Andrew Motion

In addition to being a poet, Motion also wrote a bio of Keats.
http://www.faber.co.uk/work/john-keats/9780571172283/


http://blog.grdodge.org/category/poetry-fridays/page/4/

Ice
When friends no longer remembered
the reasons we set forth,
I switched between nanny and tartar
driving us on north.

Will you imagine a human hand
welded by ice to wood?
And skin when they chip it off?
I don’t think you should.

By day the appalling loose beauty
of prowling floes:
lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks,
and a thing like a blown rose.

By night the seething hiss
of killers cruising past -
the silence after each fountain-jet,
and our hearts aghast.

Of our journey home and the rest
there is nothing more to say.
I have lived and not yet died.
I have sailed in the Scotia Sea.

Oliver de la Paz
http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/05/28/poet ... Program%29


Last Days

Auto wax, mousse, and AC/DC made us somebody,

and we ascended Fourth Avenue to Angus Young's

jangled guitar, up the one street that headed out of town.

So much for subtlety. A quiet town needs its monarchs,

and we were crowned. My hair — god almighty —

was glorious, shifting with the speed gusts.

A sea of teenagers from the surrounding towns, Payette,

Nyssa, Parma, Vale, we were punks and we were lovely.

The sheen of the newly washed pickups traveled up the hill,

each with its own pomp, though the circumstances took us nowhere.

We'd stop in the parking lot of the mall,

which was too broke for major retail — it gave in to local merchants,

Mel's, Cosmic Connections, Ye Olde Carmel Candy Shoppe,

half a dozen stores with the shelf-life of milk.

The lot swelled with liquor and cigarette smoke,

and we waited for Johnnie Dominguez, whose love for Lonnie Maeda

could only be cliché, to pull down his suspenders,

leave his hat in the cab, and brawl with Ernesto Mendez. The fight

was our extravagance. We'd preen with our letter-jackets

emblazoned with pins, our stitched chevrons, tassels aplenty.

We knew it was coming because the halls of the high-school

hissed with pressurization. So when Johnnie, close-fisted,

pounded Ernie until his cheek was pitted with gravel

from where he fell, face down, we felt the valves rattle from release.

And we ran after the siren lights broke the cool, laminar orbits of our youth.

We gunned our engines and squealed back down Fourth,

careening on adrenaline and rock and roll. We were inertia, reflex.

We were the dumbest movie, pointless, given to hyperbole.

As we rounded back up the hill, we saw Johnnie

and Lonnie, lips, blouse, hand, thigh, a spasm of desperate love.

Ernie, speechless, leaning against the hood of a squad car.

All the young cruisers' faces like gas flames in the metallic

rebound of their cars. How flared we were, the chrome bumpers

mirroring our confidence, our quintessential delinquency. How allegro.

How clenched. The red and blue spirals were our regalia.

The evening, bruise-black at the edge of the hill.

Oliver de la Paz, from "Requiem for the Orchard" (University of Akron Press, $14.95)

"the shelf-life of milk" Wonderful!

GaryG48 wrote:"the shelf-life of milk" Wonderful!

I agree! Have a look at the next one. I really love this one.

Matthew Dickman
http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/06/04/2010 ... Program%29

I gota say, this is my favorite festival poet so far, or favorite poem, so far, by a festival poet. I will be sure to check Matthew Dickman out when I go in Octorber.


The Mysterious Human Heart by Matthew Dickman
If I could, I would send this to you, whoever you are:

The Mysterious Human Heart

The produce in New York is really just produce, oranges
and cabbage, celery and beets, pomegranates
with their hundred seeds, carrots and honey,
walnuts and thirteen varieties of apples.
On Monday morning I will walk down
to the market with my heart inside me, mysterious,
something I will never get to hold
in my hands, something I will never understand.
Not like the apricots and potatoes, the albino
asparagus wrapped in damp paper towels, their tips
like the spark of a match, the bunches of daisies, almost more
a weed than a flower, the clementine,
the sausage links and chicken hung
in the window, facing the street where my heart is president
of the Association for Random Desire, a series
of complex yeas and nays,
where I pick up the plantain, the ginger root, the sprig
of cilantro that makes me human, makes me
a citizen with the right to vote, to bear arms, the right
to assemble and fall in love.

BOB HICOK
http://blog.grdodge.org/2010/07/16/2010 ... Program%29


There’s a superstition in some cultures that if you praise anyone or anything too much, proclaim your love or express your happiness too much, they will be snatched away. What at first appears as cynicism in some of Bob Hicok’s poems might be remnants of a similar wariness. Examined more closely, even a poem with as brutally funny a title as “Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window” threatens to break out into a hymn of praise. But the impulse is checked, as if some learned reluctance held the speaker back from being too much of an ecstatic.

That was great! Thanks for sharing!

WhimsicalWonder wrote:That was great! Thanks for sharing!

This poet will be at the Dodge Poetry Fest in NJ this fall. I already have my hotel room and ticket!

I have let this go unattended for too long, but am back on the job now. I will get something posted about each of the 2010 Festival Poets over the next several weeks. I have been checking the links I've post for each poet. They do not seem to be working. I am in the process of going back in to correct or delete them.

TAALAM ACEY
Born in Newark, Taalam Acey has recorded more than a dozen CDs and has authored four books including Excellent Exposure and Troubled Soul Refinery. He has performed and spoken at schools and venues throughout the world including the Essence Music Festival and his work has been featured in several films. Taalam currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.