NYPL Blogs: Poetry

NYPL Acquires First Book of Poetry by Aleksis Rannit

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 11:13:53 -0400

Aleksis/Aleksei Rannit (born Dolgopolov), an Estonian poet, art critic, and librarian was born in Kallaste, Russian Empire [now Estonia] in 1914 but spent the first six years of his life in Petrograd. After the war, he moved to Estonia and immigrated to Germany in 1939 after the Soviet Union began occupying Estonia. In 1953 he arrived in the United States where he received his MA in art history from Columbia University. During 1956-1961 he worked at The New York Public Library, first at the Art & Architecture Division, and later at the Slavonic Division including as its First Assistant. In 1961 he became the Curator of the Slavic and East European collections at Yale University Library and remained there for 20 years until his retirement.

Rannit's writings include poetry in Estonian and in English translation and several works of literary and art criticism. His collected poems Valimik luuletisi, 1932-1982 (1985) includes a critical afterword by Viktor Kõressaar (1916-2002) and Ants Oras (1900-1982). Oras was an Estonian translator and writer while Kõressaar worked at NYPL's Slavonic Division since 1952, including as its First Assistant in the Slavonic (after Rannit left in 1961) and as its Chief (1976-1983). A couple of decades earlier, Rannit and Kõressaar edited Estonian Poetry and Language: Studies in Honor of Ants Oras (1965).

Rannit played a vital role in P.E.N., the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists. He also received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Stockholm University in 1978 and from the University of South Korea in Seoul in 1981.

Rannit died of a heart attack in 1985 at his home in New Haven, Connecticut. His papers that consist chiefly of subject files maintained by him, dating roughly from the 1950s to the 1980s, are held by Yale.

Akna raamistuses: esimesi värsse (Kaunas: Kirjastus "Sakalas," 1937) is the first book publication by Rannit. It includes Rannit's poems written in Estonian between 1932 and 1937 as well as translations from Lithuanian poets: Vytautas Syrian Gira (1911-1997), Kazys Inčiura (1906-1974), Jonas Aistis (1904-1973), Antanas Miškinis (1905-1983), Stasys Santvaras (1902-1991), Alé Sidabraité, Jevgeni Škljar (1894-1941), and Petras Vaičiunas (1890-1959).

Rannit, who was deeply interested in Estonian, Lithuanian, and Russian cultures, dedicated the book to "the Immortal Light of the Soul of the Poet and Man Liudas Gira and my Lithuanian Friends." Liudas Gira (1884-1946) was a Lithuanian poet, writer, and literary critic who was friends with Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont (1867-1942), a Russian symbolist poet, and translator who among other authors translated works by Gira. Thus the title page also includes a motto in Russian taken from Balmont's work "To Liudas Gira".

Original pictorial wrappers are by Ott Kangilaski (1911-1975) who was a book illustrator, cartoonist, and also published art articles and books. Kangilaski also created decorative initials throughout the book and three woodcuts.

NYPL's copy is signed and inscribed by the author.

Bibliography

“Prof. Alexis Rannit, 70, Poet and Retired Curator at Yale,” New York Times, January 9, 1985, p. B6.
Robert H. Davis, Jr., “History of Slavic and East European Collections in the United States During the Interwar Period: An Agenda for Research,” Solanus new series 15 (2001): 50, footnote 49;
Robert H. Davis, Jr. and Edward Kasinec, “From Shelf to Spotlight: Rediscovering Modernist Books from Eastern Europe at The New York Public Library,” in: S.A. Mansbach with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz, Graphic Modernism: from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935 ([New York]: New York Public Library, c2007): 68, footnote 32.
Janis A. Kreslins, "In Memoriam Dr. Viktor Koressaar (1916–2002)," Slavic & East European Information Resources 5:1-2 (2004): 77-79.

Fragments of Shelley

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:31:55 -0400

Image of pg. 1 of PBS 0283, a manuscript fragment of Percy Bysshe Shelley's unfinished poem, "The Triumph of Life" held at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library.

The image you see here is a fragment from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "The Triumph of Life," left unfinished when he drowned on July 30th, 1822, a few days before his 30th birthday. Shelley left behind a young son, Percy Florence, a widow, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and a considerable body of poetry.

On May 4, 2021, a group of scholars and admirers of both Shelleys gathered online to celebrate a milestone in the editing of those poems: the appearance of Volume VII of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley from the Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by Nora Crook. Participants in the Zoom event included the editor herself; her co-editor of the whole series, Neil Fraistat; Rachael Marsay, Roy Davids Archivist and Curator of Literary Manuscripts after 1800 at the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; Elizabeth Denlinger, Curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at The New York Public Library; and Catherine Goldstead, Associate Editor for Literary Studies and Ancient Studies at the Johns Hopkins University Press.

If not for the pandemic, at least some of those people would have gathered in the flesh for a party, since this book, weighing in at an even thousand pages, labored at for over fifteen years, comprised of the most careful, knowledgeable, and insightful readings possible of P.B. Shelley's dreadful hand—this book deserves a party.

You can watch the event below:

If you want to skip to the highlights, you can hear Nora Crook read Shelley's lyric fragment "The Passage of the Apennines" at 33:27, and, at 37:41, hear how she made sense of two lines that had stumped her for thirty years.

Volume VII is largely made up of incomplete poems, "the fragments and the few complete but unpolished original poems that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley includes in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)." Crook is careful in her appellation of these shards of verse: "Except for those taken from fair copies we do not call these poems, but poetry, fragments, drafts, stanzas, lines, verses, items, or pieces, as appropriate." Nonetheless, this volume contains some of Shelley's most enduring work, beginning with "The Triumph of Life," 548 terza rima lines that "many regard as his finest piece of poetry, despite its being a fragment, or perhaps because it is fragment." We find also some of Shelley's most beloved brief lyrics, such as "Music, When Soft Voices Die," and much more; to quote Crook again, the "longer fragments 'Unfinished Drama,' 'Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,' Charles the First, 'Ginevra,' 'Mazenghi,' and 'The Woodman and the Nightingale' ... represent his experimentation within dramatic, narrative, descriptive, and allegorical genres."

Crook has returned to Shelley's original manuscripts and made corrections to earlier editions; writing of "The Triumph of Life" she notes that "In spite of sixty years of close scrutiny of the MS by Matthews, Reiman, and many others, we have found need for further small corrections to current texts, as other editors will do after us. 'Figures ever new | Rise on the bubble, paint them how we may.'" Despite the extent of the scholarly apparatus, though, this book has been designed with such care that, while you might not want to toss it in your rucksack on your post-COVID backpacking trip, it is a pleasure to read at a table. The supplementary materials and scholarly apparatus are there to be consulted when needed, but they do not obtrude on the poems themselves on the page. For this the editors and designers at Hopkins are much to be commended.

Turn to the back and you will find commentaries that amount to concise monographs on the most important fragments, notes on all poems, historical collations, some of P.B. Shelley's background reading, and much else. At the front of the volume, Nora Crook's editorial overview offers us a careful publishing history and a sympathetic reconsideration of Mary Shelley as editor, firmly countering the old image of her as prudish. Working within very tight constraints imposed by P.B. Shelley's father, who wished his son's work to be forgotten, and harsh English libel laws, the boundaries of which Shelley's more radical poetry skirted or surpassed, Mary Shelley was not able to publish as she wished. It would have been personally painful to her to know that some of her late husband's love lyrics were not addressed to her. And yet she did not give up the fight to keep alive his work and his name. One hundred and ninety-nine years after P.B. Shelley's death, Volume VII of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a living monument to both him and his wife.

Nine New Poetry Collections to Savor

Cierra Bland, Communications — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 16:32:47 -0400

This summer, turn beach reading on its head and dive into some poetry! These new poetry collections will open readers up to longtime masters of the art like Joy Harjo and daring new voices like Threa Almontaser.

The Essential June Jordan by June Jordan, Ed. by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works. Written over the span of several decades, Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths.

Love and Other Poems by Alex Dimitrov

Alex Dimitrov’s third book, Love and Other Poems, is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure—specifically, the twelve months of the year—Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction. Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light—but never false hope. This is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment.

The Renunciations by Donika Kelly

The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.

The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser

Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. The Wild Fox of Yemen is a love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before. Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures.

Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry by The Library of Congress; edited by Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today.

Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better.

Water I Won't Touch by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Water I Won’t Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body’s healing from a double mastectomy—in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction—these ambitious poems put new form to what’s been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.

World Literature Festival Recap: The Languages of Poetry with Dunya Mikhail and T. Urayoán Noel

Alfredo Gutierrez, Outreach Services Program Assistant — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:08:34 -0400

This April, the New York Public Library hosted our first World Literature Festival. Across three weeks, there were a wide range of programs from live storytimes, to book discussions, to author talks.

We hosted an “In Conversation” series of author talks and panels where we invited authors, poets, and leaders of organizations to speak with us. These programs were conducted in many languages and we are pleased to share the recordings now as part of Immigrant Heritage Month 2021 to continue to highlight and celebrate authors that reflect our communities.

On April 12th, the Library hosted poets Dunya Mikhail and T. Urayoán Noel for “Languages of Poetry,” a panel discussion about poetry and language. In conversation with NYPL librarians Grace Yamada and Leanna Frankland, they discussed poetry in translation, their writing process, and other poets they look up to.

This video has captions in English.

World Literature Festival - Languages of Poetry with Dunya Mikhail and Urayoán Noel from The New York Public Library on Vimeo.

Find Urayoán Noel's work at NYPL.

Find Dunya Mikhail's work at NYPL.

#CelebrateImmigrants

Art and Artists Book Club: Frank O'Hara, a Poet Among Painters

Chantal Lee, Librarian, Wallach Division, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 14:31:56 -0400

Mike Goldberg, Frank O’Hara, and Joan Mitchell, by Walter Silver, 1959. New York Public Library, Photography Collection Image ID: 5154189

On the evening of April 30th, to celebrate and conclude National Poetry Month, Art and Artists Book Club readers gathered for a special poetry edition dedicated to Frank O’Hara, who was known in his lifetime as being a “poet among painters.”

Twenty readers joined us, from New York City’s boroughs to South Korea, as we read out loud, interpreted and reflected on the poems, the poet, and poetry’s relationship to painting. We read and shared thoughts on "Having a Coke With You" (1960), "Adieu to Norman", "Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul" (1964), and "Why I Am Not A Painter" (1956).

