Uncategorized | May 31, 2018

by Sherell Barbee, TMR Editorial Assistant

The last two months at TMR have been busy: we released our spring issue; our audio team conducted an interview with TMR Associate Editor Evelyn Somers; we heard Zadie Smith speak at Columbia’s third annual Unbound Book Festival;  we announced the winners of our 2018 Miller Audio Prize; we published new Poems of the Week from Mikko Harvey, Jessica Ankeny, Mitchell Jacobs, Olivia Gatwood, Jacques J. Rancourt, Corey Van Landingham, H. R. Webster, Derek N. Otsuji, and Amie Whittemore; and it is finally warm enough for us to hang up our winter coats for good.

This has been an exciting time for poetry, too. We were given many reasons to celebrate April’s National Poetry Month this year: Frank Bidart received a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; Kendrick Lamar sparked much conversation and sales by earning a Pulitzer Prize in music for his latest album DAMN.; you can now hear Eve Ewing herself read poetry and prose from Electric Arches on Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, and Audible; Rita Dove announced that she will begin working as the New York Times Magazine’s poetry editor this summer (check out her past TMR Poem of the Week here); and our friends over at The Rumpus celebrated #NationalPoetryMonth by publishing new poems daily, including two poems from past TMR Poem of the Week contributor Ruth Awad. This month, Kayo Chingonyi won the International Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut poetry collection, and U. S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith delivered a lecture about the way poetry can “guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.”

Get a sneak peek at our new Spring issue here

As May comes to a close, we want to remember 10 poems from our Poem of the Week feature, highlighting one poem per year, from the past 10 years:

1. Andy Sia: At age 10, I get a bad haircut (2017)
   

   “From the orders of my mother, no less. I watch
   the barber chop me up, my little pieces, all innocent
   and unmanageable, falling and flying around the room…”
   

2. Phillip B. Williams: “The Field” (2016)
   

   “The battered field is hateful without remorse,
   is as seductive as what is familiar: a wild horse
   who long ceased being horse, had become beauty itself…”
   

3. Regina DiPerna: “Teeth” (2015)
   

   “mouthful, watch me
   use my jaw as a knife…”
   

4. Janice N. Harrington: “Topoanalysis” (2014)
   

   “This is his childhood. This is Goshen.
   This is the room of play and prayer and griddle cakes,
   where women scrubbed brown babes in wooden tubs…”
   

5. Darren Morris: “Fear of the Either/Or” (2013)
   

   “The neighbors’ new baby is home now
   from its little miracle, and we go by,
   obligatory, with our skin-of-lion blanket…”
   

6. Monica Ferrell: “Planet” (2012)
   

   “You’re alive.  You stumble from the spaceship’s hull
   Testing your radio…it gives a promising fuzz,
   But the mother-craft does not return your call…”
   

7. Victoria Chang: “Edward Hopper’s Conference at Night” (2011)
   

   “The man sitting on the desk seems to have no eyes or they are closed or they
   have
   been dug out the man sitting on the table sits in a way of a boss or perhaps he
   wants…”
   

8. Jason Koo: “Do You Hear Me, Poison Ivy?” (2010)
   

   “It is sweet to kiss the ear of your kitty
   as he sleeps. Sweet to pull the hi-top sneakers
   off your girlfriend’s feet as she sleeps.
   Sweet to discover she is not completely asleep…”
   

9. Bob Hicok: “In the future, the future will be the past” (2009)
   

   “A woman screamed
   during the protest between supporters…”
   

10. Joanne Diaz: “Syringe” (2008)
    

    “Perhaps you’ve always known her obvious desire,
    her thirst for more, then more: the way she’d wish
    for more kissing after the warmth of sex…”