Category Archives: Poetry

“Archipelagos” – Poem by Jamaican American Poet Geoffrey Philp

18 Sunday Feb 2024

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Poetry

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Jamaican American Poet Geoffrey Philp
Photo Credit: Vanessa Diaz / National Library of Jamaica

My Poetry Corner February 2024 features the title poem “Archipelagos” from the poetry collection Archipelagos by poet and novelist Geoffrey Philp, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). Born in 1958 in Kingston, Jamaica, Philp left the Caribbean Island nation in 1979 to attend the Miami Dade College in the United States. After graduation, he studied Caribbean, African, and African American literature. As a James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami, he studied poetry with Kamau Brathwaite and fiction with George Lamming.

Philp is the author of seven books of poetry, two books of short stories, a novel, and two children’s books. In 2022, he was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for outstanding merit in literature. That same year, he also received the Marcus Garvey Award for Excellence in Education. A retired Miami Dade College professor, he lives in Miami, Florida.

The publisher Peepal Tree Press describes Philp’s poetry collection Archipelagos as “a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean…. Philp’s powerful and elegant poems span past and present and make it very clear that there cannot be a moral response to the climate crisis that is not also embedded in the struggle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and the power of global capitalism—the missions of the West that always had and still have at their heart the ideology of white supremacy and a capitalism endlessly voracious for the world’s human and natural resources.”

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“In a Time of Peace” – Poem by Ukrainian American Poet Ilya Kaminsky

21 Sunday Jan 2024

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Ukrainian American Poet Ilya Kaminsky
Poet’s Official Website (Photo Courtesy Georgia Tech, 2022)

My Poetry Corner January 2024 features the poem “In a Time of Peace” from the poetry collection Deaf Republic (USA, 2019) by Ilya Kaminsky, an award-winning poet who was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2023. Such literary recognition earned him a position at the Lewis Center for the Art’s Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he now lives with his wife.

Born in 1977 in Odessa—in what was then the Soviet Union, now Ukraine—he was sixteen years old when his family was granted political asylum in the United States, settling in Rochester, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and a Juris Doctor law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of Law (now UC Law San Francisco). After a career as a law clerk in San Francisco, the success of his debut poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa (2004), brought new opportunities of teaching creative writing and poetry in both undergraduate and MFA programs.

Kaminsky’s award-winning poetry collection Deaf Republic is structured as a two-act play set in the military occupied fictional town of Vasenka. The narrative begins with the tragic opening scene in “Gunshot.” While breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills Petya, a young deaf boy enjoying a puppet show in the town’s square. The gunshot renders the entire town deaf (p. 11): The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.

In “Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins” (p. 14), the boy’s dead body still lies in the square. Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers. / In the name of Petya, we refuse…. / By eleven a.m., arrests begin. / Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens…. // In the ears of the town, snow falls.

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“The Orbis Spike, 1610” – Poem by Trinidadian Poet Jennifer Rahim

19 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by in Poetry

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Trinidadian Poet Jennifer Rahim (1963-2023)
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

My Poetry Corner November 2023 features the poem “The Orbis Spike, 1610” by Jennifer Rahim from her poetry collection Sanctuaries of Invention (UK, 2021). Born in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad in 1963, Jennifer Rahim was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. She held a BA (1987) and PhD (1993) in English Literature, and an MA in Theology (2016). After joining the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 1997 as a lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts, she went on to teach a range of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including creative writing, literary criticism, and feminist theory. She died unexpectedly in March 2023, leaving behind a substantial body of published work.

Most of the poems in Rahim’s collection were written during the Covid-19 lockdown and a state of emergency in Trinidad. Her poems address the nature of time, place, and mass death. In “Gone Viral,” she notes in the opening lines (p. 18):

Some words return to haunt us at the root.
The world reels from an underrated flu – gone viral,
as when a presidential gaffe becomes a kind of math.
Exponential: Many people will die who have never died before.

She recalls, too, in the opening verse of “Survival” (p. 19):

Any number of days is one too many
when home is no safe haven against the death
that roams neighborhood streets,
coughs on a public bus,
reaches for toothpaste on a grocery shelf,
jogs by in less friendly parks. . .
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“Treasure” – Poem by American Poet Marilyn Kallet

22 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Poetry

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American Poet Marilyn Kallet
Photo Credit: Poet’s Official Website

My Poetry Corner October 2023 features the poem “Treasure” from the poetry collection Even When We Sleep (USA, 2022) by Marilyn Kallet, a poet, writer, and educator. She served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate from June 2018 to July 2020. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Marilyn grew up in New York as a child. She attended Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she earned a B.A. in English and French in 1968. She also attended Sorbonne Université in Paris, France, where she received a degree in Cours de Civilisation (1967). Later, she received her M.A. (1976) and her Ph.D. (1978) in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

