Poetry

In Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry,’’ anything beautiful or pure plummets to its death or is dragged from its comfortable perch. A schoolgirl, apricots, a sunhat blown, like a petal, into a river: Things don’t fall apart in this nearly perfect movie, they simply fall down. Gravity becomes a cruel conflation of emotion, morality, and physics — a force more to be negotiated than defied. In a small South Korean town, a goodly grandmother in her mid-60s named Mija (Yoon Jeong-hee) does that negotiating with a resolve that astonishes even her. She conducts some alarming, increasingly desperate business that erodes the simple...

Robert Pinsky, who served as the US poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, will be the keynote speaker at Concord Academy's 89th commencement ceremony on June 1. Pinsky, a former Concord Academy parent, is the founder of the Favorite Poem Project, which helped bring poetry into the American mainstream.

Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems Edited by Rod PadgettAmerican Poets Project, 190 pp., $20 On the Edge: Collected Long Poems By Kenneth KochKnopf, 411 pp., $35 In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems 1955-2007 By X. J. KennedyJohns Hopkins University, 205 pp., paperback, $18.95 Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008 By X. J. KennedyBOA, 118 pp., paperback, $17 Toad to a Nightingale ...

Father doesn't always know best. That's one of the lessons in Susan Goldman Rubin's young adult biography "Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein" (Charlesbridge), which tackles head-on a defining conflict of Bernstein's youth. His father did not think it was a good idea to try to make a career in music. As Samuel Bernstein wrote in a letter to his son's music teacher, "From a practical standpoint, I prefer that he does not regard his music as a future means of maintenance. " A successful businessman, he wanted his son to work in the family wig and hair-care company.

From Portuguese fado and German lieder to Persian and Urdu ghazals, poetry plays a central role in a global array of musical traditions. Maybe it speaks to poetry's marginal role in American society that so few jazz composers have sought to set verse to music. Here are a few notable exceptions. No jazz artist poured more creative energy into writing for poetry than the late soprano saxophone master Steve Lacy, whose vast body of work included settings for text and verse by Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Tom Raworth, Blaga Dimitrova, and Robert Creeley, usually composed for his wife and creative...

MARCH 12-14 CHANDLER, ARIZ. Ostrich Festival: Are there real ostriches here? Yes. Do they race one another with human jockeys on their backs? Yes. Does the festival serve ostrich burgers? Yes. Is it weird to eat ostrich while you are watching ostriches run around? Yes. But weird is the norm at this three-day event in suburban Phoenix. The weekend of ostrich-themed events is family-friendly with fun houses and petting zoos, but it’s also well equipped for grown-ups traveling alone, thanks to a lineup of live music (including a Journey tribute band)

NEW LONDON, Conn. -- William M. Meredith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, has died a week after being admitted to a local hospital. He was 88. Mr. Meredith, a professor at Connecticut College for nearly 30 years, died Wednesday at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital of cardiac and respiratory failure, according to a hospital spokesman. A resident of Montville, Mr. Meredith received more than 25 awards, grants, fellowships, and honorary degrees, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1988 for "Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems" and the National Book Award...

THE BLUE TOWER By Tomaz Salamun Translated, from the Slovenian, by Michael Biggins Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 86pp., $22 NOTES FROM IRRELEVANCE By Anselm Berrigan Wave Books, 65pp., paperback, $16 Poetry and politics can be like friends you hate to see at the same party. Both are helpless flirts, strong personalities, languages of coercion. And while poetry strives for the very truth that politics seeks to smother, both dabble in obscurantism when it suits a bigger purpose.

The following is a press release from Salem State University: December 9, 2011, Salem, Mass.—Ravenna Press recently announced the publication of Salem State University English professor Ann Taylor's collected poetry, The River Within. Taylor, who teaches essay, poetry and non-fiction writing as well as English literature at the university, was the recipient of Ravenna's inaugural Cathlamet Prize for Poetry in 2011, besting an international field of poets to take first place.

Some years ago I was on a poetry panel where one of my fellow judges, an earnest young woman, dismissed a packet of (I thought gorgeous) poetry, remarking, "I don't care at all about beauty. " I remember thinking that it sounded the death knell for poetry, which stands on beauty and feeling as on two pillars. I do not know what poetry is without beauty, without eliciting and drawing on deep feeling. Poetry's tools are many -- imagery, rhythm, sound play, story, character, silence, line breaks, surprise, and what Aristotle called the genius that cannot be...

IT IS DOWN TO THE TOP SIX. A 14-year-old girl in a grown-up's gray suit and red blouse pauses just outside the auditorium door, hugging herself as she moves her lips wordlessly. A tall girl dressed in bright coral huddles nearby with her mother. They are standing nearly nose to nose and murmuring. It's hard to tell whether they are reciting a poem or a prayer. In five minutes, these two teens and four others will compete in the last round of the Massachusetts state finals of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest.

A novel from Poland and a collection of Japanese poetry have received prizes for best translations. Wieslaw (WEEZ'-law) Mysliwski's (miz-LEW'-skeez) "Stone Upon Stone" was translated from Polish by Bill Johnson. It won in fiction for the Best Translated Book Award. Kiwao (KEE'-wow) Nomura's (no-MOO'-rahz) "Spectacle & Pigsty" was translated by Kyoko (kee-‘YO-ko) Yoshida (yo-SHEE'-da) and Forrest Gander. It won for poetry. Winning authors and translators will divide $20,000 in prize money donated by Amazon.com.

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.

USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR A GUIDE FOR BOYS By D.A. Powell Graywolf, 108 pp., $22 Powell's fifth collection is a stunner. Without his giveaway stylistic stamp (those crisp twin lines, split by the hinge of a colon), there's only his unmistakably lush language to give him away here, and it's more than enough. Memory, sensuality, and time all tangle with each other — altering each other as they go. Powell takes us beyond the "salty declivities" of a Turkish bath into a wilderness of desire, a "region of want.

From Portuguese fado and German lieder to Persian and Urdu ghazals, poetry plays a central role in a global array of musical traditions. Maybe it speaks to poetry's marginal role in American society that so few jazz composers have sought to set verse to music. Here are a few notable exceptions. No jazz artist poured more creative energy into writing for poetry than the late soprano saxophone master Steve Lacy, whose vast body of work included settings for text and verse by Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Tom Raworth, Blaga Dimitrova, and Robert Creeley, usually composed for...

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 Schwartz...

WASHINGTON -- Anthony Hecht, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, died here Wednesday after suffering from lymphoma. He was 81. Born in New York City in 1923, Mr. Hecht won the Pulitzer in 1968 for his work "The Hard Hours. " He received numerous other prizes including the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Los Angeles Book Prize. Deborah Garrison, his editor for the last few years at Alfred A. Knopf, said Mr. Hecht was a formal poet who wrote about war, corruption, and "taking on society in the largest sense" with other serious issues but could also write humorous, witty,...

The Millis Public Library is offering several special programs to celebrate April's status as National Poetry Month. Students in grades 5 through 12 are invited to submit poetry for display at the library's Poetry Coffee House, from 6 to 7 p.m. Monday, which will feature readings and light refreshments. To submit a poem, e-mail Rachel Silverman at rsilverman@minlib.net, or Patsy Divver at pdivver@millisps.org. For adults, the library is hosting "Common Threads: Nine Poets and a Wealth of Readers," a program sponsored by the Friends of the Millis Public Library as part of a statewide event aiming to have 10,000...

NEW YORK - Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and rage, whose work - distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity - brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82. The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said. Widely read, anthologized, interviewed and taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential...