Blog Posts by Subject: Poetry

Most of the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman building are closed-stacked, i.e., we bring them to you. But on the 3rd floor, the Rose Main Reading Room maintains open, very open stacks of about 30,000 volumes on every subject, not just the humanities and social sciences which is our collection strength.

Well, it's April and time for Shakespeare Week. And once again, to read a great novel—The Juliet Club, by Wertheim writer Suzanne Harper.  Here is the blog post about it from 2 years ago.  It (the novel, that is) is as good as the first time.

I love the cat breed illustrations on the inside of the front and back covers of this book. All of the cats look so happy! The book is full of poems that indicate the nature of cats, and anyone who has experience with cats or who has lived with cats knows exactly what Crawley is talking about in these cat poems.

I can't say that I've always been the biggest poetry fan. But lately I've been getting into novels in verse, which have been popping up all over the YA Fiction scene for awhile now. Ellen Hopkins is the queen of this and if you've never read her work before, do yourself a favor and check out Crank as soon as possible. You will be hooked... freaked out... and hooked.

Abril es el Mes Nacional de la Poesia. Te invito a celebrar con poesías, escogidas al azar, para adornar tu día, y llevar a cualquier lugar...

The author of Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner, is originally from Kansas and has a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. He was a 2003-2004 Fulbright Scholar in Spain and he currently teaches in the English Department at Brooklyn College. Leaving the Atocha Station is Lerner's first novel, but he has several published books of poetry and critical works.

"She saw the moon, she saw the birds, she saw the little shoes, in summer, before swimming pools filled up — strong and empty and waiting"
~from The Shoes

Enter the world of teaching poet and published author Hermine Meinhard. From here, enter your subconscious, and write what you find. Ms. Meinhard will be there to help you along.

Mid-Manhattan Library is pleased to offer a free ten-week workshop with Hermine Meinhard, The Art of Making Poems: Creation and Craft, on Tuesdays, from 4:00 - 6:30 p.m., beginning February 12th.

Fang and I were very, very lucky during the hurricane. We were out of power for only 24 hours, during which I wrote the three haiku below: "On the Advantages of the Absence of Electricity."

I play the piano a little bit and am working on AS's Six Little Pieces, op. 19. Little they are — all six take less than five minutes to play. Easy they are not — the slightest error in nuance ruins them. Written in 1911, they are among his 'atonal' works, a vague term but basically describing those works in which the usual major/minor tonalities were avoided. I don't quite know why so many people have an aversion to this music, and its successor, serial music. So what if it is a bit like hearing a foreign language you don't speak — after a few hearings it begins to get coherent. And if it takes longer than that, so what: just lie back, close your eyes and think 

Miguel Trelles, one of the hands behind the scenes of Festival Borimix, is the kind of New Yorker who gives you hope.

Who is Harlem Witness? St. George Library Center found out not too long ago when local Staten Island musician Shawn "Harlem Witness" DeBerry performed his Gospel-Rap set to audience full of eager concert goers. Shawn also provided us with a little bit of information about his musical background and the personal aspirations he has for his craft. 

Kenneth Fearing was a major poet of the Great Depression and the founding editor of the Partisan Review.

He lived at 311 W. 11th Street and his birthday is July 28.

Hart Crane lived for a time at 45 Grove Street (he more famously had an apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge) and his birthday is July 21.

Clement Clark Moore is credited with writing one of the most famous poems in the world, "Twas the Night Before Christmas," also known as "A Visit from St. Nickolas."

Mark Van Doren edited and published An Anthology of World Poetry in 1929. Amazingly, this enabled him to buy the house at 393 Bleecker Street. Van Doren was a poet himself and a playwright and a greatly admired professor at Columbia University.

If you think of poems as flowers, then the Aguilar Poetry Fest was an exercise in charming cross-pollination. Sharing was the thing. Students were seated in groups of about 6, where they read their chosen poems to each other and then intermixed with other tables to multiply the fun. Poets included Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shel Silverstein, Douglas Florian (on Silverstein’s wavelength), Billy Collins, some haiku poets, and a smattering of others. 

Before he was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, John Masefield scrubbed floors in a saloon at Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue in the Village.

My guess, that's good training to be a poet or a writer of any kind.

Joseph Brodsky was a Russian poet, born in Leningrad, who became the American Poet Laureate in 1991. He lived at 44 Morton Street and his birthday is May 24.

May Sarton lived a little bit out of Hudson Park's area at 42 E. 11th Street, but still, close enough. She was a poet, novelist and memoirist. May 3rd is her birthday.