The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/poetry/page/2/)
Although music and art don’t have magical healing powers (I’m the sort of person who tends to frown upon the sometimes simplistic view of art as therapy), I have often found that they unblock emotions that the grind of daily life forces me to suppress out of the necessity to function in the world.
One common idea flowed through everything he wrote: an absolute reverence for the world around him, as threatened and diminished as it may be from machinations of our own device.
The National Poetry Series chose Cornell alumnus author Benjamin Garcia ’11 as one of five winners in a prestigious competition that grants awardees a chance at publication. His book Thrown in the Throat was chosen by poet Kazim Ali, and will be published next fall.
Since coming to Cornell, Culler has written and edited a total of 16 books; over 200 articles, essays, and translations. He has also been awarded multiple fellowships and was elected a fellow at renowned humanities research institutes such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of this books, “Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction”, has been translated into 27 languages worldwide.
The so-called “Confessional” school of poetry that emerged in the 1950s might have been an early precursor of this peculiarly American narcissism.
Claudia Rankine, award-winning poet and author, will be doing a live reading of poetry on campus April 18th. Tickets will be free at the Willard Straight Hall Box Office starting March 1st.
When we’re visiting a place most of us need a reminder that it exists apart from our visiting perspectives, that the visitor’s center doesn’t include event listings for too-early funerals because of cancer or lung disease or opioid overdoses, and that no visit or poem or song will every fully convey what it is like to pin your life to a place.
While people worldwide were mourning Mary Oliver’s death, I was at home celebrating my 20th birthday. I saw the news scrolling through Tumblr, the platform that had first made me fall in love with her work at the age of 11. You’ve probably seen the lines “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” on Facebook or Twitter or staring down at you accusingly from your middle school English teacher’s classroom wall. However, although Oliver’s work regularly appears on sites like Pinterest, it doesn’t quite translate to social media in the same, trite way as you might think at first glance. Last semester, I wrote a column criticizing Instapoets like Rupi Kaur for sacrificing depth and poetic language for accessibility in order to gain Internet stardom.
Gibson’s poems articulated the confusion about identity, trauma and mental health issues faced by many members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Recently, as I was perusing the poetry section of a Barnes and Noble, I was surprised to come across a section containing volumes by Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, r. h. sin, and the like. My surprise was not at seeing these collections standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those by Keats and Lorca but at the fact that the sight so resembled the shelves of poetry I’d seen a few weeks earlier at an Anthropologie. These “Instapoets,” as they’ve been called, seem to be everywhere, like a plague of clichés, unpunctuated verse, and ill-timed line breaks. These poets have huge social media followings — take Kaur, for example, who with 1.5 million Instagram followers seems to be the most popular. Kaur first garnered attention when she posted a picture on Instagram of herself in bed on her period, menstrual stains on her pants and bedsheets.