The Poets on Poets project is an audio archive that testifies to the continued importance of Romanticism in the contemporary poetry world. The premise of the collection is simple: we have asked practicing poets from around the world to read a Romantic-period poem that they particularly admire and that has influenced the way in which they think about their craft. The results are gathered here.
From Robert Frost to T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes to J.R.R. Tolkien, a collection of recordings of various authors reading their work.
San Diego Reader | Tie This Guy Up, Make Sure He Stays at SDSU - Thomas Lux, under whose wing I am privileged to have studied, interviews Ilya Kaminsky, a poet from Odessa. My girlfriend recently had the pleasure of attending Kaminsky’s class at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and like Lux, she raved about him.
I love his answer to how poetry affects the reader.
The Lesson
I was young when my father called me to the back door
to show me the brain of the white-tailed deer
he had shot and had been flaying
in the garage. He had hacksawed off
the skull’s cap to save the antlers, which he would nail,
once the little flap of hide had peeled away,
beside the others on the wall. The brain
was smallish, wrinkled, gelatin; it oozed
into the board he’d laid it on. He touched it lightly
with his hunting knife, and caused a little slit
to open around the knife’s tip. I wondered
if anything remained: the detailed sketches
of each rise and crevice of the hills; the language
of scent and gesture; the image of my father
as he raised his gun and fired. We stood
in silence, the mute brain congealing between us,
my father holding it toward me as if to say,
Look, son, this is the world.
