The Best American Poetry

George Jones, a fool no more

George Jones, who died this past Friday at age 81, had long been lauded as one of the greatest voices in country music history. He was also, along with Hank Williams, one of country music's most cautionary tales, with a history of alcoholism, substance abuse, marital woes, and career mismanagement that would have forced a lesser man into early retirement or (as in the case of Hank) an early death. Unlike Williams, Jones was never a great songwriter; he was a great interpreter of others' songs. He was very much a contradictory artist: A loner who did some of his best work in collaboration with another singer -- Tammy Wynette (his ex-wife) and Melba Montgomery most notably. And all of the problems that dogged him whenever he didn't appear onstage (which was frequent enough to earn him the nickname "No-Show Jones"), vanished when he was in thrall to his own gift, in performance, at one with the baleful sentiments he sang. He was hard on himself in every sense, and always carried with his toughness and stubbornness an air of hangdog shame, as though he felt destined to be the fool, not the master, of his life. 

 

Jones was one of the most self-conscious, for good and ill, of great American artists. He knew his gift, he knew it wasn't so much his voice as his phrasing that was the genius part ('s why he could redeem so many lesser lyrics). But the clenched-jaw delivery can also serve as synecdoche for a man frozen, trapped: trapped by his feelings of inferiority, the unwarranted shame he felt about his class, the paralyzing sting of those in mainstream music industry who never recognized him fully, for the cruelty of country radio for abandoning him when he still had something to give. People of privilege sometimes don't understand why an artist can start to self-destruct when he feels resentment, abandonment, false praise instead of the kind of praise and appreciation of his gifts he knew he was owed. (And I'm talking about the whole arc of his career, not just the final years.) "No-Show" was a fond joke barely concealing a different diagnosis: an addictive, isolating personality that could not achieve enough comfort in his own skin. All of which makes the best music that he leaves behind more precious.

--Ken Tucker

Quote of the Week: The 99-cent Slice

On Monday morning, April 15, with taxes on people's minds -- before the bombs went off in Boston -- commuters reading the Wall Street Journal got to ponder the implications of the ninety-nine cent slice of pizza, a new development in Manhattan. You see stands advertising dollar slices on Eighth Street and Second Avenue, for instance, and the competition and inferior product are leaving some proud pizza makers feeling pretty vulnerable. So let's hear from an expert, and obligingly one steps forth, and these deathless sentences emerge:

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"The 99-cent slice is a giant step towards killing the classic New York pizza experience," said John Arena, who teaches a class on pizza history and culture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "What's next, $1 lox and 10-cent bagels?"
>>>

Say, dear reader, what is the most remarkable element in this little graf? Though there's more than one candidate, my vote goes to "a class on pizza history and culture." -- DL

"A Milestone Reached" [by Philip Brunst]

Thursday the 19th of April was a special night for The Best American Poetry and series editor David Lehman. At the New School’s Tishman Auditorium an all-star cast of poets celebrated the anthology’s 25th anniversary with the launch of The Best of the Best American Poetry, guest edited by distinguished poet and man of letters, Robert Pinsky.

As Mr. Pinsky noted in his introductory remarks,The Best American Poetry series, which Mr. Lehman started in 1988, has filled an important cultural place in society. It acts out what Mr. Pinsky described as a “significant cultural process,” whereby artists confer recognition upon other artists — a process of discovery and advocacy responsible for the reputations of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to name but two poets who were once overlooked.

The Best of the Best American Poetry is a collection of 100 poems selected from the nearly 2000 already published in the anthology’s twenty-five-year existence. The LA times called it an embarrassment of riches, and the lineup of poets who read on Thursday night was certainly that. From Richard Howard to Marie Howe to Yusef Komunyakaa, the range and quality of voices was nothing short of exceptional.

Mark Doty began the evening with his hypnotic poem “Difference,” which opens with a description of jellyfish floating in a Massachusetts harbor.

“The jellyfish

float in the bay shallows

like schools of clouds,

 

a dozen identical — is it right

to call them creatures

these elaborate sacks

 

of nothing?”

                                                           

   — Mark Doty, “Difference”

 

One of the distinctive qualities of all The Best American Poetry volumes, readily apparent at book launches, is how different one poem is from the next. The poets read in alphabetical order and there is an unexpected quality to the event. There are, in rapid order, sonnets and sestinas, rhymed- and free verse, on subjects ranging from Vietnam to New Mexico.

 

Major Jackson read “Urban Renewal XVI,” his poem selected for the volume, which is in part a poem of how he came to be named Major.

