Read Emi Bergquist’s book review on The Beautiful Immunity by Karen An-Hwei Lee and explore what it means to be immune—not just in the biological sense, but in the spiritual, emotional, and linguistic realms.
This post features poems from each of the Headliners of the 13th Annual New York City Poetry Festival: Ilya Kaminsky, Safia Elhillo, Kazim Ali & Katie Farris.
Carve out some you-time and head down to this month’s PTW spot & give this Prompt a free write.
Although Black History Month is coming to a close, we must remember that the influence of Black art and culture in the poetry world and the world beyond deserves acknowledgment and utmost appreciation 24/7/365.
twenty-one ways to prosper as a child of a dying world | Clickbait is a blog designed to shamelessly attract attention to poetry. Using devices typically reserved for online “clickbait” like listicles, how-to’s, trending topics, SEO, hashtags, hyperlinks, hyperbole, sensationalism, puff, and fluff, the poets at The Poetry Society of New York are having a little fun.
Though we hope our summer days aren’t cloudy, we’re still spending plenty of time in the digital cloud. In an age of widespread anxiety and unrest, there’s more on our minds than vacation and BBQs and we’re looking to the web for guidance. Here’s a review of June’s trending searches, paired with relevant poems to help us reflect, relax, and think more deeply about this curious life.
If, like me, your last attempt to answer your dad’s question, “What’s so great about poetry anyway?” ended in monosyllables and nondescript grunts, maybe it’s time to show rather than tell. Here are five different poems for five different types of dads for those dedicated Father’s Day gift-givers that might shed some light onto what exactly is so great about poetry, while showing him some timely appreciation along the way.
As people, we have an instinct to sort ourselves into groups. From politics to religion to hobbies, we constantly seek out ways to fit into larger communities. Groups remove social ambiguity and allow us to feel secure. But poetry disrupts some of this security and puts us back into a gray area. Its possibilities offer versatility: every line in a poem can be meticulously interpreted and re-interpreted, each time teaching us a new lesson. Poems can be crafted, extended or shortened to form a shape. They can be read aloud, or they can be thought over in our racing minds.
May’s trending search topics conveyed a strong collective negativity bias. I guess we’re all trying our hardest to survive. With any luck, reading poetry can help.
Writing a poem can often feel daunting. The blank page (or screen) sometimes reveals more shadows than rays of inspiration. Luckily, for anyone in search of a poetic thumb (of any pigment, fragrance, or seed variety), when approached in a step-by-step form, the process is surprisingly friendly—and rewarding.
Father Verses Son is a stunningly illustrated poetic correspondence about life, death and the human comedy - and about men bumbling towards love. Selected for Scribner’s Best American Poetry, this new book began when a 99-year-old Beat-era novelist is reactivated into writing again by his sons, who send him poems by US Mail. One of those sons, Ari Gold, is a member here at PSNY & sat down for an interview with How to Poet.
Maya Angelou said, "to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power." Motherhood is power and motherhood is beginnings. Power because mothers grow a life into being and beginnings because that was the site our creation, our first breath began there, with a mother. This Mother’s Day, we’d love to share five poems to reflect today on our complex relationships to the many facets of motherhood.
Trust me when I say: I get it, the difficulty of writing. We pour ourselves into the words, bleeding onto the page, only for publishing houses to come back and say the work doesn’t capture the reader’s attention, or is lacking urgency, or isn’t the right fit at this time. There’re authors who, if they bear witness too many rejects, stop believing in their magic gift.
In addition to it being National Poetry Month, April is also Autism Acceptance Month, a time to recognize and honor the beauty of diverse experience. Yet in the middle of April, an ignorant political figure took the time to make false and hurtful claims about the autistic community. Thus, autism and rfk autism both show up on the trends list.
We all know how easy it is to lose writing momentum or have seasons of withering inspiration. One of my favorite things to do when I’m facing a writer’s block is to turn to another genre; film. Yes, you read right. I jump into another writer’s visual world, swim around for a bit, and hopefully find inventiveness from their creations to channel into my own.
March on the internet finally wore me down: I deleted the Facebook app. After learning how many poets in my community had ditched the platform years ago, I was a little embarrassed that I still had it. Even without social media (or certain forms of social media), the internet itself persists and with it, our curiosity. Here’s a look at what’s on our collective minds this month, per Google Trends.