Before launching into the poems, we set the scene a bit: describing the intertwined artistic world that Frank’s poetry was written in, and how the New York School was both a cultural period that began at the start of the 1950s to the 1970s, and also a geographical space that included the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea and SoHo—where painters attended poetry readings and the poets visited the artists' studios. The commingling community strived to learn from each other, gather inspiration, debate, and even gossip.

By the time of his untimely death at the age of 40 in 1966, Frank O'Hara was more or less the axis around which the painters and poets of the New York School seemed to orbit. Because of his many friendships, and his influential post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he provided connections between poets, such as Kenneth Koch and Bill Berkson, with painters such as Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers (who was O'Hara's lover).

Mike Goldberg, Frank O’Hara, and Joan Mitchell, by Walter Silver, 1959. New York Public Library, Photography Collection Image ID: 5154189

We also closely looked at a beautiful and seminal four-volume painting and poetry artists book published by Tiber Press in 1960, that is part of the Print Collection.

Tiber Press specialized in dynamic screenprints by the Abstract Expressionists and was located in Greenwich Village. The master printers, Floriano Vecchi and Richard Miller, presented this idea of collaboration to the poets and painters in order to highlight some relationship between their work.

In a review from Fairfield Porter, he said that these volumes, to his knowledge, mark the first time in which there was an American book-form collaboration between painters and poets as extensive and ambitious as the one we see here. Each artist was asked to make five screenprints, including one for the cover, one for the title page and three within the poems. The edition was limited to two hundred numbered copies, signed by the poets and painters. Each book consists of forty pages, and all four volumes are boxed together.

Remarkably, the Photography Collection has many photographic prints and negatives from Walter Silver who documented intimate behind-the-scenes encounters at Tiber Press between the artists, poets, and publishers, as they worked as both collaborators and friends.

John Ashbery, 1950, by Walter Silver. New York Public Library, Photography Collection, Image ID: 5154219

For those interested in the photographs, there are others from Walter Silver and of the New York School artists in the Digital Collections!

Joan Mitchell at Tiber Press, 1960, by Walter Silver. New York Public Library Photography Collection, Image ID: 5154601

During the evening, participants enjoyed thinking about the connection between poetry and painting, art and love and friendship, as well as simply listening to each other read the verses out loud—with the tones and inflections of the words and formatting being heard. One suggestion for future book club sessions was more poetry! We’re excited to delve deeper. With more reading out loud!

It's Poetry Month: Here Are NYPL's Best Poetry Books of 2020

NYPL Staff — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 16:36:05 -0400

This past December, NYPL presented our Best Books of 2020 list comprised of books selected by our librarians across many genres for adults, teens, and children. One of those genres was poetry and, in honor of National Poetry Month, we wanted to highlight these titles, selected by NYPL's Poetry Committee. Friendship, race, motherhood, nature, womanhood, trauma, identity: these topics and many more are explored within the pages of our staff's favorite poetry books.

Finna by Nate Marshall

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.

Poetry Committee: "Marshall examines and celebrates African America vernacular with an open and conversational attitude."

The Galleons by Rick Barot

With nods toward Barot’s poetic predecessors—from Frank O’Hara to John Donne—The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet’s work, marrying “reckless” ambition and crafted “composure,” in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, “incredible and true.”

Poetry Committee: "In simple language, Barot explores the Spanish colonial and postcolonial periods in Phillipine history, looking for his place in the world."

Grimoire by Cherene Sherrard

Named after a magical textbook, Cherene Sherrard's Grimoire is a poetry collection centered on the recovery and preservation of ancestral knowledge and on the exploration of Black motherhood. Incorporating experiences of food preparation, childrearing, and childbearing, the book begins with a section of poems that re-imagine recipes from one of the earliest cookbooks by an African-American woman: Mrs. Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cookbook. Mrs. Russell's voice as a nineteenth century chef is joined in conversation with a contemporary amateur cook in poetic recipes that take the form of soft and formal sonnets, introspective and historical lyric, and found poems. In the second section, the poet explores Black maternal death and the harrowing circumstances surrounding birth for women of color in the United States. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "One cup history, two spoonfuls memoir, a dash of modern folklore."

Gut Botany by Petra Kuppers

Poetry that inhabits and queers bodies and lands in an ecosomatic investigation. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Visceral poetry about the natural world exposes an internal human landscape teeming with life."

Homie by Danez Smith

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "An intimate tribute to friendship weaves stories of community building and breaking with brilliant wit."

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo

John Murillo's second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "A wrathful and personal analysis of American myths, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is a new classic."

My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved like a baby and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. My Baby First Birthday is about existence and non-existence. It's about being born-without consent. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people's dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it's only in our mothers' wombs that we're still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it's only then that we don't have to earn love. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Radiant and tender, Zhang's collection examines innocence, asking who gets to be loved like a baby and who must struggle just to survive."

A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok

In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Sok uses fast and chaotic poetry to describe the intergenerational trauma of the Khmer Rouge and the lingering silence among families and communities."

The Nancy Reagan Collection by Maxe Crandall

Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Performance Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. The Nancy Reagan Collection is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Nancy Reagan gets her hair done while the AIDS epidemic gets ignored."

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness. (Publisher summary)

Poetry Committee: "Diaz explores identity and desire in this mordant and funny collection, which moves seamlessly from the personal to the universal and back again."

8 Picture Books to Teach Figurative Language: A Guide for Elementary Educators

Kaitlin Rotella, School Outreach Librarian, Youth Educational Services — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 14:02:33 -0400

Figurative language is an important building block of both poetry and literature at large. As we celebrate National Poetry Month, it's a good time for young readers to develop an understanding of this crucial skill, which can be confusing and challenging for young readers. Metaphors and similes aren't easy for many adults to understand! However, with the appropriate picture books as a teaching tool, students can begin to learn how to process and imagine the descriptive text through a book’s illustrations.

Below are eight picture books that you can incorporate into your classroom instruction, with the different elements of figurative language the book incorporates, as well as a sample quote from the text.

Dreamers by Yuyi Morales

Dreamers tells the story of a mother and child who immigrate to America and must adjust to their new life. The figurative language Morales uses is moving, powerful, and deep—and speaks to an experience that many children in New York City are familiar with.

Figurative Language: similes, metaphors, personification, imagery

Quote: “The sky and land welcomed us in words unlike those of our ancestors.”

Firebird by Misty Copeland and illustrated by Christopher Myers

Firebird tells the story of a young girl who aspires to be a ballerina like Misty Copeland. This Coretta Scott King Award winning picture book features both beautiful, poetic language, as well as engaging illustrations that support the text.

Figurative Language: similes, metaphors

Quote: “you are the sky and clouds and air / your feet are swift as sunlight / stretching across the skyline / like the daylong sun over the horizon”

Hear the Wind Blow by Doe Boyle and illustrated by Emily Paik

Hear the Wind Blow highlights the twelve stages of the Beaufort wind scale—but Boyle manages to make a scientific study of wind into a lyrical poem that features gorgeously crafted language.

Figurative Language: similes, metaphors, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhyming

Quote: “Meddling wind tugs battened hatches, drums at windows, pulls at latches. Sing out loud while gusts come tumbling. You can match their roar and rumbling.”

The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Adam Rex

This comical story tells the legend of Rock, Paper, Scissors—by personifying all three inanimate objects! Kids will laugh as they learn what it means to give objects human traits.

Figurative Language: personification

Quote: “Meanwhile, in the Empire of Mom’s Home Office on lonely and windswept Desk Mountain, a second great warrior sought the glory of battle. And his name was Paper.”

Knot Cannot by Tiffany Stone and illustrated by Mike Lowery

Kids will chuckle as Knot envies all the things Snake can do that he cannot. Homophones and wordplay make Knot Cannot a great choice for teaching how odd the English language can be!

Figurative Language: homophones, puns

Quote: “Snake can even shed her skin. Snake looks brand-new. Can Knot look brand-new? No, he’s a frayed knot.”

Magnificent Homespun Brown: A Celebration by Samara Cole Doyon and illustrated by Kaylani Juanita

Magnificent Homespun Brown: A Celebration is not only a celebration of diversity and identity, but also language! This title, which is featured on The New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids 2020 list, is filled with colorful imagery that invites readers to imagine themselves within the pages of the story.

Figurative Language: similes, imagery, personification, alliteration

Quote: “Cozy brown. Like hot cocoa, a comfortable cup of liquid dreams sliding lazily over contented lips, filling mouths with quiet happiness as our family gathers to watch the swirling rage of a winter storm, tucked snugly inside the folds of our giant sofa.”

Noisy Night by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Brian Biggs

Noisy Night starts off with a child who wakes up to a strange noise above him—and chaos ensues with a variety of sounds that will have children guessing what could be making that noise? The book is a simple, straightforward story that highlights the power of onomatopoeia.

Figurative Language: onomatopoeia

Quote: “What is going RAH, RAH, RAH above my head? Cheerleaders are cheering above my head.”

Your Name is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow and illustrated by Luisa Uribe

One of The New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids 2020, Your Name is a Song is a great example of how lyrical prose can be woven into a more traditional narrative story. The book tells the tale of a girl whose name is hard to pronounce; when she comes home from school, her mother teaches her that her name is a song—beautiful and powerful.

Figurative Language: metaphor, personification

Quote: “‘Xiomara (see-oh-MARR-ah) fights a battle in your mouth. Tongues bow to say Bilqis (bil-cKee-SS).’”

Books in Verse to Celebrate Poetry Month With Your Students

Tiffany James, School Outreach Librarian — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:27:13 -0400

Happy National Poetry Month! Established in 1966, the celebratory month is a wonderful reminder of how literature and expression tie together, and is a great opportunity to celebrate some excellent works of poetry in all their many forms. From spoken word, rhymes, songs, and verse there is so much to explore. While poetry can sometimes be a difficult genre of writing for students to get into, exploring different types of poetry can help students connect and engage in a new way, and possibly even consider putting pen to paper and creating their own poems and stories.

Check out these recommended books in verse to draw in and engage your students in the art of poetry. You'll also find a short list of additional resources to dive deeper into the study of poetry.