 

“What of my fourth grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary,

who weary after failed attempts to set to memory

names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around

the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai:

Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class

after French painters whether boy or girl.”

                                                           

— Major Jackson, “Urban Renewal XVI”

 

This was followed shortly afterwards by Sarah Manguso’s prose poem “Hell.”

 

“The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave. Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

 

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.”

                                                           

— Sarah Manguso, “Hell”

 

And then two poets later there was Paul Muldoon with his alliterative and rhymed poem “The Loaf,” where the poet experiences sensations through a hole in the wall of his house, built in 1750. 

 

“When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch

in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair

it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch

 

with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.

 

When I put my ear to the hole I'm suddenly aware

of spades and shovels turning up the gain

all the way from Raritan to the Delaware

 

with a clink and a clink and a clinkie-click.”

                                                           

— Paul Muldoon, “The Loaf”

 

In the end the evening highlighted the seminal, twenty-five-year mark that David Lehman has reached with the now invaluable Best American Poetry series as well as the strength of American poetry today.

-- Philip Brunst

"He's got flow!" Do you? Donate a Book to the Parachute Library

(Ed note:  On March 13, we posted about an ambitious project to build a poetry library for teens.  Here's what happened. sdh)

Maya and Amanda open a box of books

Dear poets, 

My students and I want to thank all of you who have contributed to our growing poetry library for at-risk teens in Coney Island. Thanks to your generosity, our shelves are filling with a wonderful variety of poetry books. I hope our story will inspire others to contribute as well. We now have over fifty books! 

I lead a poetry workshop for teenagers in Coney Island’s YWCA teen empowerment program through Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival, a literary nonprofit I founded. We meet at the Coney Island YWCA after-school program housed in the Rachel Carson High School in Brooklyn, NY. Parachute and the YWCA have been collaborating for over a year in order to offer the poetry workshop.  

A few weeks ago, I initiated a grass-roots project to  create a poetry section for the high school’s library, which, at the time had one poetry book. (One book!) My plan was to contact other poets, local presses, and those who had performed at Parachute’s annual festival and invite them to contribute books for a shelf at the YWCA and the school’s library.

I posted an announcement on my facebook page, sent  an email to all the wonderful poets who had read at Parachute in recent years, including poet, Matthea Harvey, who reposted my message which got picked up by the Best American Poetry blog, tweeted by them, retweeted by the Poetry Foundation. Within a few weeks books started pouring in from all over the nation and even from as far away as Canada and Spain! They are still arriving. Each day my mailbox is overflowing with books.

A sampling of donated volumes of poetry (photo (c) Amanda Deutch)

 

One of my goals in the writing workshop at the YWCA is to expose teenagers to poets whose voices the teenagers can identify with and perhaps shake up teenage notions of what poetry is and can be. They think all poetry has to rhyme and we are working on letting go of that idea.  We have read Frank O’Hara, Tracie Morris, Muriel Rukeyser, Diane DiPrima, Jennifer L. Knox and Matthea Harvey. “How did he do that? He’s got flow!” said student Maya upon reading Frank O’Hara’s “Steps.” On their own, the girls are reading Tupac Shakur and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café.  In class, we have been writing “celebrity poems” based on chosen pop stars, such as Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj or Lil Wayne. You can read some of these on our virtual magazine, Teenage Fever Magazine  (www.teenagefevermag.tumblr.com)

The Poetry Lending Library project serves at least two distinct purposes: The teenagers get to read books by authors they would not otherwise encounter, and the poets get their books into the hands of new readers they might not otherwise reach. It’s really quite simple: symbiotic activism. The teenagers love the books; real actual “hold-in-your-hand” books. This couldn’t delight me more in an age of kindle, ipad, and nook. The students find the covers of each book we receive to be different and intriguing, and love that all the poems reveal a unique personality and life. While I may or may not be encouraging teenagers to become poets, I’m hopeful that I am fostering a love of poetry, language, and books that will empower them and serve them their entire lives. 

Won’t you take a few minutes to send a copy of your book to us? Would you like to have your books read by at-risk teens in NYC? If so, please send one (or two if you want them to go to the school's permanent collection as well as the after-school's) copy of any or all books you have authored. Feel free to sign it or leave a note for a teen. These books will really be appreciated by the teenagers. And if, through the magic of social media, this reaches you in a far-off place where your books are in a language other than English, send them along anyway. Thank you!

