The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “poetry”

An Anthem Against Silence: Amanda Palmer Reads Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Piercing and Prescient 1914 Protest Poem
An Anthem Against Silence: Amanda Palmer Reads Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Piercing and Prescient 1914 Protest Poem

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.”

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Denise Levertov on Making Art Amid Chaos and the Artist’s Task to Awaken Society’s Sleepers
Denise Levertov on Making Art Amid Chaos and the Artist’s Task to Awaken Society’s Sleepers

“I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”

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Eileen Myles Reads “For My Rampant Muse, For Her”
Eileen Myles Reads “For My Rampant Muse, For Her”

“I could fall for lamp-light…”

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Dissident Poet Boris Pasternak on Aloneness and Why We Make Art
Dissident Poet Boris Pasternak on Aloneness and Why We Make Art

“A book is nothing but a cube of hot, smoking conscience.”

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Leonard Cohen on Moonlight, the Mystique of Creativity, His Influences, and Why He Loves It When People Cover His Songs
Leonard Cohen on Moonlight, the Mystique of Creativity, His Influences, and Why He Loves It When People Cover His Songs

“It’s also very difficult to untangle influences because you represent the sum of everything you’ve seen or heard or experienced.”

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The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

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Adrienne Rich Reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
Adrienne Rich Reads “What Kind of Times Are These”

“In times like these to have you listen at all, it’s necessary to talk about trees.”

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Patti Smith on Listening to the Creative Impulse and the Crucial Difference Between Writing Poetry and Songwriting
Patti Smith on Listening to the Creative Impulse and the Crucial Difference Between Writing Poetry and Songwriting

“In times of strife, we have our imagination, we have our creative impulse, which are things that are more important than material things. They are the things that we should magnify.”

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Multivocality, Polyphony, Gumbo Yaya: Elizabeth Alexander, Barack Obama’s Inaugural Poet, on the Power of Poetry in Moments of Powerlessness
Multivocality, Polyphony, Gumbo Yaya: Elizabeth Alexander, Barack Obama’s Inaugural Poet, on the Power of Poetry in Moments of Powerlessness

“We just have to really, really, really dust ourselves off and do our work. That’s all there is to it — love each other, do your work.”

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Finding Poetry in Other Lives: James Baldwin on Shakespeare, Language as a Tool of Love, and the Poet’s Responsibility to a Divided Society
Finding Poetry in Other Lives: James Baldwin on Shakespeare, Language as a Tool of Love, and the Poet’s Responsibility to a Divided Society

“The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing… that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

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