BOA Blog

Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre,  part of the English Department at Oxford Brookes University, will tell you it has four main objectives. These include promoting contemporary poetry locally and to assist in the connection and correspondence between poets. The Centre's website and newsletter chooses a poem/poet every week to praise and "publish." This week, they made a great decision in sharing with the reading community the poem "Big Band Theory" by Sharon Bryan. Bryan's book Sharp Stars, published by BOA Editions, won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2009.

This week, to celebrate National Poetry Month, G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher will be releasing one post a day discussing their collaborative effort in Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Just like their poetry collection came to life through an email exchange, so does this discussion, which artfully discusses the question, "Can reading and writing be public/collective/collaborative acts?"  The "fantasy" of originality and the "Romantic I" is also contended, after which Gallaher leaves us with the statement that "all writing is collaborative.  One collaborates with the world. The whole article can be read here.

In a thoughtful and probing interview, Rachel Cole Dalamangas asks Joanna Howard, author of On the Winding Stair, a broad range of questions that cover the details of her work, her writing process, and the inspiration that fuels her wild imagination: In addition to the beauty of ruin and decadence, I can't ignore the possibility of a social commentary that particularly reminds me of Virginia Woolf's association in A Room of One's Own with poverty and nourishment to the imagination (or lack thereof).  In a world and an economy where most of us have to spend most of our time...

Wyn Cooper's Chaos is the New Calm and Keetje Kuipers' Beautiful in the Mouth were recently reviewed in the Midtown Review.  These reviews compare poetry to tweets, albeit the "much more complex, resonant, and luxuriant to the ear" version of tweets or status updates, in an attempt to encourage readers to turn to p0etry in the age of shortened attention spans. The review of Cooper's poems highlights the sonic quality of his book, which "resounds deliciously" and "lingers on the tongue."  These poems are recommended as a "fine choice to begin your foray into the pleasures of poetry" that you...

Photograph by Betsy Dougherty Keetje Kuipers, winner of the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Award, discusses the origins of her poem “4th of July,” which appeared in her book Beautiful in the Mouth, for Brian Brodeur’s blog How a Poem Happens. In the interview, Keetje not only shares with readers the inspiration behind the poem but also insights into her own writing process: “Because I often write in my head as I'm driving or hiking, sound and musicality are very present and motivating factors as I compose. Because I also consider almost all of my work as coming out of the...