P O E M S T H A T C H A N G E D M E
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2023
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gillian Conoley on Jean Valentine, "I Dropped a Plate" 2022 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- December 31 Anthony Cody on Andrés Montoya, "fresno, august '92" December 21 Chiyuma Elliott on Medbh McGuckian, "The Sofa" December 14 Hadara Bar-Nadav on Gwendolyn Brooks, "the rites for Cousin Vit" December 7 Derrick Austin on James Merrill, "The Mad Scene" November 30 Catherine Esposito Prescott on Rumi, "The Guest House" November 23 Ryo Yamaguchi on Barbara Guest, "Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher" November 16 Ruben Quesada on Gerald Stern, "Sister" November 9 Maw Shein Win on Yoko Ono's GRAPEFRUIT November 2 Catherine Staples on William Butler Yeats, "The Stare's Nest by My Window" October 26 Kathleen Ossip on Susan Wheeler, “What Memory Reveals” October 19 Kevin Prufer on Russell Atkins, "Lakefront Cleveland" October 12 Lisa Olstein on Alice Oswald, from Memorial October 5 Donika Kelly on Marie Howe, "Practicing" September 28 Ethel Rackin, on W. S. Merwin, "Late Spring" September 21 John Keene on Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays" September 14 CMarie Fuhrman on Wendy Rose, "Excavation at Santa Barbara Mission" September 7 Jennifer L. Knox on Denis Johnson, "Sway" August 31 Pádraig Ó Tuama on Jane Kenyon, "The Suitor" August 24 Aaron Caycedo-Kimura on Lawson Fusao Inada, "Healing Gila" August 17 Molly McGlennen on Luci Tapahonso, "Hills Brothers Coffee" August 10 Michael Kleber-Diggs on Natasha Trethewey, "Elegy [I think by now the river must be thick]" August 3 Angela Narciso Torres on Lisel Mueller, "When I Am Asked" [ j u l y c a e s u r a ] June 29 Omar Miranda on Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Boy Died in My Alley" June 22 Michael Wasson on Richard Siken, "Scheherazade" June 15 Janice N. Harrington on Derrick Austin, "Cedars of Lebanon" June 8 Felicia Zamora on fahima ife, "a night in which my spirit cowers" June 1 Luisa Caycedo-Kimura on Sandra Cisneros, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" May 25 Brian Clements on Jack Myers, “Telepathic Note to Poet Friends” + William Matthews, “Attention Everyone" May 18 Hayan Charara on Charles Bukowski, "me against the world" May 11 Traci Brimhall on Ellen Bass, "I Could Touch It" May 4 Victoria Chang on Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "Song" April 27 Alexandra Teague on June Jordan, "Poem about My Rights" April 20 Iris Jamahl Dunkle on Lynn Emanuel, "The Sleeping" April 13 Christina Lloyd on James Wright, "A Blessing" April 6 Christina Olson on James Wright, "Depressed By A Book Of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward An Unused Pasture And Invite The Insects To Join Me" March 30 Judy Halebsky on Wei Ying-wu, "Heartbreak at Our Old Dwelling at Tungte Hermitage" March 23 Olivia Morgan on Victoria Redel, "Bedecked" March 16 Elizabeth Savage on Nancy Takacs, "The Voices" March 9 Tess Taylor on Seamus Heaney, "Bogland Poem" March 2 Danusha Laméris on Chana Bloch, "The Joins" February 22 Kelli Russell Agodon on Danusha Laméris, "Small Kindnesses" February 15 Daniel Handler on Czeslaw Milosz, "Encounter" February 9 Ellen Bass on Tony Hoagland, "Reasons to Survive November" February 2 Terese Svoboda on Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck" January 26 Jane Hirshfield on Izumi Shikibu ["Although the Wind"] January 19 Arthur Sze, on Inger Christensen, "Alphabet" January 12 torrin a. greathouse on Allen Ginsberg, "Psalm III" January 5 Sharon Olds on Edward Thomas, "The Owl" + Lucille Clifton, "jasper, texas 1998" 2021 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- January 6 Tarfia Faizullah, "Infinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies" January 13 Victoria Chang, "Obit" January 20 (Inauguration Day) Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again" January 27 Ada Limón, "Service" February 3 Michael Wasson, "This Dusk in A Mouth Full of Prayer" February 10 (Special Valentine's Day Episode) Margaret Atwood, "Variation on the Word Sleep" February 17 Wallace Stevens, "The Man on the Dump" February 24 Terrance Hayes, "Snow for Wallace Stevens" March 3 H.D., "Eurydice" March 10 Wendy Rose, "Alien Seeds" March 18 Emily Dickinson, [After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes] (379) March 25 Carolyn Forché, "The Colonel" March 31 Jorie Graham, "The Field" NATIONAL POETRY MONTH (A.K.A. RILKE MONTH) April 7 Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archäischer Torso Apollos" [Archaic Torso of Apollo] April 14 Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Erste Elegie [The First Elegy] April 21 Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Neunte Elegie [The Ninth Elegy] April 28 