Poetry
The Bruce Springsteen of American Poetry
Robert Pinsky, America’s preeminent Man of Letters, talks with Chapter 16 prior to his Chattanooga appearance next week
by Pablo Tanguay
February 2, 2012 Poet, translator, critic, professor: these are former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s day jobs. After hours, he also writes the poetry column for Slate, appears on television shows like The Simpsons and The Colbert Report, performs with jazz bands, and has shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen. If America can claim a Public Man of Letters, Pinsky is it. He will give a free public lecture, “The Value of the Arts and Humanities in Education and Society,” sponsored by the University of Tennessee and the Benwood Foundation in Chattanooga, on February 7 at 7 p.m. in the Roland Hayes Auditorium of the UTC Fine Arts Building. The event is free and open to the public.
Published Thursday, 2 February 2012
A Lifelong Task
Poet Alicia Ostriker talks to Chapter 16 about wrestling with literary and cultural tradition
by Maria Browning
January 23, 2012 An author of both groundbreaking criticism and acclaimed poetry, Alicia Ostriker has devoted much of her work to a feminist transformation of literary and cultural tradition. Whether arguing for recognition of women’s poetry as a genre in its own right or recasting the stories of the Bible from a feminist perspective, Ostriker is a radical with a deep respect for her roots. Ostriker will read from her work on January 26 at 7 p.m. in Buttrick Hall on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville.
Published Monday, 23 January 2012
“Rhythm of Workers in the House”
by Georganne Harmon
January 11, 2011 Georganne Harmon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where she and her husband now make their home. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Pearl, Poem, Appalachian Voices, New Millennium Writings, Maypop, Slant, and others, and she has been the recipient of six awards by the Tennessee Writers Alliance and Tennessee Mountain Writers. A longtime teacher, Harmon conducts writing workshops for young people and adults. Italy, a second homeland to which she returns often, forms a part of her landscape. We Will Have Ghosts is her first book.
Published Wednesday, 11 January 2012
“This Brilliant Light Around the Corner”
Poets and writers around the country consider the poetic legacy of Eleanor Ross Taylor, who died last weekend at age ninety-one
by Margaret Renkl
January 6, 2012 In honor of the achievements of Eleanor Ross Taylor, and to mark her passing last Friday, Chapter 16 contacted poets and novelists around the country to ask for their impressions of a writer who spent much of her literary life in the shadow of her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Peter Taylor, but who quietly continued her own work with passion and dedication during their fifty-one years together—and for more than a decade beyond his death. Through the comments of Betty Adcock, Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Mark Jarman, Don Share, Dave Smith, and R.T. Smith, what emerges is a collaborative portrait of a woman who was quiet, modest, and gentle but whose poems were uncompromising, sharp, and (in a word that comes up again and again) fierce.
Published Friday, 6 January 2012
The Busy Memphian
Author and bookseller Corey Mesler had a very full year
by Maria Browning
December 14, 2011 With four new books published in 2011, including two short-story collections (Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About), a novel (Gardner Remembers) and a volume of poetry (Before the Great Troubling), Memphis author and bookseller Corey Mesler has had a very busy year. Chapter 16 surveys the wealth of his words.
Published Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Toward What? Away From What?
A poet alone in Costa Rica considers the nature of art—and loneliness
by Charlotte Pence
December 5, 2011 This type of travel is not meant to soothe; it’s not like a seven-day cruise where the aim is to make sure you never feel lost, unsure, or in want. This travel is about want. About loneliness. About insecurity. About all those things that go into the poems that stay with you, the ones that risk and surprise, that ache to be written, and that talk back to you on the page.
Published Monday, 5 December 2011
“Weaves a Clear Night”
An award-winning poem in seventeen sections by Chapter 16's Charlotte Pence
by Charlotte Pence
November 29, 2011 Set in modern-day Appalachia, Charlotte Pence’s new chapbook—Weaves a Clear Night, winner of the 2011 Flying Trout Press Chapbook Prize—recasts the myths surrounding Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus. Lyrical, meditative, and deeply sensual, the poems follow the emotional isolation of a woman poised between two men, neither of whom can be a part of her daily life. Despite the absence of the lover and the husband, their presence surrounds her.
Published Tuesday, 29 November 2011
A License to Lie
Internationally acclaimed South African poet Antjie Krog talks with Chapter 16 about the essential instability of the first-person voice
by Charlotte Pence
November 11, 2011 Internationally acclaimed journalist, poet, and playwright Antjie Krog was born into a family of Afrikaner writers and grew up on a farm within a conservative Afrikaans-speaking community. She published her first book at age seventeen and since then has continued to write groundbreaking work about South African injustices. On November 15 and 16, she will give a lecture and a poetry reading in Memphis at Rhodes College. Both events are free and open to the public.
Published Friday, 11 November 2011
"New Heavens, New Earth"
by Melissa Range
November 4, 2011 Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, was a finalist for the 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, New England Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a “Discovery” / The Nation prize, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri. “New Heavens, New Earth” originally appeared in Poetry London in 2006. Range will give a reading at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville on November 7 at 7 p.m. She will also appear (with Darius Antwan Stewart and Clay Matthews) at Rogers-Stout Hall on the campus of East Tennessee State University on November 8 at 7 p.m.
Published Friday, 4 November 2011
"After 42 Years"
Libyan-born poet Khaled Mattawa considers the death of Gaddafi
by Khaled Mattawa
October 26, 2011 When Muammar Gaddafi's forces took over Libya, Khaled Mattawa was thirteen. Now the acclaimed poet and translator (and a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga) considers the death of the dictator:
Published Wednesday, 26 October 2011
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