Nicole Stellon O'Donnell
On Monday in December the sun rises at 10:40. Red sky. Black clouds.
Among all the slouched backs, curved necks, and notebook-scrawling hands,
only one student notices, a girl, the one writing about the room in which
her mother died. She says, I have never seen a sunrise like that, and twenty-eight
other heads look up from their pens and notebooks. I had never and will
never again read a description of a hospital bed like the one she was writing
at that moment. Years later, she will email to ask if I have that piece she wrote
about her mother, and I will have to tell her I don’t. But this morning, neither
of us can foresee this future small grief. So I stop class while all twenty-nine
line up at the windows to watch the light. Fifty-eight eyes open out onto
snow, the parking lot, the shovel-scraped sidewalk, red brake lights, dull
frosted stop signs. Red sky and burnt clouds. This morning, deep winter,
sunrise comes, hours late, long after the tardy bell and without excuse.
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photograph of Regie Cabico
Regie Cabico, Accidental Poet

“'A poetry slam becomes poetry for the people decided by the people and so you’re changing your idea of what a poem can be because it’s happening live and it becomes a sport,' says Cabico. 'People who find themselves at poetry slams are usually at the end of their rope,' he says. 'And then they find a community and so it opens up so many doors.'”


via SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
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Kaveh Akbar's handwritten translation into Farsi of the final three lines of "katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet."

"When I found harris's poem, I saw myself, I saw the midwest I knew, I saw my own disregard for the interiority of others, I saw my own sloppiness. It’s a poem that performs its own searching, too—you hear the speaker reworking their language, endlessly reprocessing their positions and complicities."
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Apply to the 9th Annual Bread Loaf in Sicily Conference
September 22 to 28, 2019

Offering small, intensive workshops in Erice, a mountaintop town overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Work with poetry facultyGeoffrey Brock and Patrick Phillips to receive feedback on your original poetry or poetry translated into English. Only two spots left - Apply Now!
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