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonett an Orpheus II, 29 [Sonnet to Orpheus II, 29) May 5 Nazim Hikmet, "Things I Never Knew I Loved" May 12 Kelli Russell Agodon, "The Sky Regrets to Inform You, It's Tired of Feeling Judged" May 19 Claudia Rankine, from Citizen May 28 Pablo Neruda, "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines" June 2 LeAnne Howe, "The Indian Sports Mascot Meets Noble Savage" June 9 Paul Celan, "Todesfugue" June 16 César Vallejo, "Los Dados Eternos" [The Eternal Dice] June 23 Rita Dove, "Mirror" June 30 Marianne Moore, "An Octopus" July 7 Stanley Plumly, "The Iron Lung" July 14 W. S. Merwin, "When You Go Away" & Separation + James Wright, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" & "The Jewel" July 21 Georg Trakl, "De Profundis" July 28 Charles Wright, "Clear Night" August 4 Louise Erdrich, "Dear John Wayne" August 11 Li-Young Lee, "This Room and Everything In It" August 18 Julia de Burgos, "To Julia de Burgos" August 25 Sharon Olds, "The Promise" September 1 William Virgil Davis, "The Time of Year, The Hour" September 8 John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" September 15 Edward Hirsch, "In Memoriam Paul Celan" September 23 Dana Levin, "Instructions for Stopping" September 30 Patricia Smith, "Undertaker" OCTOBER - BAY AREA POETS October 6 Brenda Hillman, "Sediments of Santa Monica" October 13 Aaron Shurin, "The Bride of Frank" October 20 Jane Hirshfield, "Those Who Cannot Act" October 27 Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas" November 3 Heid E. Erdrich, "The Theft Outright" November 10 Philip Levine, "You Can Have It" November 17 Mark Strand, "From a Litany" November 24 Lucille Clifton, "leda 1," "leda 2," "leda 3" December 1 Vicente Huidobro, Altazor December 8 John Donne, "Holy Sonnet 14" [Batter my heart] December 15 Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover" December 22 James Tate, "Goodtime Jesus" December 29 Wallace Stevens, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," "The World as Meditation," and "The Planet on the Table" |
POEMS THAT CHANGED ME: THE 2023 EDITION Poems That Changed Me officially ended as a weekly event on December 31, 2022, However, I am still receiving the occasional video; so I will be posting new installments as they come across the transom. If you have an idea, feel free to pitch me. Contributors for 2022 include poets, editors, and advocates for poetry like Arthur Sze, John Keene, Ellen Bass, Sharon Olds, Donika Kelly, Victoria Chang, Jane Hirshfield, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), torrin a. greathouse, Elizabeth Savage, Kathleen Ossip, Hayan Charara, Janice Harrington, Kelly Russell Agodon, Dana Levin, Molly McGlennen, Olivia Morgan, Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, Traci Brimhall, Christina Olson, Danusha Lameris, and a host of other amazing folks. POEMS THAT CHANGED ME: 2022
By the time the middle of 2021 rolled around, I had grown weary of filming myself (at watching myself), so I decided to reach out to hotshot poets, editors, and advocates to see if they might be willing to talk about poems that changed them. Needless to say, their videos and their poems utterly changed me. POEMS THAT CHANGED ME: 2021
2020 was a year of startling transformations: our sense of personal and public health, our awareness of structural racism and ongoing racial violence, our confidence in governmental authorities and programs, our notions of time and space, our ideas of freedom and security, and our relationship to each other all changed. For many, they changed dramatically. As this year of transformation was plummeting to its demise and about to transform from one thing to another, I began re-reading poems that had transformed me. And, rather randomly, on New Year's Eve, as I was thinking about what I wanted for 2021, I got the idea for this project. What if I put together a selection of poems that had, in some way, altered how I see the world? And what if these poems can be as transformative for others as they were for me.
I do not for a moment believe my own transformations are particularly interesting, but I believe transformative poems are. My goal is to shine a tiny spotlight on works that make us think about our lives in relation to language, the past, the future, and each other. I hope to post a poem as well as a video of me reading and (briefly) talking about that poem every Wednesday during 2021. I have no illusions about my skills as a videographer. This project is the antithesis of high-tech and adheres to the one-take philosophy. Despite its low-fi quality, by the time 2022 rolls around, this page should have roughly 52 poems and videos that are a testament to the power of poetry to heal, connect, and harness. Thank you for reading, listening, and watching. Feel free to be in touch. |