“Re-Collecting Black Hawk puts forth a provocative and thorough examination of how a historical Sac and Fox leader has been reduced to a footnote. Native American historical figures have been subsumed into the US landscape via the naming customs of our European ancestors. Nicholas A. Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse use images and text in a juxtaposition that forces the viewer to think about what this means for Native Americans. Many streets and parks have been named for notable historical figures, but very few have been co-opted for business names. Makataimeshekiakiak’s English name, Black Hawk, has been used for everything from a…

Poetry Daily features the 1992 Foreword from The State of the Art by David Lehman. I remember when the Carter administration invited several hundred poets to the White House for a celebration of American poetry. There was a reception, handshakes with the president, the pop of flashbulbs. Concurrent poetry readings in various White House rooms capped off the festivities. In each room a few poets had been asked to read. The rest of the poets, the ones who hadn’t been asked to read, could attend the reading of their choice. A year later, Jimmy Carter lost the presidency. I used…

The Double Truth Chard deNiord “Sunday Calls,” from Chard deNiord’s collection The Double Truth, will be set to music by Jacob Cooper and featured during a May 15 concert by the chamber ensemble of the Albany Symphony. Cooper explained that the new song will be performed by vocalist Theo Bleckmann and the symphony’s chamber group “Dogs of Desire.” This concert is part of their annual American Music Festival, and part of Cooper’s two-year residency with the Albany Symphony. “For this concert, we’re each arranging songs and writing new ones,” he said. “The song I’m arranging is Kate Bush’s ‘Under Ice,’…

According to Sarah Galo at BuzzFeed Books, Pitt Poetry Series has published some poets that you must read. Two of our poets made the list: Paisley Rekdal and Rickey Laurentiis. Paisley Rekdal’s The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed…