What Is Poetry Just Kidding I Know You Know

A selection of interviews and rare photos from the legendary St. Mark's Poetry Project for its 50th anniversary season.

The question of the body’s place in language has enduring significance. Is there a more equivalent imprint on the language of our life than our own bodies? The Body In Language: An Anthology collects an extraordinary range of voices—including writers, artists, performers, and healing practitioners—to present new perspectives on the body in art by exploring the body in language. The selves/cells we release in creativity embody our fundamental being. Can we activate our connective senses to better understand how others make others?

Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well- known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry’s distinctive features and explore how this "outsider" form can offer a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice offers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever. —from How I Became One of the Invisible Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would. As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, “You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department.” Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

-Culled from Dia Art Foundation's -Readings in Contemporary Poetry- series, this anthology includes ninety-four poets who have participated in the reading series from 2010 to 2016. Edited by poet and author Vincent Katz, the book stresses the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice, highlighting commonalities among poets and placing their diverse voices in conversation with one another---

Charli Rae Warren doesn’t plan on striking it rich as the owner of an independent bookstore in Hazel Rock, Texas—especially one with a pink armadillo as its mascot. But when an ingenious advertising campaign puts her business on the map, it ropes in some deadly publicity . . . Charli can’t believe writer Lucy Barton has agreed to promote her latest Midnight Poet Society novel at The Book Barn Princess—or that there’s only a week-and-a-half to prepare for the signing. It’s all because of The Book Seekers, a smartphone app created by her cousin Jamal exclusively for Charli’s bookstore, which sends fans on a virtual scavenger hunt around town for a chance to meet the bestselling author. But as soon as it goes live, people turn up dead . . . Someone’s using The Book Seekers to track victims and copycat the fictional Midnight Poet Society homicides, and horrified locals suspect Jamal could be the mastermind behind the crimes. While Charli readies the Barn for a stampede of new customers, it’ll take true grit to shelve the culprit before her brainy cousin gets locked behind bars, Ms. Barton backs out of the visit, and she finds herself up a creek—with a serial killer holding the paddle!

There comes a time in all our lives when we listen to and need the words, special poems, song lyrics, and greeting cards that come from a published poet and deep within someone else’s psyche. We can use these to wish someone in our lives a happy birthday or anniversary, and things and wishes such as the way someone makes you feel as a lover, or how proud we are to have a loved one in our lives. If you’re looking for a collection of poetry to help you wish congratulations, Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Father’s Day, or congratulations on your new baby, Shelley J. Madkins offers the perfect collection of poetry for you. and, if you are a songwriter and you would like to use some of my poems for songs that you are going to use on your album you can for a small fee. About the Author Shelley J. Madkins has four paralegal diplomas: one is an associate degree, two are career diplomas, and one is a certification from Webster University. Madkins also has two other career diplomas: one in criminal justice, and another in bookkeeping and accounting. Madkins holds a BA in legal studies, and she is working on her master’s degree in science in criminal justice.