Elementary Titles

Little Cat's Luck by Marion Dane Bauer, illustrations by Jennifer A. Bell

Izzy Kline Has Butterflies by Beth Levine Ain

Gone Camping: A Novel in Verse by Tamera Will Wissinger, illustrated by Matthew Cordell

Moo by Sharon Creech

Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson

Forget Me Not by Ellie Terry

The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary by Laura Shovan

Middle Grade Titles

Alone by Megan E. Freeman

Birdie by Eileen Spinelli

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Emmy in the Key of Code by Aimee Lucido

Garvey's Choice by Nikki Grimes

House Without Walls: May 10, 1979 to June 7, 1980 by Ching Yeung Russell

Land of the Cranes by Aida Salazar

The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

Rebound by Kwame Alexander

The Colors of the Rain by R.L. Toalson

Under the Broken Sky by Mariko Nagai

High School Titles

The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta

Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Shout by Laure Halse Anderson

Solo by Kwame Alexander

Additional Resources:

Columbia Granger's World of Poetry
This library resource features 250,000 full text poems with commentaries and criticisms. (NYPL library card needed)

National Youth Poet Laureate
Learn more about this award winning youth poetry program including this year's inaugural youth poet Amanda Gorman.

Poetry Foundation
Find poems, prose, guides, podcast and more.

Poets.org
Find poems, poets, and activities to celebrate National Poetry Month. Also features a poem of the day to listen to or read.

Postcards for National Poetry Month

Cierra Bland, Communications — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 10:13:37 -0400

April is National Poetry Month and The New York Public Library is celebrating with poems that capture the spirit of the city we’ve called home for 125 years.

Share a poetry postcard on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram! Send them to your favorite poetry lover or to convert a skeptic!

Statue of Liberty with Staten Island Ferry in foreground. Image from NYPL Digital Collections, ID: 105188

Looking Out, Looking In. Old Man in Russian Hat: Black Woman in White Headscarf and Coat. Image from NYPL Digital Collections, ID: 5038732

Woman standing on front stoop. New York, NY. Image from NYPL Digital Collections, ID: 5761828

Manhattan: Union Square - [Union Square Park.]. Image via NYPL Digital Collections, ID: 723584F

George Washington Bridge, Riverside Drive and 179th Street, Manhattan. Image from NYPL Digital Collections, ID: 482785

Want to send these postcards to a poetry lover in your life?

Click here to download horizontal versions, and click here to download vertical versions.

Cyberspace and Poetry: Pandemics and Finding Comfort Through Words In Community

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:15:23 -0400

Session 1: Gathering at the Center for Research in the Humanities

On March 3rd, a group of ten poets led by another wonderful poet, translator, and editor, Silvina López Medin, met at The New York Public Library’s Center for Research in the Humanities for what would be the first of four hands-on poetry writing sessions of the generative poetry workshop, “At the Tip of the Pencil the Line.”

The premise was simple: the group would meet four times to read in translation key figures in Latin American twentieth century poetry: Susana Thénon, Amanda Berenguer, Blanca Varela and Rosario Castellanos. Participants would observe the formal elements of each of these poets, write their own poems inspired by prompts given by Silvina, and then comment on each other’s work. The first day, the group saw a display of materials at NYPL’s collections such as Susana Thénon’s bilingual edition of Distancias = Distances and Reina María Rodríguez’s The Winter Garden Photograph.

As an icebreaker, Silvina read a piece she made by putting together quotes from each of the participants’ applications to the workshop. Doing so, she created an intimate communal place for the rest of the sessions—which ended up migrating to cyberspace due to the pandemic. Here, some of those verses:

Session 1: Book Display

a moment of silence
needs a protective case
made of language and images
anonymous villages on the other side of the hills [...]
how is individual narrative translated into a craft?
desire [...]
to wait for language to bubble [...]

The project, inspired by another generative writing series organized for seven years at the Mid-Manhattan Branch by Vilma Álvarez, was coordinated by NYPL’s Catherine Blauvelt and Paloma Celis Carbajal. It culminated in a zine publication featuring a selection of ten poems written during the four sessions. For the cover, the editors found it appropriate to include a photograph taken during these weeks of a deserted and bleak 5th Avenue. The poems collectively tell a story through their diversity of voices, a sort of a chorus sometimes singing high notes full of light and others lower, darker ones showing the multiple facets of the pandemic: hope, appreciation for the small things, mourning, nostalgia, and despair.

An image from the zine of 5th Avenue, Manhattan. Photo credit: Silvina López Medin

The title of the workshop is taken from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s piece “That’s Where I’m Going.”[1] In her own words, Silvina built “a shared space that encouraged the reading of poets not often known in the US, exploring their trajectories from the tip of the pencil to the line on the page, to consider what sets writing in motion, how poems move from first to last line, what tools might help keep ones creative processes going.”

The experience was so intense, and the participants so committed that in each of the three-hour-long sessions we all decided not to have a designated break time. The mosaic of familiar and friendly faces and voices in our screens turned the workshop into a safe haven to comfort our troubled minds and hearts.

For one participant, “the workshop became a way to steer this time. It not only became important, but possible, to create space for art, beauty, and continued critical thinking and reflection.” For another it was “the best poetry workshop I've participated in by far. The overall experience is profound and long-lasting.” And for another one “poetry is this thing that has held me when I needed the most. Intangible but very needed. This workshop connected me with women that I would have not met otherwise. It created this community around the written word in which I felt welcomed. During uncertain times, the poems of all the participants held me tightly and warmly.”

On June 11th the workshop closed its cycle with a virtual launch of the zine. Silvina, its main editor, pointed out that this publication starts with the words “I’ve been thinking about” and ends in the word “waiting.”: I’ve been thinking about waiting. She then proceeded to acknowledge each participant’s contribution:

Zine cover. Photo credit: Cristina Arancibia

“Thank you, Michelle, for your daffodils craning toward comfort
María José, for your cooking and for wanting it to be the same
Chantal, for your star ready to burst
Malén, for a silence that’s like soft leather
Athena, for marking “there’s more”
Cristina, for painting a portal to escape
Jill, for your horses at night
Jamie, for the escape routes in motorcycles
Erika, for your ink that stains and cleans and scars and changes
Maria, for saying you won’t tell us and still telling.”

As a conclusion of the last workshop session we read Lispector’s piece out loud, which speaks about words transforming individuality into collectivity through understanding and caring:

“At the end of me is I. I, imploring. I, the one who needs, who begs, who cries, who laments. Yet, who sings. Who speaks words [...]
What am I saying? I am saying love. And at the end of love are we.”

Zine front view. Photo credit: Cristina Arancibia

Zine unfolded. Photo credit: Cristina Arancibia

A copy of the zine will be added to the holdings of the Library's General Research Division for anyone to read and enjoy. We hope you check it out when our doors open again. If you're interested in the reading lists for our sessions (selected by Silvina López Medin), you can access and download them here.

The New York Public Library offers thousands of programs annually, serving all ages and a variety of interests and needs. Click here to find a class for you. All classes are free unless otherwise noted.

[1] Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories, trans. Katrina Dodson (New York: New Directions, 2015), 485.

#PocketPoems 2020: NYPL's Celebration of National Poetry Month

Catherine Blauvelt, Collection Development, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:17:38 -0400

Each year, to celebrate National Poetry Month and Poem in Your Pocket Day, the New York Public Library asks poets to contribute a short, pocket-size poem that we share online and hand out in our branch libraries. This year we're not able to physically hand you a poem to tuck away, but we will be virtually handing out a new poem each day from over 30 contemporary poets. We hope you follow along online across the Library’s social media channels—find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Since this year marks The New York Public Library’s 125th anniversary, we asked poets to create a poem in response to an image that inspires them from NYPL's Digital Collection. (Curious about these images? Learn more about them courtesy of NYPL Collections Photographers.) We encourage you to explore NYPL’s Digital Collection and get inspired to write your own Pocket Poem! Share it with us on social media using the #PocketPoems hashtag.

April 30: Poem in Your Pocket Day

On this occasion of Poem In Your Poet Day, read, print, write, and share a pocket full of poems. We have a downloadable "pocket" for you to print as well as some poems (and space to write our own!).

CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTABLE VERSION

The Heart is Not by Danusha Laméris

The Heart is Not

A pocket. A thing that
can be turned inside out
by anybody’s hand. Not
a place for pebbles or loose
change. Not to carry old
receipts. It does not tear
at the seam. It doesn’t have
a seam. It cannot be torn.

Find Danusha Laméris' work at the Library, visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

It's low tide on the sound by Rachel Miller

Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations by Sekka Kamisaka. Image ID: 1269916

It's low tide on the sound

I walk out for air, we all walk out for air;
I look at the water and wait, willing up
a prehistoric fish, demanding a back
full of warty nubs and diamond studs
from the olive water. Waiting makes a
room, red curtains closing, opening,
closing, like red lips in twin peaks.
My fish fogs in, fogs out.

You can find Rachel Miller on Twitter and Instagram.

The Fox and the Mask by Robert Fernandez

The fox and the mask. Image ID: 409435

The Fox and the Mask

Aesop fable

in which

a fox is

startled

by a mask

and sez

a pity

you are

very fine

but empty

a pity

a mask

a theater

is empty

yet seems

alive

You can find Robert Fernandez' work at the Library and visit his website.

When I am a Fish by Shabnam Nadiya

Ornamental fish by George Bickham

When I am a Fish

When I am a fish, my maw—hungry—swallows
mansions, tamarisks, whirlpools, elephantine
egos, armies of supposition and conjecture

Like a snake, I unhinge. The might of empires
goes in next; my mouth wider and wider until
galaxies wait poised on my lips
When I am a fish, I swallow time whole: when you
find me, my eyes will be pebbles from a distant time

Find Shabnam Nadiya's work at the Library and visit her website.

MORE SOON by Izzy Casey

Flexitoon Puppets, Ltd., Image ID: TH-13089

MORE SOON

Being alive is hard
So I shoot myself
Out of a cannon.

You can find and follow Izzy Casey on Twitter and Instagram.

Isadora by Mary Hickman

Isadora Duncan: studies by Arnold Genthe. Image ID: ISADORA_0001VB

Isadora

Because pink
ice cubes crackle
in this cold sun
and everything
  upends itself.
  This life is bright.
  A lemon
  splits its skin
and gold wax drops into your palm.
  You are born
one day in mid-Autumn,
  the surface of a pool so
static you must
  push through it like
wings struggling
through silk.

  Red hearts
swim out onto the lawn.
Look—your landscape
sings us into silver
and it is really this pink-pink
grassland, it is really
our shadows shined clear as ark light.