It’s my birth month and it’s been a weird one; then again, aren’t they all? I’m woefully caught up in my own life right now, but Google Trends is here to remind me what the rest of the world is thinking about. Here are a few standouts.
Welcome to 2025, where AI runs the literary world, poets fight back with phoenix metaphors, and even your horoscope can’t escape algorithmic judgment. Let the stars—and GPT-9—guide you through a year of verse, revisions, and cosmic absurdity. Who knows? Maybe Saturn’s retrograde will finally explain why Submittable hates you.
Ahh, the fresh scent of a new year— it smells like warm mud in a region that should be blanketed with snow. There’s much to wonder about as we step into 2025, and a curious public continues to ask Google all the biggest questions. Here are five of the major topics on our collective minds, per Google Trends.
On the night of November 5th and into the early morning hours of the 6th, I obsessively googled presidential election results. When all was said and done, 76,394,853 U.S. voters collectively elected Donald Trump, while 76,203,140 voted for other candidates— a difference of 191,713, or roughly the population of Mobile, Alabama. According to Exploding Topics, more people in the U.S. googled Fox News in November than any other news source, and I suspect a correlation.
As the days wore on, search trends shifted while many of us remained stuck in our feelings. Here are a few of the month’s highlights, each accompanied by a poem.
1. Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and Evander Holyfield
Growing up, I often watched boxing matches with my dad, whose own father had been a Golden Gloves champion (stripped of his title for lying about his age to compete). My grandpa taught me a thing or two about the “sweet science” and left me with his old leather gloves and speed bag. Even if you don’t follow boxing, you’ll likely recognize some of the famous names that appear in November’s trending search list: apparently Mike Tyson is making a comeback.
In deference to the hardknock lives of many fighters, James McKean penned “Elegy for an Old Boxer.”
2. Bluesky Social
I’ve seen a few Teslas with bumper stickers that read, “I bought it before we knew Elon was crazy.” Talk about buyer’s remorse. Elon Musk generates strong feelings. Combining unpopular policies with less popular friendships, Musk recently prompted a mass exodus from X (formerly Twitter).
Personally, I never understood Twitter so it’s all the same to me. Others are flocking to a network called Bluesky. Thus, it felt appropriate that Kema Alabi simultaneously evokes the sky and harkens back to Donald Trump’s first electoral victory in their poem, “Undelivered Message to the Sky: November 9, 2016.”
Read “Undelivered Message to the Sky: November 9, 2016” by Kema Alabi
3. Coastal Flood Warning
Much of the east coast faced potential flooding mid-month due to abnormally high tides. Climate catastrophe is wreaking havoc. Where I live, we are experiencing severe drought and wildfires, which are atypical for the area. The undercurrent of natural disaster brings to mind “Gills” by Rain Prud’homme-Cranford.
Give us salinity to float in the betweens.
Surrender to flood waters.
4. Aliens in the Ocean
What in the world? When I saw this phrase on the list, I had to explore. Somehow, recent pentagon reports on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) have certain lawmakers and politicians (and probably members of the general public) convinced that there are aliens in the ocean. Admittedly, most deep sea creatures appear awfully alien to us land dwellers.
Leave it to Aimee Nezhukumatathil to have a poem about sea animals at the ready.
5. The Onion
The Onion is buying InfoWars. That sentence almost-sort-of means something to me. The Onion has been a staple in my life; InfoWars is decidedly less familiar (but it doesn’t sound great).
There are a surprising number of poems about onions. Although I guess it didn’t surprise me too much— I chose The Onion from the trending search list on suspicion of poetry. It’s the layers. There’s Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Traveling Onion,” and Juan Felippe Herrera’s “Jackrabbits, Green Onions & Witch’s Stew,” but I wanted to share “Monologue for an Onion” by Suji Kwock Kim because of that whole layer thing.
In December, I will search for snow— to ease the wildfires in my home state, and because I simply love it.
Writer Bio: Allisonn Church was born in a small rural community to a mother who pinned butterflies in glass cases and hid scarab beetles in her jewelry box. Her first favorite poem was “The Willow Fairy”’ by Cicely Mary Barker. Find a list of Allisonn's published work at churchpoems.wordpress.com.
