2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 24 :: ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL on GRACE PALEY
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling. My favorite Grace Paley stories have one-word titles: Wants, Debts, Love, Friends, Mother. Each is just a few pages long. To me they comprise a world literature. Expansive, weighty, inexhaustible. To
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 23 :: JULIET P. HOWARD on PAT PARKER
I first discovered the phenomenal poet Pat Parker (1944-1989) in my early 20’s and immediately fell in love with her poetry. I discovered her poetry around the same time that she passed away, so unfortunately I never had the opportunity
2nd Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 21 :: LUZ SANCHEZ on FOROUGH FARROKHZAHD
I like to believe I've always been a woman of culture, a student ready to learn about the world, a kid who might still believe that for as much as we are all so very different we are also so
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 20 :: MICHAEL BROEK ON CHOOSING and CREELEY
I’m thinking about all the magnificent souls I’ve been reading lately and just, also, enjoying the pleasure of sidling up next to at the humble mid-20th century bar in my suburban Atomic Ranch, following a reading at my college, an
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 19 :: JOHN KROPA on CLARK COOLIDGE
“How I'd like to think is as words come. Instead I think how they go. Catch them as they recede. This is because my brain is in my head and not someone else's so thoughts are leaving from the get-go.
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO :: DAY 17 :: CAITS MEISSNER on YONA HARVEY
I have drunk in the words of Yona Harvey a'plenty and surfaced quenched. She is a blessing of a poet, a writer who's words stick in the psyche for time. Of her breadth of work, there is one particular poem
2nd Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 16 :: JEFFREY GRUNTHANER on JOHN FORBES
I discovered the poetry of John Forbes during an especially precarious period of my life. Not that things have become more stabilized since, yet there’s something about injecting excessive amounts of cocaine and staying up lateLateLATE for nights on end—following
2nd Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 15 :: MEL ELBERG on MAUREEN OWEN
I WHO POUNDED ON YOUR DREAMS remember when the word romance meant moonlight & now it just means holding down two jobs by Mel Elberg “Maureen Owen saved me from academia” a teacher turned friend explained, handing me printed out copies of Owen poems
2nd Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 14 :: DONNA FLEISCHER on LORI DESROSIERS
And Never Look Back: On Lori Desrosiers’ “Three Vanities” Not since Edward Field’s 1964 book of poems Stand Up, Friend, With Me, have I read a narrative voice formidable, tender, and singular as that of Lori Desrosiers in Three Vanities. These
2nd Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 11 :: LEGACY RUSSELL ON RICHARD SIKEN
In 2005, I happened upon a copy of Richard Siken’s Crush while browsing at Saint Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village. Published that year as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the venerable Louise Glück had written the foreword. Her first