You can find Mary Hickman's work at the Library.

April 29: Untitled by Sara Beth Joren

Linguaggio del cuore. Image ID: 1600898

i keep a box

of the rare moments

where you aren’t perfect.

when you don’t shine

like a perfect sliver of sun,

finding my face.

i collect them to open later

when your box of mine fills up.

APRIL 28: Field Hospital by Micah Bateman

Old frame house on Fair Oaks battlefield, pierced by hundreds of bullets, and used as a hospital by Hooker's division. Image ID: G92F147_010F

Field Hospital

To make a house a hospital
Doesn't take much:
An open-air belligerent;
An inhabitant made patient
By a different quotient of respiration,
Or merely by waiting; a thin
Yesterday's broth; a salve of adhering water to cloth;
A cure made just by closing off.

Find Micah Bateman's work at the Library, visit his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

APRIL 27: What Shall We Name the Baby? by Rachel Mannheimer

What shall we name the baby? Twenty-five hundred first names of girls and boys, whith their meanings, origins, nicknames, etc. Image ID: 1103820

What Shall We Name the Baby?

It was the year of Mona, Lorenzo, and Hattie.
Elena, William, and Ruth. A friend was on bed rest.
A friend miscarried. I asked Mona’s mother
what to send Hattie. I walked to the post office,
up through the cemetery. It was the year
we’d planned to marry, the year the fabric of the world
seemed ripped apart and so I hoped my dead mom might return.
I never stopped. My list of names just grew.

Visit Rachel Mannheimer's website and follow her on Twitter.

APRIL 26: Caves of the Ice King under Kauterskill Falls (MFY Dennis Coll 91-F90) by Christian Schlegel

Caves of the Ice King under Kauterskill Falls. Image ID: G91F090_022ZF

Caves of the Ice King under Kauterskill Falls (MFY Dennis Coll 91-F90)

“The Catskills provoked me into [ceaseless]

study, nearly three decades beyond the comple

tion of the dissertation,” writes Michael Ku

dish (The Catskill Forest: A History [2000])

(ii). “Future ... historians may locate all

the bark roads, ... the sawmills, all the

quarries, all the isolated groves of balsam

fir, and all the bogs” (iv).

Find Christian Schlegel's work at the Library and visit his website to learn more.

April 25: Hair in the Water by Emily Hunt

Traveller tree Singapore. Image ID: 4044504

Hair in the Water

the Traveller Tree stores
in each royal leaf sheath.
Shredded daily by wind
the high ends of them
twist for more sun.

Find Emily Hunt's work at the Library, learn more at her website and follow her on Instagram.

April 24: CITY OF WINGS by Margarita Engle

American Butterflies. Image ID: 806450

CITY OF WINGS
Rooftop garden high in the sky
butterflies help me feel like I
am the one whose dreams
can fly!

Find Margarita Engle's work at the Library, visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

April 23: THIS FAMILY— by Dilruba Ahmed

This family from Arkansas had one thousand dollars when they arrived in California. There are eleven children in family. They bought a forty acre piece of land on which they still owe one thousand dollars. Image ID: 57795443

THIS FAMILY—

their house made smaller
by California's expanse of green,
eleven children hungering
inside a caravan
of American desires. The wind-swept
trek ends here, with federal loans to irrigate
their dreams. The year is '38.
On the newly-bought plot that emptied
the strongbox, the oldest invokes
a single wish
with a scattering of seeds.

Find Dilruba Ahmed's work at the Library and visit her website.

April 22: my Japanese mother as Orpheus, with dementia by Lee Ann Roripaugh

New York City Ballet production of "Orpheus" showing lyre designed by Isamu Noguchi, choreography by George Balanchine upside down here (New York). Image ID: swope_776026

my Japanese mother as Orpheus, with dementia

she calls to ask if my dead father
has called me on the phone / no, I say

while a tiny flicker of electricity fireflies
up my spine / did he call you?

yes, she says, and then she looked for him –
under the covers, behind the mirror –

she looked and looked, and he wasn’t there
he disappear, she says / (he disappear)

Find Lee Ann Lee Roripaugh's work at the Library.

April 21: Onward She Fights by Cara Dellatte

Belva Ann Lockwood, 1830-1917. Image ID: 1581273

Onward She Fights

Our ship is ready to set sail
Food for our children to eat
Makeup to soften our appearance
Tools to educate our souls
Yet we are stuck on dry land
Our ship will not move
Our rights are stagnant
Onward we shall go, Womans Rights, Womans Rights!

April 20: Pocket Poem by Dunya Mikhail

Song Sparrow by John L. Ridgway. Image ID: 821518

Pocket Poem

The cage owner reminds the sparrow:
life outside is inferno.
One day the sparrow flies away
and there in the heights,
overlooking the ruins of the world,
the sparrow discovers the cage owner was right.
It sings about the ruins,
a beautiful song with no walls.

Find Dunya Mikhail's work at the Library, visit her website, Twitter and Instagram.

April 19: Anti-Prophecy by Joy Ladin

Europe: a Prophecy [Frontispiece] by William Blake. Image ID: 1158113

Anti-Prophecy

I don't want a god who reaches down,
shaggy, sinewed, hair in his mouth,

bent on creating perfect circles
instead of one imperfect Earth,

pocked, peopled, salted-washed continents adrift
on melted rock. I want the God

who melts that rock. Who births; seeds; loves
what is instead of what should be.

Find Joy Ladin's work at the Library, visit her website or Twitter.

April 18: When I am ready to leave this place, by Brenda Morisse

Soleil couchant by Samuel Putnam Avery. Image ID: 1149394

When I am ready to leave this place,

I will have memorized its sunset. How the indigo

pours into the orange. How the sky crushes down

on the light, how the gold spreads across the horizon.

When I am ready to leave, I will have surrendered

my awe. I will have hardened my compassion. I will say,

“I am dying. I must pray for forgiveness.

Don’t bother me.”

April 17: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fun by Shannon Keller

Macy's Thanksgiving Parade by Percy Loomis Sperr. Image ID: 731239F

Fee-Fi-Fo-Fun

Fee-fi-fo-fun
Giant balloons enjoyed by everyone
Lest they escape
and ruin the cityscape
But still
a smile
on every child's face

Shannon Keller is the Helen Bernstein Librarian for Periodicals and Journals. You can find her blog posts for the Library here.

April 16: WHAT MOVES ACROSS A BORDER? by Franny Choi

Immigrants undergoing medical examination by Edwin Levick. Image ID: 416754

WHAT MOVES ACROSS A BORDER?

Money. Trade negotiations. People with the right
papers. Pathogens. Car parts in truckfuls, streaming rights,
seasonal workers. Seeds. Certain birds. Religion and dialect.
Music, at the right volume. Human remains. Wireless signals,
calls to action, calls to prayer. Sisters separated for decades,
whose faces are as foreign to each other as the faces
of the dead. River water. Drones. Dictators in motorcades.
And longing—longing, most of all. And families. And storms.

Find Franny Choi's work at the Library including Soft Science, a selection from NYPL's Best Poetry Books of 2019. Learn more at her website or follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

April 15: Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415 CE) by Rebecca Lehmann

Phare de l'Egypte: Pharus Aegypti Alexandrina, miraculum mundi septmum. Image ID: 79758

Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415 CE)

Tremble, like the taut sails of imperial ships,
sent to maintain order; like riotous monks
burning temples; like the lighthouse flaming
its hot warning. No stars anoint my night.
No unctuous spirit chariots me away.
Only the pierce of jagged oyster shells,
the astrolabe dropped in the dust,
library ablaze in the impossible distance.

Discover Rebecca's work at the Library, visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

April 14: Un chien tourné vers la droite by Jennie Xie

Un chien tourné vers la droite by Stefano Della Bella. Image ID: 5529818

Un chien tourné vers la droite

He turns to the right, sensing
I may spill ink over his creatureliness.
Wants no part in any theater.

Nothing of aulic language nor dulcet tones.

Need displeases when one touches
the middle of one’s life.

He pushes his taut gaze against
mine, then retracts.

A kind of address I have spent
a lifetime returning.

Find Jenny Xie's work at the Library, learn more at her website and follow her on Twitter.

April 13: Logs Left by Ian Fowler

Logs left in the woods by logging operations, illustrating the great waste of timber accompanying private ownership and exploitation by Russell Lee. Image ID: 57834397

Logs Left

Wasteland of intention

Left rotting

Signed “best”

In closing

April 12: The Kills by Moonlight by Marguerite Maria Rivas, Staten Island Poet Laureate

The Kills by moonlight by Isaac Almstaedt, Image ID: G91F288_008ZF

The Kills by Moonlight

We stand, feet planted
on the upper deck,
as we glide across dark waters
into a silvery band of spring
moonbeams. Our faces—
blue light and deep shade—
turn island-ward
toward home.

You can find Marguerite Maria Rivas at her website.

April 11: émigré by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

Cuban woman sitting in a chair and smoking a cigarette by Paul Reboux. Image ID: 1267522

émigré

I leave seastars, tortoiseshells at her altar
like someone who knows what they lost, pour
melao on Yemayá’s feet in a white petticoat.
The to-co-co-ró of a white-bellied bird
who pecks at my throat, as if it knew. We are
two spent brides in the half-light. Still,
at daybreak, through the smoke of a prayer
I can almost make out the shape of an island.

Find Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones' work at the Library and learn more at her website.

April 10: Just a Minute by jayy dodd

Maude Russel and her Ebony Steppers - 1929 Cotton Club show "Just A Minute." Image ID: 5062801

Just A Minute

Girls gather for gratuitous gawking,
the review includes a parade. Flash
of jazz, colorstruck crowd of
cacophony clamoring. In Harlem,
Black Steppers on the second floor,
scantily clad cuties. Jive among
jeers & the jungle sets for
tourist-patrons salivating at
something “savage”. Gyration is a
measure of time & rhythmania is
contagious.

Find jayy dodd's work at the Library, visit her website and find her on Twitter and Instagram.

April 9: Sonar, So Far by Jenny Inzerillo

Common Bat; Vampire Bat; Common Bat; Dog Headed Bat; Horseshoe Bat; Fruit Eating Bat, Image ID: 822029

Sonar, So Far

Have you read the news?
This is really batty.
Can you hear the mews?
They are really catty.
That’s right, I’m stuck at home
With my work and kitty,
Scribblin’ out a poem
And keepin’ it itty-bitty.