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Poem “Ears of Dew” by Brazilian Poet Fabrício Carpinejar

17 Sunday Sep 2023

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Brazilian Poet Fabrício Carpinejar
Photo Credit: Rodrigo Rocha

My Poetry Corner September 2023 features the poem “Ears of Dew” (Ouvidos de Orvalho) by Brazilian poet, writer, journalist, and columnist Fabrício Carpinejar from his award-winning 2002 poetry collection Biography of A Tree (Biografia de Uma Árvore).Born in 1972 in Caixas do Sul in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, he is the third of four children of the poets Maria Carpi and Carlos Nejar. At nine years old, after his parents separated, he was raised by his mother.

Growing up in a home with a large library, the young Fabrício was free to explore any book that aroused his interest. “At 7 years old I was already a poet. I have always been excessively distracted,” Carpinejar told journalist Marcio Renato dos Santos during an interview for the Public Library of Paraná in August 2017. “Imagine, I am the son of two poets, so at home the language was metaphor. We spoke in metaphors, in figures of speech. I see people speaking objectively, but that’s not my idiom. I was raised in another environment. And I’ve always been a basement child, a tree child. There are children who have pets, I had a tree. A plum tree, lived in it, it was mine and no other brother could climb it. It was where I hid to cry, when I was angry, etc. This is a poetic distraction. So I’ve always been weird. And weirdness is a poetic gift.”

The blossoming poet moved to Porto Alegre, the state capital, where he studied journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, graduating in 1995. Upon launching his first book of poetry in 1998, he began signing his name as Carpinejar, the combination of his parents’ surnames. In 2002, following the success of his first four poetry collections, he became a master in Brazilian Literature at his alma mater.

Set in the year 2045, Carpinejar’s fourth poetry collection Biography of A Tree begins on his 73rd birthday when he settles his accounts with God. “It’s an intimate apocalypse,” he told Rogério Eduardo Alves during an interview for the Folha de S. Paulo in September 2002.  “The poetry [in the collection] is the ear of the tree, the ear of the dew, the hearing of hesitations and small defeats. God does not speak; man fills his silence and squanders his name to relieve himself of his own judgment. I combat the easy idea of transcendence in Brazilian poetry. God appears in the book in the second person and always in lower case, in direct treatment, shoulder to shoulder. In the end, God is fired for just cause. To be fired is the contemporary and possible death of God, an evolution of death described by Nietzsche. To fire God is like taking away his market functionality, the productivity of his days, his guardianship over our destiny.”

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“Betty” – Poem by Caribbean Poet Ian McDonald

20 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by in Poetry

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Caribbean (Trinidad/Guyana) Poet Ian McDonald
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

My Poetry Corner August 2023 features the poem “Betty” by Ian McDonald from his poetry collection New and Collected Poems 1957-2017 (UK, 2018). Born in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad in 1933, Ian McDonald is a poet, novelist, dramatist, and non-fiction writer. After moving to then British Guiana in 1955, he made his home there until his eighties when he migrated to Canada to be close to his children and grandchildren.

Born into a white family of power and privilege, the young Ian fell in love with literature and writing as a schoolboy. In 1955, after graduating from Cambridge University in England with a Bachelor of Arts Honors Degree in History, he began working with Bookers Ltd., then owners of the British Guiana sugar estates/plantations, where he rose to the position of Director of Marketing & Administration. When the company was nationalized in 1976, McDonald remained as the Administrative Director of the newly formed Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) until his retirement in 1999. Following his retirement, he spent the next eight years (2000-2007) as the CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean, located in Georgetown, Guyana.

McDonald’s contributions to the development and promotion of Guyanese and Caribbean literature, theater, and sports are impressive and memorable. How did he ever find time to write poetry? In an article “A Love of Poetry” for the Guyana Chronicle in September 2014, he said of his writing process: “Occasionally a poem emerges in the consciousness fully formed and can be dislodged from there onto paper with a shake of the pen. Mostly what occurs is a sense of something needing to be said, a couple of lines in the head, perhaps just a phrase, and the accumulation of a poem begins and goes on with many fits and starts and adjustments, abandonments and reformulations….”

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“Broken Strings” – Poem by American Poet Mark Tulin

16 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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American Poet Mark Tulin
Photo Credit: Amazon Author Page


My Poetry Corner July 2023 features the poem “Broken Strings” from the poetry collection Awkward Grace: Poems (USA, 2019) by Mark Tulin, a poet, humorist, and short-story writer. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he attended the Pennsylvania State University where he studied psychotherapy, specializing in family and sex therapy. In 2012, after practicing for over thirty years as a marriage and family therapist, he moved to Santa Barbara, Southern California. Today, he lives with his second wife, Alice, in Long Beach.

