Love Poetry For Couple

INTERVIEWER : I know you�ve written about this, but could we begin with the beginning, how you became a poet? KIZER : I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley�s translations, and Whitman, and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma. A sort of intellectual seduction: there I am, lying on the sofa breathing with difficulty, while Father pours Keats into the porches of my ear. If Daddy had only read Keats�s letters! They�re so wonderful, but Keats is someone you can�t let yourself be influenced by. There�s that interesting group of poets who are fatal to your style: I�d say Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. The Waley led me to my own interest in Chinese and Chinese translations, which has been a major theme in my life. And Whitman, of course, I idolize, though I�m more attracted to met...

INTERVIEWER : Do you feel you�re in command when you�re writing? GINSBERG : Sometimes I feel in command when I�m writing. When I�m in the heat of some truthful tears, yes. Then, complete command. Other times�most of the time not. Just diddling away, woodcarving, getting a pretty shape; like most of my poetry. There�s only a few times when I reach a state of complete command. Probably a piece of Howl, a piece of Kaddish, and a piece of The Change. And one or two moments of other poems. INTERVIEWER : By command do you mean a sense of the whole poem as it�s going, rather than parts? GINSBERG : No�a sense of being self-prophetic master of the universe. �more at  The Paris Review Allen Ginsberg

Reading at Lamontville High School in Durban in 2016

Call for Submission: Second Issue https://t.co/rENC4hPJC4 pic.twitter.com/jjbL3kgpoa � Africa in Dialogue (@africa_dialogue) May 15, 2018 What!!!?

Shailja Patel 1. Did you move into writing poetry gradually, or did any one thing push you over the edge? Poetry chose me, when I was very young. I've been making up poems since before I learned how to write. ----- 2. Please tell us about Migritude . Is it a play? A poem? A monologue? Migritude is an epic journey, in four movements. I coined the word Migritude as a play on Negritude and Migrant Attitude . It asserts the dignity of outsider status. Migritude celebrates and revalorizes immigrant/diasporic culture. It captures the unique political and cultural space occupied by migrants who refuse to choose between identities of origin and identities of assimilation, who channel difference as a source of power rather than conceal or erase it. The four works that make up the Migritude Cycle draw on my Hindu spiritual heritage. They reference the earliest religious teaching imparted to Hindu children: that of the First Four Gods. The Hindu child is taught that her first god is her Mothe...

1. Have you always been "poetic"? An interview at Geoffrey Philp's blog dates your first poem back to when you were 9. What was the first poem you placed in a magazine? Did that/those "first" poem/s make it into any of your books? Always, if that means seduced by rhyme and rhythm and the power of images. My father didn�t read us bedtime stories � he read us poems from an anthology called THE BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Some poems told stories, and some of those were fit for children, like �The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat�, but others were very grown up poems, like Longfellow�s �The Day is Done�. Shortly before his death, I read his favourites back to him from the same book, weeping the whole time. The first poem I published was in BIM, an important literary magazine founded in 1942 in Barbados by Frank Collymore, which has just recently been revived. There were very few publishing outlets for us in the region at the time so many of us in the Cari...

Michelle McGrane Born in 1974 in Zimbabwe, Michelle McGrane spent her childhood in Malawi, and moved to South Africa with her family when she was fourteen. Her third poetry collection is forthcoming in 2010. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and blogs at peony moon . Here's what was said: Will you share some of your memories of Malawi with us? My memories of Malawi remain a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, smells and tastes. I remember going to the Saturday morning market in Limbe with my mother: the glowing pyramids of fruit and vegetables set up in rows on concrete slabs, the yards of tiny dried fish, kapenta, laid out in the sun, the heaps of colourful spices in yellow enamel bowls, bunches of ripe bananas. Baskets of all shapes and sizes. Straw brooms. Wooden carvings. Miniature wire cars and bicycles. Brilliant bead jewellery. It was an Aladdin's treasure trove. There were hot weekends spent at a cottage on the shores of Lake Malawi. We slept with white ga...

