The first film screening at the White House was "Birth of a Nation," a blatantly racist film that was used as a recruitment tool for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. A leaf does not fall from thin air. While we can never revise our collective histories, my most optimistic hope is for insistent, relentless attention to our nation’s darkest corners.
Jessica Q. Stark on "The First White House Screening" |
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"A President Who Quotes Poetry"
"This is a good clue that we have elected a thoughtful, moral, decent human who cares about reckoning, who cares about human stories. This is a reminder that the person we've chosen to lead us values language, complex truths and nuanced thought. To love poetry is also to honor the precision of words and the music of language at once."
viaCNN |
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| | Poetry Daily stands with the Black community.
We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world.
Black Lives Matter. |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Kazim Ali on "When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me"
"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work." |
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