poetry

Your essential Indiana poetry collection according to local literary figures.

“Somebody Else Sold the World” is the first of two 2021 music-inspired books by the former Poet Laureate of Indiana.

Faced with even more uncertainty than usual during the pandemic, Indy’s artists are using the downtime to explore new territory in their work.

“When I was around alcohol, I drank about my writing, not the other way around. Drying out allowed me to start putting words on paper again.”

See if you can guess the worst spelling of his name by a Starbucks employee.

Indiana’s greatest poets come from all walks of life.

Three Indiana natives discuss art, inspiration, and spoken word poetry in Indianapolis.

Joel Dart has worked with computer language since middle school, but in 2010, he decided to use it in a completely new way.

“President Obama and Vice President Biden stood up to shake my hand,” says Blanco. “It was a true sign of respect for my work as a poet. I thought, ‘These guys have my back.'”

“The moral of it is very much related back to what Whitman is trying to teach—that everyone is a part of everything, everywhere,” says Katherine Shelton (Caroline). “No one really dies, because everyone lives.”

Poet Marianne Boruch has won other awards in the past, but nothing prepared her for the news that she’d won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the largest monetary prize for a single collection of poetry in the world. Boruch, who has been teaching at Purdue for nearly three decades, won the $100,000 award for her 2011 collection The Book of Hours. Nature-oriented poems dominate the collection, borne out of the extended periods Boruch spent in the woods over the past five years. Other poems in the collection depict people in more everyday settings, and some ruminate on poetry itself. As she prepared to leave for yesterday’s award ceremony at Claremont Graduate University in California, Boruch talked with IM about the award, her book, and great poetry.