Please send your poetry books to:

Rachel Carson High School
YWCA Room 346
521 West Ave
Brooklyn NY 11224

Truly,

Amanda Deutch
Artistic Director
Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival

http://parachutepoetry.tumblr.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ParachuteFestival
http://parachuteconeyislandfestival.blogspot.com/

Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival is a non-profit, volunteer run organization. We invite you to make financial contributions, which help us keep doing what we are doing.  Every dollar helps us continue to offer free writing workshops for at-risk populations, an annual free literary festival, and projects such as this lending library. You can contribute here.

Acrobatics and Sumptuous Heavens [by Madge McKeithen]

 

photo: copyright Lawrence Schwartzwald

Everywhere people are longing for a deeper life.

Let’s hope some acrobat will come by

And give us a hint how to get into heaven.

Jan Karetnick, Marilyn Nelson, Lizza Rodriguez

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                   

 

 

 

Robert Bly, awarded the 2013 Frost Medal, read from his work to an enthusiastic overflow crowd at the Poetry Society of America’s 103^rd Annual Awards Ceremony hosted by Alice Quinn on April 5th. These closing lines, read toward the end of the evening, from Bly’s “Longing for the Acrobat” echoed Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s citation honoring the first reader, Lizza Rodriguez, the high school student winner of the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Award. Rodriguez and her teacher Jen Karetnick (pictured above with the 2012 Frost Medalist Marilyn Nelson) made the trip from Miami Shores, Fl, for the awards ceremony. Calvocoressi citing lines from Rodriguez’s award-winning poem,

I was dilly dialing

when the phone rang

then I ran out

like red roses 

wrote of her “perfect balance of formal rigor and imaginative acrobatics.” From Lizza Rodriguez’s reading to the last lines of “Wanting Sumptuous Heavens,” as Robert Bly, poet, teacher, preacher, reformer, editor, translator, theorist and champion of the work of many of his contemporaries took us through the sounds – grumbles, summer, thumbs, come, grumbling, comfortable, sumptuous  -- the evening was lively with words and talent and noisy with enthusiastic applause. Hardly a moment’s dip or lull. 

Ted Mathys

Ted Mathys’s poem “Vikings Did Not Have Horns on their Helmets” was the winner of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for a lyric poem that expresses a philosophical or epistemological concern.

Today the exception to the rule

  

that every rule has an exception

violated itself into a bright

metastasis of unfastening

while I rested my head against

aftermath…

In her citation honoring Ted Mathys, Alice Notely wrote, in part, “A said thing is only a said thing – though it may be true –but you can just as easily say the opposite.” Negations and reverses of the most pleasing sort, playful but not only, a poem to share with others, it ends (or perhaps doesn’t), with

 Lightning can strike the same place twice.

Lightning can strike the same place twice.

Elyse Fenton took the red-eye from her home in Portland, Oregon, to read from her manuscript Sweet Insurgent Friday night.

 …but after impact he opened

the door & walked away. Hello

tenacious earth. Sometimes

you have to practice crying uncle

for years to make it stick

Elyse Fenton

 

Of Elyse Fenton’s poems, which won the Alice Fay di Castagnola award for a manuscript-in-progress, Kevin Prufer wrote “they are alive to our historical moment, inspiring us to re-think our place in a constantly shifting political and ethical world.” Her manuscript-in-progress is now a manuscript out for consideration for publication.

Carol Light may have come farther than any of the other winners to attend the awards ceremony, flying in from Rome where she is teaching spring semester to receive the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award for original work, mid-career, without prior substantial recognition.

The sky is a bouquet of old news.

Its gap-toothed vendor was Italian;

his roses unfurl galaxies.

 

If history is a map of courage,

then the heart is made of helium.

 

Carol Light

Her poem “Hertzsprung-Russell” is part of her book Heaven From Steam – twenty-two skies and eighteen yets, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. David Wagoner, citing Carol Light’s work, wrote that she “writes out of the belief that…sound, rhythm, and meaning are of nearly equal importance in a poem…[and that she] is always using formal cadence instead of allowing it to over-control the rhythms of common speech.”

 

The life of the party slits its wrists. Its wrists

  slit their wrists. The wrist of the world

  wears a Patek Philippe Henry Graves

 

Supercomplication. Which is not a wristwatch but a pocket

  watch.

Nick Twemlow

Nick Twemlow’s “The Twenty-Four Complications” is from Palm Trees, the winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Timothy Liu, wrote in the award’s citation of this poet’s “verbal savvy, consequential wordplay, and cultural élan…a poetics that does not eschew the personal over the political or vice versa.”

 

 

 

 

Gray hairs

crowd out the black.

Not one of them

brings me wisdom.

 

Wrinkles

provide no armor.

I still quiver

to anyone's dart.

Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky, whose Collected Poems received the William Carlos Williams Award, spoke her poems to us, directly, looking at us, in a manner that generated a warm, vibrant intimacy. 