Check out Jenny Inzerillo's website, find her on Twitter and listen to her morning show.

April 8: Elysium of Dogs by Charles Cuykendall Carter

Biography of a Spaniel by William Hopwood, Image ID: 1711938

Elysium of Dogs

Shades of dead dogs congregate to air
grievances of my betrayals here,
despite the airlessness, on the moon.
The re-impounded carpet-staining hound,
the sheepdog who knocked Dad to the ground:
I let them down. The tumored schnauzer swoons.
The boxer, enlarged-hearted, casts the lone
defense: He loved us till we were gone.

April 7: ABDICATION by Safia Elhillo

Ex-King of Kano. Image ID: 1257562

ABDICATION

who have you been my fathers my abdicated root
dressed in white & vanished
& like my mothers before me i wrap you in white
i marry & mourn & am haunted in the unwatched night
i cleanse the air with smoke i avoid my eyes
in any mirror animal oils in my hair i mark the map
with caesurae mark the map with names of men

Check out Safia Elhillo's work on at the Library, her website , Twitter and Instagram .

April 6: Dream Keeper Redux by Willie Perdomo

Pedestrian by Walter Silver, Image ID: 5146999

Dream Keeper Redux

I'll love you
this poem

from the top
of my dome.

One dream
after another,

I’m almost
home.

Willie Perdomo's book, The Crazy Bunch, was included in NYPL's Best Poetry Books of 2019. Find his books at the Library and visit his website, Twitter and Instagram.

April 5: Eating Persimmon Acrobatically by Chantal Lee

Eating kaki acrobatically by Gyōsai Kawanabe. Image ID: 5894682

Eating Persimmon Acrobatically

While Tantalus reaches for the fruit
that hangs from a retreating branch
of a tree that belongs to an angry god,
these Japanese monks wait 100 years, tantalized
by the sweetening persimmons
slowly ripening from on high.
The doting gods bless the monks, stretching
their arms and legs
so that they can eat this fruit of many names
(Jove’s Fire, Divine Fruit, God’s Pear).
Enchanted, the monks slip on cinnamony juice.

You can find Chantal Lee on Instagram.

April 4: Accidental Elegy by Rob Schlegel

The pontic rhododendron by James Caldwall. Image ID: 1152356

Accidental Elegy

Intuition is important, if only for its imperfections

disguised as leaves, pale green

in a period-piece about a period

about to happen. You develop in silence

new ways of speaking, but what will you kill

in order to see? You can almost feel

the rhododendron's slightly malicious

intelligence. Who will remember

your face? The dead dry leaves are more than a feeling,

they're the air you breathe to change.

You can find Rob Schlegel's books at NYPL and through his website. You can also find him on Twitter and Instagram.

April 3: Suppose by Alison C. Rollins

Southeast Missouri Farms. Son of a sharecropper dressing in a combination of bedroom and corn crib, 1938 by Russell Lee. Image ID: 1260164

Suppose

We are all heads of corn

In God’s hands. Our ears green

With naiveté, we listen to the sun

Sing yellow through the window.

Suppose on Tuesdays God wears a tie.

Suppose God was the son of a share-

Cropper. Suppose the bed we make

Is not a lie, but a quilted fabrication.

Check out Alison's book, Library of Small Catastrophes, chosen as one of NYPL's Best Poetry Books of 2019, and visit her website, Twitter and Instagram.

April 2: Recognition (To the planet Mars, 1877) by Julie Swarstad Johnson

The planet Mars: Observed September 3, 1877, at 11h. 55m. P.M., by E.L. Trouvelot, Image ID: TROUVELOT_008

Recognition (To the planet Mars, 1877)

Light catches beyond us and we

see flame, see a bee above a bud’s tight curl

or we feel the rustle of motion behind a door

shut tight, distance on the edge of collapse

for that figment of our minds glimpsed

in the eyepiece, the glass unmoved

against our lashes’ fluttering, a pulse

hammering deep in your luminous throat.

Find Julie Swarstad Johnson at her website or on Instagram.

April 1: PENELOPE by Yanyi

Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations by Sekka Kamisaka. Image ID: 1269883

PENELOPE

I never meant to leave from love.

But this bedpost made in Ithaca

has not been moved. Is even stronger.

Your hands are shaped the same

but smaller. My sheets are dark

from honey whet with sun.

I unweave your hair.

The moon is dark when I lift it up.

Check out Yanyi's website or find him on Instagram and Twitter. Yanyi's book, The Year of Blue Water, was included in NYPL's Best Poetry Books of 2019.

Make a Resolution to Read More Poetry Next Year

Clarissa Cooke, Children's Librarian, 96th Street Library — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 17:21:21 -0500

Three years ago, I made a New Year's resolution to read more poetry and try new poems by authors I hadn't read before. Except for the year when I resolved to buy more shoes, this was the best resolution I'd ever made. I believe that our yearly resolutions should bring us more happiness so I've decided to renew my poetry resolution for the coming year: I resolve that in 2020 I will actively seek out poetry books, and read more poems. I will not just enjoy them when I stumble across one on a subway poster, or in some other unexpected place.

When I made my poetry resolution in 2017 and posted it on Facebook, I was immediately invited to a "Burns Night Supper" by a friend who had not known that I liked poetry. A Burns Night Supper celebrates the birthday of Scottish poet Robert Burns every year on January 25. At the dinner, a bagpiper was hired to start the evening off, haggis (the national dish of Scotland) was served,and we sat around the table reading Robert Burns poems aloud, drinking whiskey (some of us), and having a fantastic time.

Not all poetry will speak to you, but when you find a poem that does, you want to write it down and keep it forever. A good poem plays with language; it describes an image or feeling in a way that crystalizes it for you. Sometimes you read a poem and feel that the poet peered into your heart and understood your emotions in ways that you didn’t think another human being could. And sometimes poems make you laugh.

If you want to add more poetry to your life this year, remember—you can like poetry, without liking all poems. When reading a book of poetry, feel free to skip any poems that you aren’t enjoying, there will be more to try in the same book, or another one.

Here are some poetry collections I've selected to start you on your reading adventure:

American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time selected and introduced by Tracy K. Smith

American Journal presents 50 contemporary poems that explore and celebrate our country and our lives. We hear stories from rural communities and urban centers, laments of loss in war and in grief, experiences of immigrants, outcries at injustices, and poems that honor elders, evoke history, and praise our efforts to see and understand one another.

Ballistics: New Poems by Billy Collins

The former U.S. poet laureate and best-selling author of Nine Horses and Around the Room presents a new compilation of his acclaimed poems, some of which have never before been published.

The Dream Songs by John Berryman

This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation.

Fuel: Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

A collection of poems that find meaning in a world where we are "so tired of meaning nothing", Fuel covers topics ranging from the border families of southern Texas to small ferns and forgotten books to Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.

Incredible Good Fortune: New Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin

These warm, funny, and eloquent poems, spanning the years 2000 to 2005, by the celebrated author of Always Coming Home and The Language of the Night, showcase Le Guin’s many facets as a writer.

Night Angler by Geffrey Davis

Davis' second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood.

Poems that Make Grown Women Cry: 100 Women on the Words that Move Them edited by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden

The poems chosen range from the 8th century to today. Their themes range from love and loss, through mortality and mystery, war and peace, to the beauty and variety of nature. This unique collection delivers private insights into the minds of women whose writing, acting, and thinking are admired around the world.

Rumi: Unseen Poems translated and edited by Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz

Rumi's poetry has long been popular with contemporary Western audiences because of the way it combines the sacred and the sensual, describing divine love in rapturously human terms.

A Sleepwalk on the Severn by Alice Oswald

A reflective, book-length poem in several registers, using dramatic dialogue. Ghostly, meditative, and characterized by Alice Oswald’s signature sensitivity to nature, the poem chronicles a night on the Severn Estuary as the moonrise travels through its five stages: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon, and moon reborn.

Venture of the Infinite Man by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jessica Powell

In an epic poem comprised of 15 cantos spread over 44 un-numbered pages, the Infinite Man sets forth on a virtual sleepwalk through time and space, on a quest to atone for [Neruda's] past and to rediscover himself.

Whereas: Poems by Stephen Dunn

Finding beauty in the ordinary, this collection considers the superstition and sophistry embedded in everyday life, allowing room for more rethinking, reflection, revision, prayer, and magic in the world.

Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources, and sometimes edited for clarity and length. Click through to each book’s title for more.

Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!

The Year in Poetry: NYPL's Best Poetry Books of 2019

Crystal Chen, Woodstock Library — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 12:41:28 -0500

Welcome to The New York Public Library's 2019 inaugural Best Poetry Books list. Over the course of the year, the dedicated Poetry Committee reads far and wide to select our very best poetry of the year.

These 10 collections are fiercely imaginative and unique, covering identity, climate change, politics, pop culture, and everything in between. New poetry readers will find welcome in Yanyi's gentle and gorgeous The Year of Blue Water; experienced poetry readers will find themselves electrified by the provocative futuristic vision of Franny Choi's Soft Science. Each of our top 10 poetry book selections challenge and inspire, illuminating the world around us.

Take a moment and find the poetry book that speaks to you and don't forget to explore our Best Books of 2019 lists for more expert selections for children, teens and adults.

The Black Condition ft. Narcissus by jayy dodd
Resilience and alienation in the internet age are deconstructed in this experimental collection by dodd.

The Crazy Bunch by Willie Perdomo
A savage, funny, and lyrical hymn to Perdomo’s formative years in East Harlem.

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Kaminsky maps a republic of the imagination that has an unsettling contemporary resonance.

In Her Feminine Sign by Dunya Mikhail
Mikhail’s poetry renders sublime and ordinary the enigmatic states of womanhood.

Library of Small Catastrophes by Alison C. Rollins
Rollins catalogs and archives the complexitites of life in a simple and affective poetic style.

Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
For Scenters-Zapico, borders exist inside and out; traverse them if you dare.

Soft Science by Franny Choi
Savagely erotic, Choi's poetry surveys the future with a razor-sharp eye.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone by Thiahera Nurse
Fiercely real and unapologetic, Nurse’s poetry leaps off the page to tell it like it is.

Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 by Lee Ann Roripaugh
A playful and inventive portrait of nature’s angry and humorous indifference toward humanity and its accessories.

The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi
Deceptively simple, The Year of Blue Water speaks to anyone finding their place in the world with emotional depth and clarity.

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Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations.

