In honor of National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets teamed up with 826 National to highlight and celebrate the work of poets in cities with 826 chapters: Ann Arbor/Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Each chapter selected a poetry ambassador, who selected a poem written by a local poet and wrote a short essay about it. That poet picked another, and the chain went on.
As National Poetry Month 2015 winds down to a close, so does our Read This Poem project. This week we reveal the final picks for each of the cities.
For week four of Read This Poem, Chicago picked Ladan Osman. This week, Osman picks “Brazil,” from Cave Canem and NEA Fellow Roger Reeves, which paints an intimate picture of the speaker comparing tragedies with a stranger.
Melanie Henderson, last week’s pick from 826DC, selects “Dream, Technidifficult” by Ailish Hopper, which takes inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. and P-Funk.
This week Diane Seuss, the last pick from 826michigan, chooses the whirling and dizzying “Recall the Carousel” by Laura Kasischke. Seuss says, “’Its round and round,’ and from that point on, we spin in its gyre of vowel sounds.”
Zoe Tuck, who was picked last week by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, finishes 826 Valencia’s chain with a poem by Tessa Micaela in which “a voice called o is our guide, taking us through lack and want and imagination and tenderness and trauma and curiosity in a style that undulates between spare lyricism and prose block plenitude.”
Go back and revisit all of the poems from each city.