Must Read–and Must See–Monday: Poetry of Witness
Something a little different this week: recommending a documentary, Poetry of Witness. Poetry of Witness is a 2015 documentary film directed by Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo about the lives of six contemporary poets who have lived through, and survived, extremities such as war, torture, exile, and repression, using poetry to preserve their memories.It debuted October 16, 2015 at the Buffalo International Film Festival.
The film documents the struggle of six contemporary poets who have faced the duress of war, exile, and human rights violations to give voice to their experiences while wrestling with the complex moral quandaries of artistic production, memory, and trauma. The poets: Carolyn Forché (Salvadoran Civil War), Saghi Ghahraman (Iranian Revolution), Fady Joudah (Doctors Without Borders), Claudia Serea (Socialist Republic of Romania), Mario Susko (Bosnian War), and Bruce Weigl (Vietnam War) offer first-person accounts of how their experiences as soldier, activist, doctor, and survivor imprint their poetry as evidence of those conflicts, rather than as representations of them.
Buy Poetry of Witness: The Documentary
A Couple of Suggested Anthologies (there are so many more…)
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Award winning poet Carolyn Forché spent 13 years compiling Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness. It is an exhaustive and illuminating work of breadth, beauty, wisdom and tragedy.
Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 – 2001
More about the Poetry of Witness
Anthony Cirilo Talks about Poetry of Witness
Carolyn Forché talks about the poetry of witness
Poet Carolyn Forché gathers 500 years of suffering in new anthology
More About Against Forgetting at3Generations
Love y’all.
Mary
This week meet one of my most beloved brother mans 🙂 Peter Grandbois, author of seven books, including: The Gravedigger, selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” program, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in Foreword magazine’s Book of the Year Awards for 2011, a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Disturbances, a finalist for Book of the Year in Foreword magazine’s 2013 awards, and the novella collections or “monster double features,” Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville (Honorable Mention, IndieFab award in the category of best fantasy of 2014), and The Girl on the Swing. His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is senior editor at Boulevard magazine and fiction co-editor at Phantom Drift.
And we’re back—with the amazing Gabrielle Brant Freeman, author of the stunning debut collection When She Was Bad. Gabrielle’s poetry has been published in many journals, most recently in Barrelhouse, Hobart, Melancholy Hyperbole, Rappahannock Review, storySouth, and Waxwing. She was nominated twice for the Best of the Net, and she was a 2014 finalist. Gabrielle won the 2015 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. Press 53 published her first book, When She Was Bad, in 2016. Gabrielle earned her MFA through Converse College. 
Ms. Rogers
This week’s Must Read is 
This week, meet Karenne Wood, a poet and linguistic anthropologist who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. She earned an MFA at George Mason University and a PhD in anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she was a Ford Fellow. Wood is the author of the poetry collection 
This week meet the fabulous 
This week meet 
This week meet Jerry D. Mathes II, author of Fever and Guts: A Symphony, Ahead of the Flaming Front (winner of the North American Book Award), The Journal West, Fall in the Borderland, and the forthcoming collection of short stories, Shipwrecks and Other Stories. Jerry is a Jack Kent Cooke alumnus and is also the author of Still Life: A Novella, winner of the Meadow Prize for the Novella. His photography, poems, essays, and short stories, have won numerous awards. In 2011, he produced a short film, “Drinking Sangria in the Cold War,” which was adapted from one of his award winning short stories. He has worked as a martial arts instructor, an armor crewman, a construction worker, hotel auditor, car salesman, repo-man, delivery guy, cable guy, went logging, worked in forestry, crewed on several types of fishing vessels, fought wildfire on a helicopter-rappel crew, taught writing at the University of Idaho and Stephen F. Austin State University and taught the Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station Antarctica during the 2009-2010 and 2011-2012 Austral summer seasons where he worked in logistics. He also wrote and directed two short films while at the South Pole. In 2012 he produced a video essay about wildfire. He loves his two daughters very much. 
This week meet 
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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