 

In the award citation, B. H. Fairchild said, “Ezra Pound noted that poetry severed from music atrophies, and since the earliest poems of her first book, Ring Song, in 1952, Replansky has become the master of a Blakean music radically unfashionable in its devotion to song-like meters…” Before the reading, the crowd included many Naomi Replansky admirers, long familiar with her work and delighted to join in the award’s expression of deep gratitude; after the reading, her fans numbered even more. Her “About Not Writing” is posted on the Poetry Society of America Website along with more complete poems of all of those honored, including those who could not attend the evening’s celebration: Micah Bateman, Greg Wrenn, Paula Bohince, Gary Young, and Lucia Perillo.

Martin Espada

 

Martin Espada, who shares the 2013 Shelley Memorial Award with Lucia Perillo, certainly did not sever the music. He read poems from The Trouble Ball, including “The Playboy Calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” and “Isabel’s Corrido,” with these ending lines.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once

on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.

I kept a snapshot of the wedding; yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

 There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I’d do it again.

 

Strains from this last line resurfaced as Robert Bly read from “Ravens Hiding in a Shoe.”

Robert, you’ve wasted so much of your life

Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you

Do that again? I would, a thousand times.

With this poem, he settled into a conversational, call-and-response reading, the poet of solitude opening out to the community. “Is that true?” he would stop to ask the audience, read another line and then again, “Is that true?” Ted Mathys’s negations and reversals draw close to these lines, also from "Ravens Hiding in a Shoe."

Each sentence we speak to friends means the opposite

As well. Each time, we say, “I trust in God,” it means

God has already abandoned us a thousand times.

The audience’s response was enthusiastic – Yes. Yes. Yes.  to his “Is that true?” and then a prolonged No…in response to his amused query “Am – I – emphasizing – each -- word – too -- much?”

“Like Ezra Pound half a century earlier, Bly has centered himself in poetry and proceeded to radiate his energies out to nearly all corners of the world of letters,” wrote Askold Melnyczuk in his 1988 Partisan Review critique of Bly’s Selected Poems. His work, his many roles defy summation, making Billy Collins' Citation all the more impressive. As he sat to read from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey side-by-side with his daughter Mary holding the microphone, Robert Bly seemed at the heart of all that had gone on in the preceding hours, in the words, the tributes, the audience participation and enthusiasm. More than one person in the audience told me how Robert Bly’s work in poetry and prose had opened the door to poetry for them and led them on to other poets – Rilke, Rumi, Machado, Neruda. Several had attended events at which Robert Bly had read over the years around the country.

With a large number from his family in attendance and a packed room full of admiring poetry readers, Robert Bly read most lines more than once, sometimes repeating parts of lines. We went down into the words with him, into the poem at the word level.  Word by word.

And image by image. 

 

I do love Yeats’s fierceness

As he jumped into a poem,

And that lovely calm in my father’s

Hands, as he buttoned his coat.

                                            “I Have Daughters and I Have Sons" -- Robert Bly

 

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL in 2006 and at the Darien Library in 2009. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Utne Reader, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School and blogs at madgemckeithen.com

New Trilling Essay Talk of the Town [by David Lehman]

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristicslly fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung camupuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity.

That may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Publc Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be cariacatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said John Kelly, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Jacques Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

continue reading here.

"Seattle artist inspires füror" [by Billl Morlin for "Salon"]

<<<
Charles Krafft's ceramics were long thought to be ironic -- until he was exposed as a Holocaust denier

by Bill Morlin

He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” – a gun and dagger.

Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth.

Hundreds of comments about Krafft are being posted on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere, and the art and culture world — particularly in ceramic art circles — are abuzz over the revelations published in The Stranger, a Seattle alternative paper. The headline on that piece was hard to misunderstand:  “Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth.”

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Read the rest of this fascinating post on Salon.

From Cindy Adams's mouth to God's ear

From Cindy Adams's column in today's New York Post (March 5, 2013):

<<<

And mazel tov to the royals. Her future Majesty Kate's lineage was traced back to Moses. Parents Jewish. Mother descended from the Myers family, English 19th-century Jews. Coming down the line on the matriarchal side, rabbinical law sys England's someday sovereign could have a seder at Buckingham.