Think of Me as a Place: Remembering David Berman

Catherine Blauvelt, Collection Development, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:33:51 -0400

A friend texted me the news of David Berman’s death last night. I went straight to my bookshelf and pulled out my copy of Actual Air, published by Open City Books in 1999.

This particular book of poems has been traveling around with me for two decades, from Chicago to Texas to Iowa to New York, from shelf to shelf, from high school to middle-age employment. Though I keep it on a bookshelf in my living room (for all visiting eyes to see), when I returned to it last night, I felt a slight sense of shame for neglecting its pages for so long, and for the fact that only now, at Berman's passing, was it back in my hands.

I flipped to the poem Classic Water, which I had youthfully dog-eared, though it is the second poem in the book:

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for

the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out

and I heard her whisper

"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag

with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop

when we picked up an unknown man sobbing

over the shortwave radio . . .

I followed Berman's list of remembrances to the turn at the end of the poem—it still makes the edges of my mouth tilt up!

Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night

by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake,

talking about the paradox of multiple Santas

or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

And so the poem goes on to reveal the speaker's regret and, in truth, their stronger feelings for Kitty.

I was a teenager when I first read this poem again and again, and I remember thinking Berman's memories were what I had to look forward to—and oh, did I search for them and welcome them! Now that I’ve moved through my youth, Kitty and the speaker have become old friends, a pleasant fuzzy memory—was I there with them or rather, were they there with me; through my growing up, they have become a place to go back to.

Berman's ability to maintain sincerity, read after read and year after year, is unique and, in my opinion, well-deserving of your eyes.

The New York Public Library has several copies of Actual Air in its collection. Have a copy sent to your local NYPL branch or come into the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Rose Main Reading Room to read, over and over again, Classic Water in its entirety, as well as the 38 other beauties in Berman's collection.

'A Small, Portable Truth': NYPL's Poem in Your Pocket Day 2019

Gwen Glazer, Communications — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:49:11 -0400

I wish for you a small, portable truth you can take
anywhere—no foreign adaptors needed,
no translation required and nothing lost in it.

--the first stanza of Maggie Smith's poem for PiYP Day 2019

We're inviting patrons—in our branches all over the city and anywhere you are online—to take a breath, take a break from the news, and take a poem.

In celebration of Poem in Your Pocket Day, The New York Public Library asked more than 30 contemporary poets to create or select poems just for us. Today, these poems are printed and available in all 88 branches, plus NYPL's research library and several prisons in our system.

They're also available for you, online, right now! Read them online, download them, and check them out across our Library's social media channels.

On the ground, our library staff members are reporting record numbers of poem enthusaists! They're in branches all over the city, and in just one room at our 42nd Street location, more than a thousand poems were distributed in a matter of hours.

Examples of our #PocketPoems displays:

Poem in Your Pocket Day with Sharon at Columbus Library!

Colorful poems at Tremont.

Insta-worthy, fashion-forward Muhlenberg.

Van Cortlandt's all ages display.

Poems in the iconic 42nd St. Library.

To download all our poems, print them, and distribute them yourself, check out the PDF online!

View this post on Instagram

Join us in celebrating #NationalPoetryMonth every day of April with special #PocketPoems that will be shared in the @nypl Instagram story and on our website.‬ . ‪@maggiesmithpoet kicks off the festivities with a new work created just for this project, titled “A Truth That Tells You.” . ‪Check the link in our bio or visit nypl.org/poetry each day to find poetry events throughout NYPL locations and the pocket poems we have shared—maybe even print out the poems yourself to keep in your pocket or share with others.‬

A post shared by The New York Public Library (@nypl) on Apr 1, 2019 at 8:00am PDT

To see displays from around NYPL, check out our Facebook album:

For poetry-related programming at your local branch, visit our National Poetry Month Events page.

#PocketPoems: NYPL's Celebration of National Poetry Month

Gwen Glazer, Communications — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 02:59:15 -0400

To celebrate National Poetry Month, The New York Public Library has collected poetry from over 30 contemporary poets and staff members, with some writing especially for this project. Throughout the month, the poems will be shared online, across the Library’s social media channels, and in our branches—and presented below!

Download all of this year's #PocketPoems.

April 30: untitled by Raúl Hernández

Escribes un hayku
en una hoja de cuaderno.

Arrancas la hoja
la doblas y la doblas.

Por la ventana
se va el hayku
a las estrellas

hecho avioncito.

….

You write a haiku
on a sheet from a notebook.

You tear it out
and fold it and fold it.

Out the window
the haiku heads
for the stars

made into a little airplane.

Check out Raúl Hernández's work in the Library and online.

April 29: 'NO GHOST THO'' by Katy Chrisler

Pull a black pyramid
from your mouth. Spit-glistened
affair of sphere swallow
not merely a theory of beauty.
Province knows the boundary
of what is fearful. The object
called forth, more to say.
Lead back to something.
Belong here with me among
the smallest of means.

Check out Katy Chrisler's work online.

April 28: 'Monday, May 15, Sappho, WA—' by Sarah Dowling

a logging chapter is closed. Those
country maidens were good riders,

flowers blooming in an old bathtub,
cows grazing in an orchard. Their

garments neat as they should be. A
-cross the dirt road, peasant-girls

on the front porch—oh,
anyone would want to live

in the fenced area nearby. Anyone
would want a dress around her feet.

Check out Sarah Dowling's work in the Library, online, and on Twitter.

April 27: 'Shipwrecked' by Grace Yamada

I feel no wonder
Looking down on my ship run aground
Decks and helm deserted
By the rage that filled the sails and rowed the oars
I can only wander along this salt coast
Collecting and discarding the memories I will need
As I continue on without them

Check out Grace Yamada's work at the Library.

April 26: untiltled by Adrienne Raphel

Higgledy piggledy,
Ernest H. Shackleton
Couldn’t man up for the Polar Bear Swim.
No bears in the South Pole, he
Geo-pedantically
Whined but he knew he was
Being a wimp.

Check out Adrienne Raphel's work in the Library, online, and on Twitter.

April 25: 'You' by Katrina Ruiz

are rogue balloon caught in revolving ceiling fan
speeding car in the emergency lane
the dog who wanders too far without a leash.

I try to ground you like chancletas do beach blankets
and hand holds on rollercoasters.

But we’re the prizes discarded in the cereal box
socks lost in every wash
and the farmer’s market haul
we swear we’ll eat before it goes bad.

April 24: 'Beginning with a Horse' by Alan Felsenthal

A horse has six legs
two belong to a man
who might be Pluto
disguised as the devil
abducting a unicorn
whose horn was used
to purify a spring
that whetted the infinite
now behind us

Check out Alan Felsenthal's work in the Library, online, and on Twitter.

April 23: 'Molecule' by Cole Heinowitz

Each molecule of water, bound by a limelit orgy in the elevator before internship to some cubic unit of sea reef requiting birth, causes an eddy of causality where sedimented rings appear as vertical chutes in the heat of the moment, leading straight from surface to core, obfuscating the sweatshop of historical accretions madly revolving to support the spectacle drinking from a cup, seeing “no manner of similitude.”

Check out Cole Heinowitz's work online.

April 22: 'Parable of Joan Mitchell' by Daniel Poppick

Blue jail, teal jail, green jail, ochre jail, aqua jail, yellow jail, mustard jail, red jail, rose jail, magenta jail, platinum jail, charcoal jail, chartreuse jail, puce jail, pink jail, lilac jail, sunset jail, sail jail, soil jail, salmon jail, noise jail, blood clot jail, stair jail, rust jail, custard jail, snail shell jail, drip jail, grass jail, rhyme jail, dice jail, worm jail, circle jail, dot jail, clear jail, chrome jail, mail jail, air jail.

Check out Daniel Poppick's work online .

April 21: 'What Parks Are For' by John Burns

In a field, two Labrador retrievers
roll together, tongues out.
under an orange sky.

What have I lost that I cannot remember?

I think it is the color of that sky
and what the two dogs were trying to say with their eyes.

I bark like a cloud.

April 20: 'I Give You My Heart' by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

I find myself on my feet with fifteen leaves. Everything carries
its own light on the walls.  

I woke up to slaughter—my heart opening to cemeteries of moon,
to parasites, to drizzle, the mud crowning the undergrowth

with immense sadness. I knew death when I dressed in my uniform.
I found the index of solitude: my country in legal

jargon, its piety, its fiction— Yes. It loves me, really. 
I give my blood as the blood of all fish.  

Check out Ricardo Alberto Maldonado's work online and on Twitter.

April 19: 'Unconditional' by Dora Malech

If this black willow is calligraphy
then this white sky’s an invitation
and requests the honor of your presence.
And you—will you attend?

Check out Dora Malech's work in the Library, online, and on Twitter.

April 18: 'Kintsugi' by Sally Wen Mao

Gold in the cracks. Thank god the vessel was broken. Why did I believe that repair would never mend it back to its beauty? Over the years, mending has become a monotony. Never mind the slow burn of a porcelain birth—kiln of a million live embers. Repair this ewer with precious metals, let its fractures show. Soak the shattered thing overnight in whole milk. Morning, wait for its whole.

Apply adhesive—
pinch of gold, silver of ash.
She was broken, thank
god.

April 18: 'When I say I’m Spanish, I mean' by Alysia Vargas

Yo soy Puertorriqueña through blood.
Culture runs through my body, stops
at my mind and my tongue speaks the language
foreign to my ancestors. Native tongue pronounces
a mixture of failure and American. I rarely speak
Spanish but I feel it in my mothers
hands when she tames my curls. When I walk
into her sofrito scented kitchen and open arms.
Saint candles burning the day away, my ancestors
humming in my blood.

April 18: 'Language' by Carla Faesler

Nobody
will believe
I reached so far
on this old vehicle
of thought

April 18: from 'The Goodbyes' by Emily Sieu Liebowitz

Can I become closer to a portrait in my nature?
Less like something overheard in town,
but still a way to refer to oneself. Not
me or you, we or they but more
like Sylvia’s dogwood is blooming &
Susie’s are in blossom too.

April 18: [Every bare tree] by Robin Myers

Every bare tree
is a silent
chorus of itself.

April 18: 'world around the' by Caleb Klaces

The eye does not see itself as a place to live.
The cruise ship parties on a bellyful of jellyfish.

Painted stars hold the cracked ceiling together.
Light falls and the sea is supportive.

