Saxophonist and Trombone player Alfred Patterson moves just as easily between musical styles: he was a member of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, toured with the American Ballet Company, played in the pit orchestras for musicals such as “Dreamgirls” and “La Cage Aux Folles,” and jammed with the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras. In this video, Patterson discusses sound, poetry, and the nature of improvisation.
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Renée Alberts, curator of the Carnegie Library’s Sunday Poetry & Reading Series, reports on the 2010 Poets Forum. Presented in New York City by the Academy of American Poets, the forum provided a platform for an array of opinions, topics and styles of contemporary poetry.
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Here we present an excerpt of Pennsylvanian author Philip Terman’s long poem “Serenade for Oil City, Pennsylvania,” in which he tells the story of the small Pennsylvania town once at the center of the oil industry.
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This year, the Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of International PEN, celebrates 50 years of defending freedom of expression around the world with a year-long campaign – Because Writers Speak their Minds. As part of this campaign, the Committee looks back on 50 emblematic cases illustrating how and why they have worked. One case on this list is story of Mansur Rajih. This poet was the first International Cities of Refugee Network’s guest writer in Stavanger, Norway, where he arrived in 1998 after spending 15 years in prison in Yemen.
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In this video created by Rattapallax magazine exclusively for Sampsonia Way, the poet Edward Hirsch talks about Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s deep and lasting influence on him.
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Gade Tsering, a Tibetan blogger, writer, and poet, was one of the most recent contributors to High Peaks Pure Earth because of his outspoken voice in all his writings. He runs a widely popular Chinese language blog called Tibet, or After the Last Sky. Tsering aims to spread awareness about issues going on throughout the Tibetan region through his poetry
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For the Iraqi translator and poet Soheil Najm, poetry offers an opportunity to start a conversation across cultural barriers. Najm is the co-editor of Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq, an anthology of Iraqi poets in translation. He has also translated selections of work by Nikos Kazantzakis, Alasdair Gray, Ted Hughes, and Jose Saramago. Soheil Najm presents Ra’ad Zamil’s poem, offering a glimpse into the struggles of a generation of Iraqis who have survived Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and are trying to make a life in Iraqi’s nascent democracy.
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