>>>

Cindy's column (headlined "Eva's Frisky date," because the lead item concerns Eva Longoria and her cat) also contains the assertion that "Miss Kim Kardashian's arse, now larger than her ego, juts out like a shelf" -- and that actress Cynthia Nixon says she has "a TV, but no cable so no reception." -- DL

Harvard expels cheats [by DL]

Some news stories speak for themselves, no editorial comment needed.
Last spring Harvard suspended nearly half of the 279 students who took a government course called "Introduction to Congress" and were caught cheating on the take-home final.
The tip off was a spate of identical answers, down to the same typographical errors, on the test.
Around seventy of the accused were expelled in a decision announced on Friday, February 1.
It took six agonizing months for the top brass to figure out what to do.
A smart lawyer tried to get the kids off the hook by saying that the course deliberately encouraged cheating as an approprate "introduction to Congress" and the workings of government.
Two late-night TV talk show hosts referred to the case, making puns on "sexual congress" and the alleged promiscuity.of college kids.
Sports fans were particulaly displeased with the expulsions, because a number of jocks, under the impression that it was a gut course, were among those who got the ax. The Harvard basketball team is a shell of its former self.
Veritas, on the Harvard shield, is Latin for "truth." There is one deliberately false statement in the above account. Can you tell what it is? -- DL

Ultra Violet Postcards [by Catherine Woodard]

BRINK

The meaning of quiet – those corridors
Knew it well. Softly girls. This building is old,

Mother C lisped up stairs, her wimple
Flaring like a halo. At table, tennis, we twirled spins

like neat habits. A single smash could dismantle
our world. Outside school, a man with a cleft lip

spiced slices of raw mango. Red chilli
burst into our mouth like explosions of sea water.

The heat moved us to shower. We limp-toed
into womanhood in spotless socks,

a generation afraid of bringing things down.
A backyard of bramble and weed was where

we found noise. It wandered knock-kneed
and had a tongue full of pins.

Through this poem, I discovered Anindita Sengupta in a new anthology I will review here tomorrow. “Brink” caught my eye on a flight from Mumbai to New Delhi on New Year’s Eve. I already intended to visit protests there on violence against women. So yes, I was ripe to land on this hinge line of “Brink:” “a generation afraid of bringing things down/ A backyard of bramble and weed was where/we found noise.”

I also admired the poem’s focus on the “meaning of quiet” and the deft insertion of the meaning of unquiet through a table tennis scene: “A single smash could dismantle/ our world.” Just outside the school in that poem, explosions are found, alliteratively and literally, in “spiced slices of raw mango.”

City of Water, Sengupta’s first collection of poems, was published in 2010 and won the Muse India Young Writer award in 2012. She lives in Mumbai and is pictured with her nine-month-old daughter, Amaya.

I love how quickly you can travel the world and the world of ideas on the Internet. I offer a few postcards from my travels after meeting “Brink” on paper.

My first stop was Ultra Violet, a site for contemporary feminism in India that Sengupta founded and edits. I’ve been reading it regularly since my return to New York for its sophisticated coverage of civics and culture and have had a few email exchanges with Sengupta. Ultra Violet reflects her ear and eye as a journalist and poet. She is one of six international journalists recently awarded new media fellowships to report on topics of global health by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Sengupta will focus on maternal and reproductive health as this link explains.

A delightful discovery of my trip to India was the large number of journalists who write poetry or poets who support themselves as journalists. Print journalism, at least for now, remains a robust business in India. As a newspaper reporter for more than two decades before I made poems, I fantasize about more cross-fertilization between poetry and journalism in the United States. Both poets and journalists aspire to compressed truth. I’d love to see more experiments like NewsPoet where a poet spends the day in the newsroom at National Public Radio reflecting on the day’s stories and composes a poem for the night’s broadcast. And I urge journalists to look beyond the usual suspects of government officials, academics and advocates and call poets for quotes. Who would not want to hear what W.S. Merwin or Jorie Graham, or even better their poems, have to say on climate change? A good poem is by technical definition a good sound bite.

Ultra Violet considers issues from political, cultural and practical angles. The poem “Not a Cactus” by Minal Sarosh shared recent billing with astute analysis about needed reforms from a pioneering woman’s rights lawyer. “Our Cities, Ourselves: An Open Letter to Mumbai City Administrators” examines how urban design affects women’s issues. Shilpa Phadke, an Ultra Violet editor, sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, posted her letter and  “Mumbai Rising,” a powerful video below produced at the centre. Phadke is a co-author of the book Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. The book argues that women should have the right to choose to take risks in public space without being harassed. Phadke appeals to Mumbai government officials for better public transit, expanded parks and restaurants and bars open late at night which she argues is not only good for women but for Mumbai’s reputation as a “world class city. Surely you care about international financial investment.”

Like in travel, when you discover an interesting neighborhood, the best way to explore is to just wander around. Ultra Violet is a great place to roam.