My debt shoves me aside and grins at the camera.
When a number forgets where it started, it speculates.

Coins multiply in the frozen hearts of Bluefin tuna.
This old coin cannot bear its own head.

April 18: 'Plea' by Caitlin Roach

How when a body dies it becomes the body. No mind
to all the mouths who named it, who knew it in quiet, who call for it
now, unanswered. But know it: bear the cells’ leaking out and pooling
where they’re pulled to, bluebottles lapping at these final outputs, fur
around their mouths bloodied like winged wolves. Note them
as markers, makers beyond you. Watch the body age beyond itself, wage
against itself, overwintered. Count the cracks of cygnets hatching
in June. Let the prayer come out your mouth, just let it. The light
will regain its blueness, I know it.

* originally published in The Manchester Review

Check out Caitlin Roach's work in the Library and online.

April 17: 'Mango Mañanas' by María José Maldonado

I reached up and picked a
mango from my
grandmother’s tree

She cut it into slices added
lime, salt and alguashte

That day we ate our native fruit under the tropical
Salvadoran sun while a green little lizard looked up at
our delicious fun.

Check out María José Maldonado's work in the Library.

April 16: 'Violin' by Ian Brand

A violin filling with blue dusk

or else your voice
is a grotto inside a waterfall,

a house with four walls of rain
outside of which the birds

are patches of song
scissored

piecemeal
from the light.

Check out Ian Brand's work in the Library and online.

April 15: '4ever 2morrow' by Mario Santana

I live in a world of my own
There's no place like home
Somewhere that makes you
Want to write a poem
Just imagine a nation
Where you can use your imagination
As a passport to the future
Using creation to get away like vacation

April 14: 'Oda a Pura Belpré' by María Isabel Molestina Triviño

Ay dulce Pura, tu nombre lo dice todo Siempre íntegra cual
alma cálida en un mes de verano Tus dotes de contar y
cantar se hacen palpables por doquier Con voz suave y sutil

Ay dulce Pura, tú que derrochas paz por donde quiera que vas
Brindando alegría a chicos y grandes Con tus cuentos de
antaño Y tu folklore colosal

Ay dulce Pura, a pesar de no estar mas aquí Tu espíritu brilla
con luz sinigual Y tu legado continúa muy presente Tocando a
toda la gente con tus espléndidos cuentos de siempre

Check out María Isabel Molestina Triviño's work on Instagram.

April 13: 'firefighter' by Al Valentín

I come from a long line of women who believed
that it's better to be on fire than to be a fool
so I'm teaching myself to cry again
hoping that these embers will be extinguished
hoping that at least one of us
can know the joy of water

April 12: 'Helia' by Rhonda Evans

She eases us her brilliance upon us.
Slow. Careful.
Waking us with gentle hues that rock the soul like grandma’s hands.

The brilliance of mid-day is a steady pulse.

She is proud of herself at the end of the day.
To rest she cloaks herself in the color of Queens.
First lilac. Then lavender. Then she drinks the wine of sleep.

Check out Rhonda Evans' work at NYPL and on Twitter.

April 11: 'Boys Accidentally Set Sail While Painting Yacht' by Jared Hayley

A logbook of dirty Mad Libs.
Hooks without bait. Shucked skin.

They vow never to speak of what happens,
then nothing worth telling happens.

The moment of day when sky is dark
and sea is light reminds each of his other.

Check out Jared Hayley on Twitter.

April 10: 'Soft' by Jackie York

I have lost soft things
suddenly turned stiff
wept a wall of stone into my skin—
but your yellow eyes can already see through it
your moody meow already pricks up my ears
your heft has made a home on my hip;
I can’t help but let you knead me
paw your way in

April 9: Untitled by Mary Katherine Kinniburgh

The cosmos:
a fluttering

colorful bird
that each night, we take out

to play on our fingers
as we sift through books

who eats small seeds
that look like stars

Check out Mary Katherine Kinniburgh's work online and on Twitter.

April 8: 'My Attendant' by Jessica Laser

He saved the seeds
From an orange I ate.
I like it when he does
This but don’t
Need these seeds.
“Good. I’ll throw them.”
As I wrest the Ziploc
From his hand
I peer into the eyes
Of my attendant.
I see there the strings
I have made taut,
That they are made
Of my own muscles.
I see them waiting
To be plucked by touch.

Check out Jessica Laser's work online.

April 7: "Hello There Pretty Space' by Caroline Reichardt

mysterious planet slime home
has grumpy past
power the rocket ship!
hello there pretty space

Check out Caroline Reichardt's work online.

April 6: 'The Moon Lets Go' by Nancy Reddy

Years and years from now the earth will gain
another hour in its day, but I’ll be dead then,
and everyone I love will be gone, too. At daycare dropoff,
my boys wave to me but kiss – mwah! mwah! – each other
through the pre-K room’s goodbye window,
launching each smooch with a sticky hand and smacking it
against the glass. The moon is small and bound to us by gravity
that’s slowly loosening its grip. I’d wanted them to love each other like this.

Check out Nancy Reddy's work in the Library and online.

April 5: 'Systemic Risk' by Daniel Borzutzky

You can analyze systemic risk according to how many bodies live or die
If the system fails the broken bodies become invisible and/or hyper-visible
The people are being born and dying
They are enacting the invisibility of the security system through the exhibition of their
naked bodies
I eat corrupted data to keep my skin from becoming transparent
I would rather be a defect of culture than a defect of data or character
What is not observed gets more visible in relation to the strength of the surveillance
It’s better to deprive a few million people of food than to pull the plug on the global
economy
If the consumers don’t buy your product then teach them the meaning of love

Check out Daniel Borzutzky's work in the Library and online.

April 4: 'Sun-Stuccos Caught Nearby In the Least' by Catherine Blauvelt

The image on my screen defeats the window
in front of me; a shadow behind the moon;
creation without prior text; LOVE as my first person.

Say one fruit for another fruit: Love, Apple, Ruth.
To be while continuing a little dying breeze over
and over again; till I go up, I am a case.

Check out Catherine Blauvelt's work in the Library, online, and on the NYPL staff blog.

April 3: 'Heretofore Unuttered' by Nicole Sealey

As if god, despite his compulsions, were decent
and hadn’t the tendency to throw off
all appearance of decorum, here I am
admiring this single violet orchid.
How lucky am I to go unnoticed
or so I imagine, when, at this writing,
there is a red-tailed hawk, somewhere,
tracking the soft shrills of newborn songbirds—?

Check out Nicole Sealey's work in the Library, online, and on Twitter.

April 2: 'Connections' by Jason Baumann

All of my trains
arrive seconds too
late to catch your
closing doors.

Check out Jason Baumann's work in the Library and online.

April 1: 'A Truth That Tells You' by Maggie Smith

I wish for you a small, portable truth you can take
anywhere—no foreign adaptors needed,
no translation required and nothing lost in it.

Once, looking at a map, my daughter said,
A river is a line the world drew for us. I wish for you
a truth that stays true across any line drawn

by the world or its people, a truth that tells you
wherever you arrive, you are welcome.

Check out Maggie Smith's work in the Library, online, and on Twitter.

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For all of NYPL's National Poetry Month festivities, check out nypl.org/poetry.

And for poetry-related programming at your local branch, visit our National Poetry Month Events page. Events include poetry-writing workshops, poetry discussions, and read-ins.

Inside Poetry Series: What Is Poetry, Anyway?

Colleen Gibson, Social Media Associate — Tue, 01 May 2018 09:57:02 -0400

The last time many of us read a poem, even semi-voluntarily, we were in elementary school. If you're thinking of returning to poetry now, you may have tons of questions: what really constitutes poetry? How do you find poems that suit your tastes? How do you find cool new poets or figure out which classics to read?

We're here to help, and we're going to start at the beginning...

What is poetry?

Kate Greenaway poem; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 1591804

It's easy to think of poetry simply as words that rhyme and are organized into lines, like "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks:

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

But not all poetry rhymes, and not all poems are broken into lines. Prose poetry, like Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s "Field Guide for Ending Deportation," appears like paragraphs on the page:

I confess to you my inadequacies. I want to tell you things I do not know about myself. I’ve made promises to people whom I will never see again. I’ve cried in an airport bathroom stall in El Paso, TX when immigration denied my father’s application. It felt like a mathematical equation—everything on one side needed to equal everything on the other. It almost made sense to be that sad. I am not compelled to complicate this metaphor. I’m selling this for two dollars. Years ago, on my birthday, I came out to my friends. I thought about the possibility of painting their portraits. What a stupid idea. I’ve started to cover up certain words with Barbie stickers in my journal. It occurs to me, sitting in my car, at a Dollar General parking lot, in search of cheap balloons for a party which I do not care about, that I am allowed my own joy. I pick the brightest balloons, pay, drive home and dress for the party. I mouth the words happy birthday to you in a dark room lit by everyone’s phone cameras. Afterwards, I enter all of my emails from five years into a cloud engine and the most used word is ok. I confess that I have had a good life. I spend many nights obsessing over the placement of my furniture. I give you my boredom. I give you my obligation. I give you the night I danced and danced and danced at a child’s birthday party, drunk and by myself. I’ve been someone else’s shame. It’s true, at its core, amá was deported because she was hit by a car. For years to come, this will be the ending of a sad joke she likes to tell. I laugh each time she tells the joke to strangers. Something about how there is more metal than bone in her arm. Something about a magnet. She says I thought I had died and death meant repeating a name forever. She says el jardin encierra la boca de mis pasos. But this is a bad translation. It’s more like I felt like a star, I felt like somebody famous.

What isn't poetry?

The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 492745

Attempts to define poetry may end up turning in circles; some might say poetry is anything that isn’t prose, and prose is what isn’t poetry. This doesn’t get us very far, and it speaks to how difficult it is to pin down what poetry is.

Emily Dickinson defined poetry in terms of its effect: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry...Is there any other way?" Beyond the beheading approach, however, there are a few other ways to recognize poetry, and historically, poets themselves have helped us define it.

To Robert Frost, poetry is "What gets lost in translation."

Ezra Pound believed, "Poetry is a composition of words set to music," stressing the importance of rhythm to the form.

John Stuart Mill describes poetry as personal and inward-facing: "Poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind."

Canadian poet Anne Carson offers up a vivid (and possibly terrifying) definition in the Red Doc>:

What is the difference between
poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose
is a house poetry a man in flames running
quite fast through it.

