FUSION Presents a Raucous Night of Performed Poetry: Berklee’s Spoken Word & Slam Poetry classes and The Garden

The Slam poets represent a cross-section of the Spoken Word & Slam Poetry class, taught by Michael Heyman. This is brave, bold, head-on, powerpuffed, chuffed, exposed, raw, beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, and phantasmagoric poetry for the people that should hit you…

Camelot Vampires Unleashed: 12 Poems in Traditional Forms from Pat Pattison’s Poetry Workshop

Each year Berklee participates in the Intercollegiate Poetry Festival, featuring poetry from students at universities and colleges around the area. This year’s event took place on Monday, April 3rd at Salem State University, sponsored by Mass Poetry and Salem State…

Vajra (Water song)

Kevin O’Keefe

Some day, a day not on your calendar / And it shouldn’t be long from now / You’ll leave behind your shelter of / Practiced spontaneity and dull knives. / ...

Five Poems

Ziyi Wu

A Horizon Line When I close my eyes, I see a horizon line. It’s black at the Coney Island beach in New York, Gray on the plane back to China, Blood orange in LA, And gradient pink at Charles River,…

Two Poems from Bucha, Ukraine

Lesyk Panasiu, with introduction by Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky on Lesyk Panaisuk’s Poetry “Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion. “War will live…

Fire and Rust:

a Suite of Poems from Pat Pattison’s Poetry Workshop

Each year Boston College host the Greater Boston Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Festival, inviting undergraduate student poets from area colleges and universities to read their original poetry. This year, Skyler Bugg, a student in Pat Pattison’s Writing Poetry 2 class, represented Berklee College of Music. Here are the three poems she presented. Firebird is written in Blank Verse, Eve is an Italian Sonnet, and Becoming is Free Verse.

3 Poems

Leana Borsuk

Just find it
That small curl always dangling in your face—it blocks me from your eyes. You wonder what color, and it’s not the color, but how it feels to me when the sun shines through, burning your eyes. It makes my blood boil, the way at night they are filled with excitement. I know you feel the butterflies in my stomach and the way the moon reflects the mood in your eyes. I just can’t get enough. I think, when will it be enough?

Introduction To Trans Literature and Two Other Poems

Stephanie Burt

Before The Wedding That man you’re standing next to…For so long I looked up to him like a god. You’re immured in conversation And when he smiles back at you now, my heart Skips, and not for him. Tonight I…

For He Was a Great Man

Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus

For he was a great man thrown & pulled toward the flames
For the flames were familiar for they would seal his story
For he was taken down face down body down to account
For his soul stood up & noticed the chariot song descending
For he pleaded as the fiery metals coiled upon his ebony skin
For he was our Renaissance our thirst our vessel for Freedom
For they said he was our father our son our symbol our body
For a choir assembled in the streets in every furnace of witness
For he called upon his mother as he called upon the Source
For he was not your Negro he was not your Black cut down
For he was the ancestral ship burning through waves & chains
For he was the future no one had prophesied the Now & the Is...

“Lightning Decides” & Three Other Poems

Andrew Motion

Blue Hill
The simplest way
to conquer Blue Hill
in the heat of the day
is to drive and stop
at the very foot
of the gentlest slope
and this we did
but were lost at once
in the bristling shade ...