The Missouri Review

More good news from a recent contributor to TMR! Scott Coffel‘s poems appeared in TMR 31.2, our summer 2008 issue.  In the introduction to his poems, Scott wrote “poetry should resist easy victories or the siren songs of self-improvement.” So he knows that getting his first book of poems, Toucans in the Arctic, published last [...]

[Read more →]

Last week, as I edited one of the final audio recordings of the current issue of TMR, I remembered why I love audio so much. Usually, I contact the vocal talent, I’m at the recording session, or I’m editing some portion of the piece myself. When I was out of town in December, one of [...]

[Read more →]

There’s been some buzz in recently among tech circles about a new presentation system called Prezi. The idea behind Prezi is to construct presentations not around a series of slides, but rather in the form of a single huge map (reminiscent of a brainstorming “mind-map”) that navigate around, zooming in to individual images or items [...]

[Read more →]

For those of you following the ongoing search for Craig Arnold, the American poet who disappeared earlier this week while researching volcanoes in Japan, you may find his blog, The Volcano Pilgrim, of interest. Last updated April 26, just before he went missing, he describes his surroundings with a poet’s eye and clearly capture’s the [...]

[Read more →]

I know why books of poetry don’t sell. I witnessed part of the problem last month when I attended a conference put on by Missouri’s Center for the Book. Several of the local poets who were invited to read had also signed up to have tables at the book fair to sell their collections. Yet, [...]

[Read more →]

The American poet Hayden Carruth passed away several weeks ago at the age of 87. He seemed to pass away as quietly as his poetry took root and grew around us: 30 books. I don’t recall hearing any announcements of his death on the news. The news of his death reached me by way of [...]

[Read more →]

Part 1:

Part 2:

[Read more →]

 In this Missouri Review podcast, we are pleased to present the wonderfully varied range of the second, third, and fourth runners-up from the Voice-Only poetry category of our 2007 Audio Competition. These are “The Golden Lesson” by Susan Somers-Willet, “Taking Tickets” by Eric Torgersen, and “Women in Strange Trousers” by Josh McDonald. With “The Golden [...]

[Read more →]

In this installment of The Missouri Review podcast, we feature the first place and first runner-up entries to the Voice-Only Literature (Poetry) category of our 2007 Audio Competition. Both of these awards go to poems by Todd Boss: “To Wind a Mechanical Toy” (1st place) and “Yellowrocket” (1st runner-up). Both poems are sonically resonant, without [...]

[Read more →]

Somehow we’ve neglected to raise a fuss yet over the fact that Paul Guest, one of the poets appearing in our current issue, very recently won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, which currently comes with a sturdy cash prize of $50,000. Since 1985 it’s been awarded annually to ten emerging writers of promise, in a [...]

[Read more →]

On Tuesday, January 8, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen, one of our favorite local poets, as official poet laureate of Missouri. Walter’s work has appeared in the pages of The Missouri Review no less than four times–in 1983, 1989, 1991 and 1997.

[Read more →]

A few weeks ago at the University of Missouri, I had the opportunity to go and listen to Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate. In fact, I got to see him speak twice: first at a question and answer session attended by a small group of writers in the Corner Playhouse, and [...]

[Read more →]

It’s something like a universal truth that in times of governmental repression and institutionalized violence poetry becomes an enemy of the state. Consider Anna Akhmatova’s situation in Stalinist Russia: after being identified as a “bourgeois element,” her poetry was banned from publication for fifteen years (1925-1940). Wole Soyinka, the great African poet and activist, was [...]

[Read more →]