Poems for Poem in Your Pocket Day
Poem in your Pocket Day is tomorrow (April 24th), and you can celebrate by carrying your favorite poem with you and sharing it with others. In celebration of this day, we’ve asked a few poets to share one of their favorite poems with us.
Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp is the author of The Dailiness (2013) and This Business of Wisdom (2010) and editor of the poetry blog Which Silk Shirt. Each Sunday, she hosts Audio Saucepan, a global music/poetry program on Santa Fe Public Radio. She guest edited WLT’s special section on international jazz poetry in the March 2011 issue. “Letter to Baghdad” begins her manuscript-in-progress, One Hundred Hungers. In 2012 she received the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for another poem from this project. To learn more, visit www.laurencamp.com.
Camp’s selection: “The Widening” by Stephen Dunn
“I’ve got Stephen Dunn’s poem “The Widening” in mind today. I’m about to take it to my class to discuss. I like how courageous he is about thinking things out in a poem —revealing the average realities, the less than perfect.”
Yahia Lababidi
Egyptian American Yahia Lababidi is the author of a poetry collection, Fever Dreams, an essay collection,Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing, and a collection of aphorisms, Signposts to Elsewhere. Lababidi’s work has appeared in several anthologies and been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, Slovak, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, and Italian. His latest project, The Artist as Mystic, is a collaboration between himself and aphorist Alex Stein, in which they explore the lives and art of ecstatic poets.
Lababidi’s selection: “Ars Poetica?” by Czesław Miłosz
“The poem I return to, again and again, and wish I’d written, and speaks me better than myself is “Ars Poetica?” by Czesław Miłosz. Here I am lending it my breath to know it better: https://soundcloud.com/yahia-lababidi/ars-poetica-by-czeslaw-milosz.”
Hélène Cardona
Hélène Cardona is a poet, linguist, translator, and actress. Her most recent book is Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry, 2013). She is the author of The Astonished Universe (Red Hen Press, 2006) and the forthcoming Life in Suspension. She also writes children’s stories and co-wrote with John FitzGerald the screenplay Primate, based on his novel. She has taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount, translated for the Canadian Embassy and the NEA, attended the Universidad Menéndez Pelayo, Spain, and the Sorbonne in Paris, where she earned a master’s degree in American literature. She has received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía and has been widely published in journals and anthologies, notably Washington Square, The Warwick Review, Dublin Review of Books, Irish Literary Times, Periódico de Poesía, World Literature Today, and Poetry International.
To learn more about Cardona, visit https://www.pen.org/helene-cardona.
Cardona’s selection: “Leopard” by John FitzGerald
“I love the rhythm of this poem, its ferociousness, its humor, the play of sounds. The persona of the leopard is seductive yet lethal, superbly rendered.”
