Have you been looking for a supportive and collaborative environment where you can refine your poetry?

The Chicago School of Poetics offers that and more: weekly face-to-face workshops on location in Chicago, and online workshops that can be attended from your home, or from anywhere in the country.

Our program allows you to get inside the actual writing process of the core faculty and will take you beyond what you might have thought possible in a positive, community-building environment.

Register for our March – April session. Click here for more info.

Endless, Beautiful, Exact
(Argotist eBooks, 2011)

A series of texts, remixed from appropriated oral and written source material, that explore interpersonal conflict through a fragmented and implied narrative. The author seems to have a clampdown on what he is willing to express, and what few words are allowed through are charged with emotion and tension.

Click here to download.

Click cover to download.

A series of texts, remixed from appropriated oral and written source material, that explore interpersonal conflict through a fragmented and implied narrative. The author seems to have a clampdown on what he is willing to express, and what few words are allowed through are charged with emotion and tension.

Available at Argotist eBooks.
Click here to download.

About the festival:

World famous composer Philip Glass presents a one-of-a-kind arts festival in Carmel Valley and Big Sur, California. Featuring music, dance, poetry, theatre and film. Premiering this summer, Aug 19 to Sept 4, 2011. (read more…)

Tickets available here: http://philipglasspoetrynight-eorg.eventbrite.com

To read online: http://bhjournal.com/issues/Vol8_2

Politically charged investigation raises the stakes of poetry for both the poet (as producer) and the poem (as art object). This type of poetry not only invokes the bardic practice of speaking the wisdom of the group, but also uses the poem as a type of activism. When critics question the role of poetry in the real world or what it can accomplish outside of its own existence, activist poetics that enters conversation with contemporary political happenings offers one of the better answers. This activist poetry can reveal knowledge about real happenings through the conceptual relationship between the real and the world of art.

Read more at: http://jacket2.org/reviews/poem-type-activism

The Verrückter Schwanz Cinépoetry Festival

Selected short films that explore the intersection of cinematic and poetic expression.

Thursday May 12th at 7:00 pm
Food and Wine to be served

Curated by Francesco Levato
Director: Maria Garcia Teutsch
Contact: 831.755.6943

“Oscillations (i),” “Oscillations (vi),” and “Oscillations (viii)” The Homestead Review (forthcoming, 2011)

Documentary poetry incorporates news reports, government documents, legal testimony, and statistical data, among other source material, and it is assumed by the definition of “documentary” that the facts are presented “objectively without editorializing or fictional matter,” but often the poet is engaged in politicizing a certain view. This workshop will examine the role of poet as documentarian and the poem as record of fact.

RHINO/the Poetry Forum invites all poets to its Poetry Workshop & Peer Exchange. Attendees bring 15 copies (no longer than two copies) of a poem to be critiqued, and participate in an ongoing discussion of poetry and poetics. No registration is required, and the workshop is free, though a $5 donation is appreciated.

For more information please visit: www.rhinopoetry.org

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Elegy for Dead Languages collects in print the long documentary poems War Rug; Elegy for Dead Languages; and Hood, Handgun, Power Drill.

“Francesco Levato’s powerful documentary, War Rug—like Eliot Weinberger’s What I heard about Iraq before it—detains the language of the perpetrators of global military aggression and redeploys it to indict them. From J.C. Penny catalog copy to counterintelligence manuals and autopsy reports, War Rug is a fierce yet unfortunate reminder of the absolute horrors of our age.”

—Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary about War Rug

“In the poem War Rug, which was published by Broadsided last June, Chicago poet Francesco Levato explores the reality of living under a constant state of emergency, referencing the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded advisory system in juxtaposition with other common crisis shorthand. ‘Code Blue: no breathing / no heartbeat,’ he writes.”

—Poets & Writers