Benjamin Voigt

Sep 23, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Benjamin Voigt |Lavelle Porter

Audre Lorde is dead. Long live Audre Lorde. When a French or British monarch dies, it is custom for royal subjects to proclaim this seeming paradox: The queen is dead! Long live the queen! Their aim is to acknowledge the demise of a monarch (an individual) while affirming the persistence of the monarchy (the institution).

Jul 8, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Robert Frost |Benjamin Voigt

I. THE PROCESS OF REVISION Robert Frost’s early draft of “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” which he sent to George R. Elliott in a letter dated March 1920, is two stanzas longer than the version we know. For a poem about the brevity of every state of being, the inability to cling to beauty amid its constant movement, and the value of glorious things gone too soon, Frost inevitably realized that a single, brief octave would not only suffice, but would better enact the themes of the poem through its form.

May 6, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Robert Lowell |Benjamin Voigt

The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo, slats of dust distracted by a downdraw; I woke and knew I held a cigarette; I looked, there was none, could have been none; I slept off years before I woke again, palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I saw nothing was burning. I awoke, I saw I was holding two lighted cigarettes. . . . They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death. Tonight it’s Randall, his spark still fire though humble, his gnawed wrist cradled like Kitten.

Dec 14, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Alice Notley |Benjamin Voigt

“Flowery mantle.” “Homeric sacrifice?” “noise of darkness” “fear of darkness” “now mantle of innocence” “King of his death now” “Home” “I’ve come home” “He said, ‘I’ve come home’” “They were sacrificed for nothing, for distant” “instants of thought” “All for your thinking” “He said, ‘I’ve come home; I've finally come home’ then he died” “flowers” “Magnolias & lilies” “innocent now” “I’ve come home. Who’s there? at home?

Sep 8, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Benjamin Voigt |Alice Notley |Nick Sturm |Claire Luchette

Alice Notley has become one of America’s greatest living poets. She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be “our present-day Homer.” Notley was born in Arizona and grew up in Needles, California.