BELFAST Poet Alexandria Peary, who grew up in Sidney and currently serves as the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, will judge the 20201 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, a statewide competition happening this year in conjunction with the 16th annual.
Interviews
An Interview With Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the author of Bellocq s Ophelia (2002) and Native Guard (2006), the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book is Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississipi Gulf Coast (2010). Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Her poems appeared in issue 5 of Smartish Pace.
MultiStages will present SPEAKOUT: Protest Plays & More, a virtual festival of multicultural multidisciplinary commissioned works, live on June 21 and recorded from June 22 to 25. Conceived and curated by Artistic Director/activist Lorca Peress, the program is a 90-minute turntable of short plays, dance works and poetry exploring the essence of protest and activism in the modern period since the killing of George Floyd, the pandemic, the surge in hate crimes on Asian-Americans and more.
Since 1977, MultiStages has organized collaborations between playwrights and artists of other disciplines to develop multidisciplinary works. When George Floyd was killedand the BLM message exploded, veteran artists of MultiStages took to the streets. The streets were their theater, where the screams were real and the pain was palpable. In deciding what they could do to support this movement and to protest attacks on Asian Americans, Artistic Director/activist Lorca Peress, created the idea of a m
The Writer’s Chronicle, and
The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. She teaches at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
INTRODUCTION
Being a poet has taught me the value of practice and patience. I have learned that my next poem will reveal itself to me if I simply follow language by engaging with it through my (mostly) daily reading and writing practice and if I wait for that small, persistent thing a scrap of language, an image, a question that won’t leave me alone that opens a door in my mind. I’ve also learned that for me, at least poetry is slow. I often work on poems for several years before they’re finished. This morning, I think I finally found the right form for a poem I’ve been working on for four years. Last month, I finished a poem I started working on in 2010. My poems spend a long time resting, waiting for me to come back around and try again to get it right. I’m not a particularly patient person in other
Read this article in Yiddish.
Jewish crime ain’t what it used to be. In 1908, New York Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham caused a scandal when he asserted in an article in the North American Review that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The Jewish community was outraged and Bingham was forced to retract his statement.
In fact, studies have long shown that Jews have a relatively low crime rate, lower than that of other religious groups. For much of their history, Jews were generally less drawn to crime, partly thanks to the strong social net provided by the organized Jewish community, in which wealthier Jews helped support the poor, who were then less liable to fall into a life of crime.