In their works, artists create fertile grounds in which human freedom can thrive, rooted always in the individual rather than in institutions, churches, or national states. While each artist may undertake their journey differently in relation to their awareness of Plato’s chariot allegory and Nietzsche’s metamorphoses of the spirit—they, as their own masters, are driven to make their work from inner necessity, a condition that embraces both feeling and thought, held together by the embracing unity of freedom.
The opening line of Patricia Spears Jones’s elegy for Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet and journalist Claribel Alegría, who died in 2018, envisions a poet who “marked her days with rage & love.” Alegría is thus a model for Spears Jones’s fifth collection, The Beloved Community, which is similarly animated by such “rage and love,” as the poet navigates with grace and grief the “blood, blame, and curses” (“Fred Hampton Born This Day”) of American history and its impacts, both nationally and personally felt, in the present day.
My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While […]
Sara Deniz Akant.
There’s something special these days about a phone call. A particular kind of listening happens when you’re not watching faces on a screen or coping with the internet connection but instead focusing just on the voice on the other end of the line. Sara Deniz Akant is a poet whose ear is especially attuned to disembodied voices, whether they be documents from long ago or the memory of her mother’s singing.
As a result, so many of Akant’s poems feel alive with multiple speakers, though they are playfully mysterious characters. Her collection Parades