An only child, Tulin began writing poems as a teenager to cope with asthma and a dysfunctional family. His father, a fruit store owner, was charming, sociable, and rational. His mother was an independent-minded schizophrenic who “talked to herself and rarely filtered her words.” Because of his mother, he studied psychology and became a psychotherapist. “If I couldn’t fix my parents, I might be able to heal a family of strangers,” says Tulin in his author bio on Medium.

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“For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” by Brazilian Poet Eli Macuxi

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Eli Macuxi
Photo Credit: Blog Elimacuxi, Pure Poetry

My Poetry Corner June 2023 features the poem “For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” (Pra Sua Hipocrisia Com Um Beijo) by Brazilian poet, photographer, historian, and teacher Elisangela Martins, who self-identifies as Eli Macuxi or Elimacuxi. She teaches History and Art Criticism in the Visual Arts Course at the Federal University of Roraima with special interest in feminism and gender identity/orientation. As a historian and photographer, she has partnered with the Association of Transvestites and Transexuals of Roraima in fighting for human rights.

Born in 1973 in the City of São Paulo, she grew up in a favela on the periphery where, for the first ten years of her life, she faced hunger and begged on the streets. Her semi-illiterate father, from the Northeastern State of Ceará, taught her to read and write. With a childhood fascination for verse and encouraged by a teacher, she began writing poetry in fifth grade. At fifteen, she dreamed of having her work read and studied by others:

“But the desire was totally blunted by the pessimistic awareness of reality,” confides the poet on her blog. “I was a skinny teenager, without luck of getting a job, studying at night school on the periphery, ‘daughter of a drunkie,’ with lots of younger siblings. To be a writer? Poet? It was laughable.”

In 1990, as a seventeen-year-old night school student and receptionist at a pharmacy during the day, she married a much older man. Giving birth to triplets soon after did not bode well for their marriage. Before the triplet’s second birthday, her husband had had enough and left them. A divorcee and back home with her parents, she worked for two years at several part-time jobs before securing a steady job as a waitress at a high-end restaurant. 

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“Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat” – Poem by Caribbean American Poet Lauren K Alleyne

21 Sunday May 2023

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Caribbean American Poet Lauren K Alleyne
Source: Poet’s Official Website (Photo by Erica Cavanagh)

My Poetry Corner May 2023 features the poem “Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat” from the poetry collection Honeyfish by Lauren K. Alleyne, first published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2019). Born in the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, the poet arrived in the USA at eighteen years old after receiving a scholarship from St. Francis College in New York City, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English. She also earned a Masters Degree in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University (2002) and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry from Cornell University (2006).

In 2022, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia recognized Alleyne with an Outstanding Faculty Award for her work at James Madison University, where she serves as a professor of English and executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. She currently resides in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Honeyfish, her second collection of poetry, won the 2018 New Issues Press Green Rose Prize sponsored by Western Michigan University. In the first of three untitled sections of the collection, the poet-persona bears witness to the relentless horror of white oppression and murder of black bodies: Aaron Campbell (Oregon, 2010), Trayvon Martin (Florida, 2012), Tamir Rice (Ohio, 2014), Sandra Bland (Texas, 2015), Charleston mass shootings (South Carolina, 2015), and Charlottesville white supremacist protest (Virginia, 2017). In contrast to such violence, the elegies and poems of remembrance hold no malice. Instead, we experience the tender and painful images of the innocent lost.

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“Bless This Land” – Poem by Native American Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

16 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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Native American Poet Laureate Joy Harjo 2019-2022
Photo Credit: Joy Harjo Official Website (Photo by Shawn Miller)

My Poetry Corner April 2023 features the poem “Bless This Land” from the poetry collection An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate of the United States 2019-2022. (The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.)

Born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the first of four siblings, Joy Harjo is a poet, musician, playwright, and author. Her father was Muscogee (Creek) Nation and her mother of mixed ancestry of Cherokee, French, and Irish. Her mother exposed her to poetry at an early age, but painting was her first love.

My mother was a songwriter and singer, Harjo relates in her poem “Washing My Mother’s Body.” My mother’s gifts were trampled by economic necessity and emotional imprisonment. // My father was a dancer, a rhythm keeper. His ancestors were orators, painters, tribal chiefs, stomp dancers, preachers, and speakers… All his relatively short life he looked for a vision or song to counter the heartache of history. Her father’s drinking and abuse ended their marriage.

At sixteen years of age, Harjo’s abusive and violent stepfather kicked her out of their home. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she received her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts. After graduation, she returned to Oklahoma, gave birth to a son, and returned to New Mexico to pursue a life as an artist. After earning her BA at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1976, Harjo moved to Iowa where she completed an MFA in 1978 at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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