I am interested in the creation of a genre. Not in the creation of a literary movement. Nor in being a part of a generation. Genre is based on space, not on time. Genres create prototypes that can last for centuries. Like the creation of the prototype of tragedy by Aeschylus. Or pataphysics by Alfred Jarry. Their future is pregnant with thoughts. A new genre creates a space that future generations can enter and write—in that model, in that prototype—a new mode of thinking.
Giannina Braschi, POETRY Magazine
Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi wrote the Postcolonial epic works entitled Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana. She discusses structure and space in architecture, design, theater, poetry, and philosophy. Read the full interview in Poetry Magazine. Don’t miss Braschi’s new poem entitled Antigone.
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine began with the “Open Door.” In its first year Poetry published Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” William Carlos Williams, and William Butler Yeats and introduced Rabindranath Tagore to the English-speaking world just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The magazine has since been in continuous publication for more than 100 years, making it the oldest monthly magazine devoted to verse in the English language. Perhaps most famous for having been the first to publish T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (and, later, John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”), Poetry championed the early works of H.D., Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore. It was first to recognize many poems that are now widely anthologized: “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, Briggflatts by Basil Bunting, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E.E. Cummings, “Chez Jane” by Frank O’Hara, “Fever 103°” by Sylvia Plath, “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg, and “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens. Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams, to name just a few, have appeared in Poetry’s pages.