Carson suggests that part of what defines poetry is its fiery urgency and its relative speed.

A more straightforward definition of poetry might center around its attention to language, density of meaning, image, and play of rhythm. Defining poetry is not a science, however; poetry’s boundaries are constantly shifting and mutating as poets innovate and provide new ways of thinking about the configuration of words.

Other topics in the Inside Poetry series:

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Experiments with the New York School of Poets

Jessica Cline, Picture Collection, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 09:52:25 -0400

“I cannot possibly think of you other than you are,” began Frank O’Hara’s poem The Critic. Borrowing this line, our four-week poetry writing workshop at Mid-Manhattan Library began writing poems in March. We traveled our own memory lanes to call up a friend, a lover, a favorite actor, or a foe to give a line to in our notebook, a public address to aid in immortality. Our March workshop, led by poet Hermine Meinhard, discussed the New York School of poets, their influences, their style, and their writing habits as it captured the spirit of the 1950s and 60s in New York City. Taking some of these habits, we wrote poetry, trying for a slice of life or a walk down a New York street, using drips and splashes of collaged ideas.

The New York School of poets began in the late '40s with a group of poets interested in art, especially the Abstract Expressionists, and urban life. Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Barbara Guest were among the originals to this group and we devoted a session to discussing each of them and then writing poetry inspired by their style.

Frank O'Hara and Franz Kline. Image ID: 5180068

Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems had us walking around Midtown “among the hum-colored cabs.” We took up this theme our first week and tried walking the city and recording what we saw. O’Hara helped us let our writing go wherever our mind was wondering that day, whether it was to honey bees, to Easter, to AIDS, or to our neighbors in the city.

With John Ashbery’s work, we collaged bits of phrases and words from his poetry with imagery from a dream we had had. We entered his poem And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name through text rendering and called out phrases or words from the poem in class in order to rearrange the lines and gain a greater understanding of the words. We went around the room randomly speaking words and lines out loud in flashes. Participants commented that this exercise was “freeing” in that our writing was permitted to digress into whatever came to our minds.

Kenneth Koch. Image ID: 5240095

In week three, Kenneth Koch provided us with a mantra to keep us going, “Remember your obligation is to write.” Looking through art books and responding to the Abstract Expressionist painters with notes on our feelings and about what we saw, we tried repeating a line at least three times in our poems. And Koch’s Wishes, Dreams and Lies, about teaching school children in New York City to write poetry, set us off to write a poem made up of lies.

During our final class, we looked to Barbara Guest’s use of words and language for the effects they produced with rhythm and spacing on the page. The mystery in her poems was complemented by the structure and textural elements they brought to the writing. We used pictures sourced from the Library’s Picture Collection of evocative black and white landscape photography as a starting point to write from this week. The open spaces in these pictures mirrored the haunted language of Guest’s poetry.

John Ashbery. Image ID: 5154221

Barbara Guest, 1982. Image ID: 483451

The combination of a specific artistic movement, the New York School, with the opportunity to improve our own poetry writing allowed for the discussion and use of many resources available in our library collections. Here are a few:

Abstract Expressionist Painter’s monographs that we looked at included:

Jackson Pollock (visit his exhibition at MoMA through May 1)
Hans Hofmann
Lee Krasner
Joan Mitchell
Robert Motherwell
Mark Rothko
Franz Kline
Arshile Gorky
Willem De Kooning
Helen Frankenthaler
Adolph Gottlieb
Clyfford Still
Barnett Newman
William Baziotes
Richard Pousette-Dart

Willem De Kooning. Image ID: 5154277

Works of Poetry and criticism that aid in the understanding of the New York School:

The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard
All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the Early 1960s by Daniel Kane
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets by David Lehman
In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde by William Watkin
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson
New York School Collaborations: the Color of Vowels edited by Mark Silverberg

Do you have a favorite New York School poet or poem? Please share it with us!

Celebrating Our Voices During National Poetry Month

Candice Frederick — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 12:35:18 -0400

Actresses (Front L-R) Laurie Carlos, Paula Moss, Aku Kadogo, Trazana Beverly; (Top L-R) Rise Collins, Janet League, Seret Scott in scene fr. the play "For Colored Girls Who Have Condsidered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf." (New York) Image ID: swope_1145109

The Schomburg Center's Public Programs Pre-Professional, Jamara Wakefield, shares what inspires her as a spoken word artist in honor of April's National Poetry Month:

My mother’s collection of African-American literature was my first black history library. Her books became a literary sanctuary where I discovered Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Zora Neale Hurston’s I Love Myself When I Am Laughing And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean & Impressive. I thought I was a little Zora, and I aspired to embody her quirky style. Ntozake Shange’s writing also made me want to twirl and dance in my room. As I grew older, I lost myself in books like Alice Walker's Possessing The Secret of Joy, books that taught me what it means to be a black girl and now a black woman—things I could never learn from reading the required 17^th century Victorian literature in school.

April is National Poetry month and here at the Schomburg Center we recently hosted two exciting poetry events: Teen Night: Open Mic and The Eyes Have It: Poetry and Photography. The energy at these events inspired me to me to explore the work of playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, featured in our podcast selections, and the Gwendolyn Brooks papers found in our Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. My mother once told me how she performed Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” at a her predominantly white school in the ’60s, at a time when the message of the poem was at powerful as it was risky. After hearing my mother's story, I became obsessed with memorizing poems and reciting them for my audience of dolls, neighbors, family or anyone who would listen. I too wanted to find my voice. I wanted to be a poet.

As I reflect on those early encounters with poetry and my current work as a performer, it is clear to me that I stand in the long tradition of using performance, poetry and theater as a resistance strategy to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of our past. This foundation not only nurtures my self-esteem, but allows me to critically think about my role in the world today.

Novedades de Abril 2015: Celebrando el Mes Nacional de la Poesía

Alexandra Gomez, Supervising Librarian, BookOps — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 11:08:17 -0400

* En Homenaje a Ismael Alicea (1954 - 2015)

Poesía es el arte de componer las palabras para comunicar el sentimiento. La poesía es considerada una de las artes literarias más antiguas en la historia del ser humano y puede ser utilizada e interpretada de diferentes maneras. Para muchos la poesía es considerada como el refugio del alma, para otros una forma literaria de expresar el sentimiento sublime. La siguiente lista selectiva presenta obras poéticas, y poesías bilingües, además de historias recientes donde los protagonistas utilizan la poesía como medio de expresión y refugio de sus emociones. He aquí algunas obras que nos inspiran a celebrar cada día ¡el mes nacional de la poesía! Esta lista también está disponible en formato PDF .

All the Odes
Neruda Pablo
Una colección bilingüe del primer libro que recopila todas las diversas composiciones poéticas del género lírico del gran poeta.

El arbol de la rendicion: poemas de la lucha de Cuba por su libertad = The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom
Margarita Engle
En estos poemas bilingües sobre la independencia de Cuba, Rosa quiere curar a todos los enfermos de todas las razas, con medicamentos hechos de plantas silvestres, pero ¿cómo podría salvar a todos los devastados por la guerra?

Canto hondo: Deep song
Francisco X. Alarcón
"Esta es una colección de 100 poemas en inglés y español inspirada por el poeta español Federico García Lorca " -Cubierta.

Colaterales/collateral
Dinapiera di Donato Salazar
Una obra poética bilingüe ganadora del Premio Paz que expone el complejo sentimiento humano y honra la memoria del gran poeta Octavio Paz.

El Diablito y La Rosa: Poemas De La Lotería=The Little Devil and the Rose: Lotería Poems
Viola Canales
A través del juego tradicional de la lotería mexicana, estos poemas expresan el sentimiento de crecer México-americano, desde los aperitivos de la tarde, trepar por los árboles, compartir las tradiciones católicas, hasta lidiar con la discriminación.

La dulce venganza de Celia Door
Finneyfrock, Karen
Celia, se siente dolida por la separación de sus padres, la pérdida de su amigo, y la crueldad de uno de sus compañeros de clase, y se refugia en la poesía en busca de consuelo.

Opio en las nubes
Rafael haparro Madiedo
Esta obra que ganó el Premio Nacional de Literatura, contiene poemas con historias marcadas por la droga, el rock, el sexo y la derrota.

El profeta
Kahlil Gibran
De una manera poética, el autor cuenta la historia del profeta Almustafa, quién después de vivir por 12 años la isla de Orphalese, está a punto de ir de vuelta a casa en barco. Pero antes de marcharse un grupo de gente lo detiene, y él les enseña los secretos de la vida.

Reiki: los poemas recomendados por Mikao Usui
Johnny De'Carli
125 poemas seleccionados como "alimento espiritual," y utilizados tradicionalmente durante la práctica del Método Reiki.

Rigo es amor: una rocola a dieciséis voces
Por medio de la poesía y la prosa, dieciséis voces comparten sus experiencias con el destacado cantante mexicano , Rigo Tovar, quien fue conocido por introducir la cultura de música pop, tales como la música rock y soul, a través de infundir la música tradicional mexicana y latinoamericana con instrumentos modernos como la guitarra eléctrica y el sintetizador.

Sol para las doce: antología poética
Pedro Mir
Una selección de poemas del renombrado poeta dominicano laureado por el Congreso de la República.

The Unknown University
Roberto Bolaño
Para sorpresa de muchos lectores, el renombrado escritor de 2666 y otras novelas destacadas también escribía poemas bilingües. Y cuando se presentó la oportunidad de preguntar a Roberto Bolaño: ¿Qué le hacía creer que era mejor poeta que novelista? " Bolaño respondió:" La poesía me hace sonrojar menos." ("La poesía ", a su juicio, " es más valiente que nadie. ")

Versos del pluriverso: poemas que han sido añadidos a Cántico Cósmico
Ernesto Cardenal
La ciencia y la poesía se combinan para generar poemas de amor que se agregan al “Cántico Cósmico” del gran poeta Ernesto Cardenal.

Esta lista también está disponible en formato PDF . Algunas de estas y otras obras también pueden estar disponibles en diferentes formatos. Para más información sírvase comunicarse con el bibliotecario de su biblioteca local. Síganos por ¡Twitter! Para información sobre eventos favor de visitar: Eventos en Español. Más Blog en Español.

* Ismael Alicea fue un Bibliotecario dedicado, amante de la poesía, que siempre advocó por el incremento de los recursos y servicios bibliotecarios para los hispanohablantes y personas inmigrantes.