Poets Archives - The New Territory Magazine

José Olivarez – Calumet City, Illinois

José Olivarez & Calumet City—maps might make the world legible, but poetry reveals “the little cracks in the totality.” Literary Landscapes by Ava Tomasula y Garcia.

Ron Wilson – Manhattan, Kansas

Ron Wilson & Lazy T Ranch—the Poet Laureate of Kansas talking poetry and connection with the state’s Poet Lariat.

Lisel Mueller – Forest Haven, Illinois

Lisel Mueller 27240 N. Longwood Dr. Forest Haven, Illinois By Jenny Mueller “Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After...

Gordon Parks – Fort Scott, Kansas

Gordon Parks & the Marmaton River—walking the cracked bottom of the gulch, following the “documentarian of a watershed century.”

Lorine Niedecker – Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin

Lorine Niedecker’s River Cabin—America’s greatest unknown poet, writing in a riverside cabin that appears to shrug off the idea of annual flooding.

Philip Levine – Waawiiyaatanong

Philip Levine & Belle Isle—“here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.”

James Tate – Pittsburg, Kansas

James Tate Cow Creek CrossingPittsburg, Kansas By Leslie VonHolten Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The...

Heid E. Erdrich – Minneapolis, Minnesota

Heid Erdrich & All My Relations art gallery—“imaginative language-meaning” in the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

Gwendolyn Brooks – Chicago, Illinois

Gwendolyn Brooks & South Side Community Art Center—looking back toward Bronzeville: Brooks’s voice above the hum. #LiteraryLandscapes

James Emanuel – Alliance, Nebraska

Two generations finding “my truth and my refuge” at the Alliance Public Library. #LiteraryLandscapes by Sean Stewart.

Maya Angelou – Stamps, Arkansas

Maya Angelou & the memorial at Lake June—“picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across, imagining the breeze she once breathed.”

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt – North Bend, Ohio

Though Piatt’s writing seems “sweet and peaceful,” it “proves to be like ‘the depths of a dark river,’ ‘shadowy and terrible.’”

Ted Kooser – Seward County, Nebraska

TED KOOSER Gravel RoadsSeward County, Nebraska By Matt Miller For all his stature as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser remains a poet of Nebraska, and so he is a poet of gravel roads. Consider “So This Is Nebraska,” his best-known poem about his home...