“I am a poet, and I finally know where I fit in.” That’s how 14-year-old Savannahian Andre Massey, Jr. finished his speech today at the White House, where First Lady Michelle Obama honored Deep Center and 12 other 2015 National…
Richard Blanco may be the least known of the poets ever accorded the honor of delivering an inaugural poem.
From the NYT: “Like Mr. Obama, who chronicled his multicultural upbringing in a best-selling autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,†Mr. Blanco has been on a quest for personal identity through the written word. He said his affinity for Mr. Obama springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay (and worked as a civil engineer while pursuing poetry). His poems are laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind.”
In addition to praising Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, The New Yorker says that Patricia Lockwood “is one of the few people who makes Twitter seem like it needed inventing.”
And things are going swimmingly, with the book at #29 on the poetry bestsellers as tracked by the Poetry Foundation.
From today’s Washington Post obituary for Adrienne Rich: Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems “Diving into the Wreck†in 1974. In…
I don’t know how much will be made of Carlos Santana’s political remarks at Turner Field as he received the Beacon of Change award at today’s Civil Rights Game in Atlanta, but there’s already an article in the AJC and…
