Headline Poetry

I am loving this poetry blog from small and perfectly-formed poetry press Wave Books: check out PoetryPolitic, 50 American poets (showing how truly diverse an identity is encompassed by that national designation) offer thoughts, in poem form, through the 50 days leading up to the election. They are profound, personal, political, playful -- and available as downloadable MP3s, to be enjoyed and meditated on. Plato thought poets should stay out of his Republic (because they enchant readers/listeners with their attempts to encapsulate the ideal forms of things in words), while Shelley called poets "unacknowledged legislators." On this blog they are in neither camp (or both): deeply engaged with the intimate daily and earthy, and the myriad ways in which politics is interwoven into our dailiness and our dreams -- pointing up the ways that politics as practiced has come to neglect the personal (except where it interferes for religious reasons) and the real 'popular,' the concerns of the people. The same has been said of lyric poetry -- particularly the experimental stuff -- but these poems show different. More immediate than CNN's newstrack and more vibrant and resonant than the Huffington Post: these poems are news that stays news. Thanks to Susan Schultz for posting it on Facebook!