poet Laureate have been described as "tender without being sentimental, calm but not lacking in passion. "   Come explore these poems from 2:00 to 4:00 pm with Claire Keyes, Marblehead poet and Salem State Professor Emerita.

PLACE By Jorie Graham Ecco, 96 pp. $15.99 ALIEN VS. PREDATOR By Michael Robbins Penguin, 71 pp. $18 As titles go, "Place" offers a useful conceptual center of gravity for Jorie Graham's new collection. It's full of poems that wrangle with where we find ourselves — in time, in the space of our bodies (or the space of the cosmos), and most urgently, in the experience of our own experience. "Place" is unstable, breathtakingly fleeting.

Common Threads, uncommon poems MassPoetry.org's Common Threads initiative is pushing Massachusetts residents to put a little poetry in their lives. It is distributing nine poems, available on the group's website and at Harvard Book Store, with a goal of getting 10,000 people to read and discuss them this month. The poems by writers with deep ties to Massachusetts tackle love, death, racism, baseball, and other subjects. The oldest poem is "The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet, a work from the 1600s that poet Lloyd...

Forget everything you learned about dead poets in high school. These funny poets have a way with words that will charm the giggles out of you, and maybe even inspire you (and your kids) to write some funny poems of your own. Fizzy Funny Fuzzy www.fizzyfunnyfuzzy.com/ You'll laugh out loud reading these silly poems composed especially for kids by poet Gareth Lancaster. Topics include things like being late for school, having an especially naughty family member, and being forced to eat your vegetables — in short, topics kids will identify with and laugh at. They won't even...

WHO Jim Vrabel WHAT This Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Oberon, author Jim Vrabel will perform a staged reading of his one-man one-act play, "Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman's ‘The Dream Songs.' " Berryman's sprawling, challenging, 387-poem masterpiece follows an imaginary character named Henry (whom Berryman was given to clarifying was "not the poet, not me") through multiple stages of his life and through many lenses of identity. The reading will be followed by an open mike hosted by Harris Gardner of Tapestry of Voices; all proceeds will go to benefit Grolier Poetry...

WASHINGTON - Reed Whittemore - who as a Yale sophomore in 1939 helped start a literary magazine that published some of the eminent poets of the age and who himself became a leading ambassador for poetry as writer, editor, college professor, and twice poet laureate of the United States - died April 6 in Kensington, Md., at 92. The death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his daughter Cate Whittemore. She said her father had dementia and was diagnosed more than 45 years ago with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder that made it hard to raise his arms, make a...

Forget everything you learned about dead poets in high school. These funny poets have a way with words that will charm the giggles out of you, and maybe even inspire you (and your kids) to write some funny poems of your own. Fizzy Funny Fuzzy www.fizzyfunnyfuzzy.com/ You'll laugh out loud reading these silly poems composed especially for kids by poet Gareth Lancaster. Topics include things like being late for school, having an especially naughty family member, and being forced to eat your vegetables — in short, topics kids will identify with and laugh at. They...