Saturday Poetry – ‘This Beautiful Planet’ by Dorothea Lasky This week’s Saturday Poetry matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘This Beautiful Planet’ by Dorothea Lasky. Born on March 27, 1978, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dorothea Lasky received her BA from Washington University. “I’ve long been obsessed with the idea that our human experience is very unimportant when taken in the context of the endless magnitude of the universe. It’s both a comforting and terrifying reality. In terms of this poem, this reality is manifest in my current fear for our planet. Climate change dominates my thoughts most days. In many ways, this poem is a narration of this particular sort of…

Saturday Poetry – Interview with a Rose by James Cagney This week’s Saturday Poetry matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Interview with a Rose’ by James Cagney. He is the author of Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory (Nomadic Press, 2018), winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. A Cave Canem fellow, Cagney lives in Oakland, California. I have matched mobile art by @filizakart with this image entitled ‘Beauties from the Spring’. If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer on any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.…

Saturday Poetry -WHO REAL؟ by Marwa Helal This week’s Saturday Poetry matched with mobile photography/art is entitled WHO REAL؟ by Marwa Helal. She is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No Dear, 2017). This poem, she explains is about “Easy, e=mc2. Let me translate: Either make space or move out the way” I have matched mobile art by @incomprehensiblebugfx with this image untitled. If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer on any images posted to Instagram. This will mean…

Saturday Poetry – The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. by Donika Kelly This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. by Donika Kelly. She is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021) and is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. About this poem, she said “often, I am thinking of how I can ground love—feeling it, being in it—and being present in my body and in joy, in my work. These moves feel so urgent to me as a black lesbian in this political…

Saturday Poetry – ‘Prisms’ by Laura Riding Jackson This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ”Prisms’ by Laura Riding Jackson On January 16, 1901, Laura Riding Jackson was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City. From 1918 to 1921, she attended Cornell University. In 1920, she married Louis Gottschalk, a professor of history at Cornell. Her work soon attracted the notice of “The Fugitives,” a group of writers centred on Vanderbilt University whose members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. The group met regularly to read and discuss poetry and philosophy and published a poetry magazine, the Fugitive. In 1923, the poet began calling…

Saturday Poetry – ‘So Much Happiness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘So Much Happiness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020). Her other books of poetry include The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); Voices in…

Saturday Poetry – “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney. Born in Ireland in 1939, Seamus Heaney was the author of numerous poetry collections, including Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). He split his time between Dublin, Ireland, and Boston, where he taught at Harvard University for many years. In 1995, Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature. I have matched mobile art by @silkemetzartivist untitled. If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it. To view…

Saturday Poetry -“The world is a beautiful place” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled “The world is a beautiful place” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007); Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997); and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958). He has translated the works of a number of poets, including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to poetry, he is also the author of more than eight plays and three novels, including Little Boy: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019), Love in…

Saturday Poetry – ‘Crossing the Line’ E. Ethelbert Miller This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Crossing the Line’ by E. Ethelbert Miller. He explained “I wrote this poem at The Line Hotel in Washington, D.C. It’s an outgrowth of a meeting with my friend Maria Otero who was born in Bolivia. In the first stanza, there is a reference to miners. We all struggle to mine love in our relationships. The poem focuses on the commitment required to maintain a friendship over decades. It’s about aging and acknowledging another person’s beauty and how it changes, but is forever eternal. What holds the poem together is the ritual…

Saturday Poetry – ‘Wonder Wheel’ by Wo Chan This week’s Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Wonder Wheel’ by Wo Chan. Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. Their book, Togetherness (Nightboat Books, 2022), was the winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Chan expressed “I wrote this poem for my dear friend, Hye Yun Park, in the spirit of summer: of beaches and Coney Island Ferris wheels, of sunsets and seafood pancakes, and of friendships—the mystery and wonder of it that brings (and keeps) two people close. We had spent, unplanned, two consecutive evenings together, which became the container for this double sonnet. Friday’s dinner and a gazing…