1. In your opinion, what is the worst thing that has happened to writing in the past ten years? That is such a general question. I wouldn't know where to begin. The world is so big. I know some good things are happening in Caribbean writing. More authors are being published, and that is something about which we can all give thanks. 2. If there were one thing that the 'learning' and 'beginning' writers should do, what would it be? There is a Buddhist story about full cups and empty cups. Be empty. 3. Poets spend a lot of time perfecting their craft, and then perfecting each piece. So, where's the money? The riches are in the kingdom of heaven... 4. How long did you work on your first book? Do all your books take about the same time to "finish"? My first book took me about ten years to write. Then, I began to write steadily. Hurricane Center took me one year to write because I purposely set out to write a poem a week. Made my wife crazy, but I did it. Th...

1. In your opinion, are the times we live in good or not for literature? If not, what do you do to "make it"? If so, in what way? I'm not sure. From a writer's perspective, one's own time is one's own time, meaning, I live now and can't compare, in lived experience, to another time. Having said that, I imagine all times are good for literature from a writer's perspective - all times must have in them the stuff, the grist for the writer's mill. Have the past 20 years then been good for writing, especially for the monkish art of poetry? I think so, especially as we face a world from which it is probably better to withdraw if you're a poet, into your cell or tower, which is exactly where the writing happens. As to the production side, I don't know. In SA, big publishers publish less poetry, but small independents still have heart and courage to do so. Literature in general seems to be booming - books are published, reviewed etc. L...

1. Did you move into writing poetry gradually, or did any one thing push you over the edge? It was a dance from when I was a child, a kind of secret that I didn�t know how to share, until my dances got longer and louder and would not be silent anymore. The essay, "Laying in the Tall Grasses, Eating Cane: How I Became a Writer," in my collection Eros Muse (Africa World Press, 2007) goes in more details about my development as a writer, and perhaps more effectively chronicles how I found my voice... but I would have to say now on recollection, that in many ways my life was poetry, so capturing it was not only easy but inevitable. ----- 2. Do you work on just one poem at a time, or do you work on several at the same time? I'm always working on several things at once, not just poetry, but prose and essay and stuff. If I don�t my head will explode. Ideas come at me like bullets on a battle field, and sometimes my head does feels as if it has been blown open, brain and matter...

Kelwyn Sole 1. Why is poetry the major means of expression for you? Why do you write poems and not caricature politicians, for example? Occasionally I have written poems that caricature politicians, so I don�t see the tasks as necessarily separate. A simple answer, though, would be that it�s what I�m best at. As far as art is concerned, I�d have preferred to be a dancer or a musician: but I have flat feet, and my ability with piano or drums isn�t great, to say the least. I think one of the few generally accurate things one could say about poetry is that, from ancient times, it has borne a relationship to music. It�s the one thing on which critics as different as Pound and Amiri Baraka agree (the latter calls poetry �speech musick�d�, as I remember). That�s one of the attractions for me: plus the intensity and compactness of expression in a good poem: its reactive chemistry of mood, thought, emotion. I�m struggling here, because I�m not sure I can do adequate justice to this... . Recen...

1. What�s your relationship to poetry? How do you interact with it? I talk to my pet rabbit in rhymed couplets. Apart from that, I read it and think about it a fair bit. I make up songs in my head, to borrowed tunes. 2. Do you work on just one poem at a time, or do you work on several at the same time? If I�m working on a poem, then that�s what I�m working on. I like to return to things after some months. 3. Poets labour a lot over their work (as do other artists). A lot of time and dedication goes into writing good poetry. Where�s the money? There are too many �poets� and very little money, and such money as there is tends to go to poets who serve various agendas. Prizes, with their winner-takes-all structure, give the impression that people are being paid and honoured, but in fact very few are receiving very little. Poets who aren�t climbing on a wagon must write for the pleasure of it. Nobody tries to publish their completed crossword puzzles. That said, I think poets should be paid...

1. How did you get into writing poetry? Did any one thing push you over the edge? no 2. Do you work on just one poem at a time, or do you work on several at the same time? several 3. Poets spend a lot of time perfecting their craft, and then perfecting each piece. How do you balance this with family life and with little income (compared with the input)? I work daily. I do not know how long it takes me to complete a poem. 4. These are difficult times, and they say laughter is the best medicine. What makes you laugh? Because I am part of the society I write about. 5. Is there a particular goal you seek when you write? Awake others? Entertain them? Tell the truth? What? Tell the truth 6. How do you know when a poem is �finished�, and do you stop work on it then and there? It is difficult to convince myself that a poem is complete. 7. You are to encourage poetry students to write a poem. Please come up with a "writing prompt" out of your own experience, or out of something else, ...