September 11, 2015 – Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves
Three Day Road
Three Day Road is the first novel from Canadian writer Joseph Boyden. Joseph's maternal grandfather, as well as an uncle on his father's side, served as soldiers during the First World War, and Boyden draws upon a wealth of family narratives. This novel follows the journey of two young Cree men, Xavier and Elijah, who volunteer for that war and become snipers during the conflict. The book was generally critically well received.
#764: It's been a year
Plus: phone poems, low-friction friends and the decline of online travel recs
NaPoWriMo
Well, we did it again, everybody! Another April — and another National/Global Poetry Writing Month — have come and gone.
Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters
This essay has been drawn from Vol. 1 No. 4 of the American Reader, available here. Our October 2012 interview with Veselka can be found here.
The Essential June Jordan, Jan Heller Levi, Christoph Keller, eds. - Copper Canyon Press
The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, 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―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001―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. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.
The Traffic King of Reddit
by Brian O’ConnorLast week, while avoiding work, I stared at a gif of an endless model train spiral for what seemed like hours, transfixed by the constant, seamlessly looping stream of miniature carriages, moving without end, going nowhere, ...
Stella Maris
"From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road comes the second volume of a two-volume masterpiece: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. Black River Falls, Wisconsin, 1972: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia's psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence"--
Found poetry
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.
The best writing advice I’ve ever read comes from Robert Frost.
I write prose, not poetry, but the most helpful piece of advice I’ve ever read was written by a poet: Robert Frost, who was born 147 years ago today. In the second, expanded edition of his Co…
RoadSketch — draw a line, find the road
Elon Take the Wheel - BenBella Books
Timely, thought-provoking, and rigorously sourced, Elon Take the Wheel invites readers to reconsider what automated driving promises, what it obscures, and what it means for the future of mobility.
National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
A week of poetry, music, dancing, workshops, exhibits, conversations, food and fellowship, rooted in tradition but focused on today’s rural West.
Dissecting Doug Ford’s Bike Lane Removal Annoucement
A blog about cycling and political advocacy based in Toronto, Canada. (#BikeTO)
All Roads Lead to the South — National Day of Action for Voting Rights
The voting rights they marched for are being stripped away right now. We're going back. Are you coming?
Might I recommend this poem by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, which is a response to this sort of comment
Melissa Lozada-Oliva - Like Totally Whatever
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