Sierra Poetry Festival

'The New Dawn Blooms': US Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recites 'The Hill We Climb' at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris today...

When Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech 58 years ago, he changed the course of history with his aspiration. The metaphors, political overtones and themes King employed were inspired by Langston Hughes' poem "I Dream A World..."

Congratulations to Tongo Eisen-Martin, on his appointment as San Francisco Poet Laureate. We hope to see you soon, Tongo.

"Creation" by Ellen Dooling Reynard, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Silver Blade Magazine. Reynard grew up in Montana, "raised on myths and fairy tales," and now lives in Nevada City, California, on the Western slope of the Sierra.

Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet to serve as U.S. poet laureate, has been reappointed to a rare third term by the Library of Congress. Harjo, an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, was initially appointed in 2019. At the start of her tenure, Harjo explained what that honor meant for Indigenous peoples in particular. Some of us are astronauts. Some of us are really good at fixing cars, she told the PBS NewsHour at the time. But we’re human beings. And some of us write poetry it makes a doorway of hope.

More poems from Poets.org have been shared in the past two days than in any other forty-eight-hour period in the past four years. People are turning to poems seeking language, powerful and precise, to cope with this moment in our country when divisiveness has become so painfully clear. Since the election on November 8, Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise has been read on Poets.org more than 35,000 times. Angelou writes: ... You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. https://poets.org/people-are-turning-poems-post-election

"History" by Charles Simic Our life stories are scary and droll, Like masks children wear on Halloween As they go from door to door... Holding the little ones by the hand In some neighborhood long torn down, Where people ate their dinners In angry silence or quarreling loudly, When there was a knock on the door, A soft knock a shy boy makes Dressed in a costume his mother made. What’s this you’re wearing, kid? And where did you get that mask? That made everyone laugh here While you stood staring at us, As if you knew already we were history.

https://www.nytimes.com//poetry-poets-recommendations.html

BREAKING NEWS The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes ...individual existence universal. Louise Glück was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. She made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’, and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has received several prestigious awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize (1993) and the National Book Award (2014). Louise Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry. All are characterized by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her. In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self. But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works. The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid. With collections like ‘The Triumph of Achilles’ (1985) and ‘Ararat’ (1990) Glück found a growing audience in USA and abroad. In ‘Ararat’ three characteristics unite to subsequently recur in her writing: the topic of family life; austere intelligence; and a refined sense of composition that marks the book as a whole. Glück has also pointed out that in these poems she realized how to employ ordinary diction in her poetry. The deceptively natural tone is striking. We encounter almost brutally straightforward images of painful family relations. It is candid and uncompromising, with no trace of poetic ornament. It reveals much about her own poetry when in her essays Glück cites the urgent tone in Eliot, the art of inward listening in Keats or the voluntary silence in George Oppen. But in her own severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith she resembles more than any other poet, Emily Dickinson. Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss. In one of her most lauded collections, ‘The Wild Iris’ (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem ‘Snowdrops’: I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy in the raw wind of the new world. It should also be added that the decisive moment of change is often marked by humour and biting wit. The collection ‘Vita Nova’ (1999) concludes with the lines: I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge. The title alludes to Dante’s classic ‘La Vita Nuova’, celebrating the new life in the guise of his muse Beatrice. Celebrated in Glück is rather the loss of a love that has disintegrated. ‘Averno’ (2006) is a masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death. The title comes from the crater west of Naples that was regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Another spectacular achievement is her latest collection, ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’ (2014), for which Glück received the National Book Award. The reader is again struck by the presence of voice and Glück approaches the motif of death with remarkable grace and lightness. She writes oneiric, narrative poetry recalling memories and travels, only to hesitate and pause for new insights. The world is disenthralled, only to become magically present once again. Anders Olsson Chairman of the Nobel Committee Learn more: https://bit.ly/3078MSQ