CHICAGO, IL — There has always been poetry in the mail – love letters, greeting cards, and verses submitted to magazines for publication. Now, there’s poetry on the mail, as the U.S. Postal Service recognizes the enduring work and influence of ten major American poets.
The Chicago Post Office will hold a local dedication of the “Twentieth-Century Poets” stamp sheet Sat., April 28 during the Chicago Public Library’s Poetry Fest, at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St., in the Video Theater beginning at 12 noon.
The sheet of 45-cent First-Class Forever stamps, which went on sale April 21, honors Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.
Chicago postal employees – including several with extensive local performing and writing credits – will read selections from the featured poets.
Each stamp features a photograph of one of the 10 poets. Text on the back of the stamp sheet includes an excerpt from one poem by each poet.
Background on the Featured Poets:
Elizabeth Bishop was known as a “writer’s writer,” suggesting the admiration other poets feel for her work. She polished her poems to gleaming perfection, displaying the precise observation, intellectual strength, and understated humor that continue to win readers. Her poems walk the line between the marvelous and the ordinary and other contradictions.
Joseph Brodsky was an exile from the Soviet Union who became the first foreign-born poet to be appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. Although he embraced the country he came to call home, many of his poems resonate with loneliness and loss.
Gwendolyn Brooks, another former U.S. Poet Laureate and a lifelong resident of Chicago, is best remembered for distinctive, lyrical portraits of urban life. A master of traditional poetic forms, she also experimented with free verse, jazz and blues poetry, and colloquial language.
E. E. Cummings expertly manipulated the rules of grammar, punctuation, rhyme, and meter to create poems that resembled modernist paintings. His works transformed notions of what a poem can do and delighted readers of all ages.
The poems of Robert Hayden reflect his brilliant craftsmanship, his historical conscience, and his gift for storytelling. Many of his works render aspects of the black American experience with unforgettable vividness; others are more personal.
Denise Levertov hoped her poetry would inspire change. She wrote mystical, meditative poems about nature, spirituality, love, and loss as well as antiwar poems. Weaving together public and private, active and contemplative, she perfected an organic form of poetry that explored the political and social world through the intimate experiences and perceptions of the individual.
Sylvia Plath probed the conflict between inner self and outward appearance. Her complex body of work includes deftly imagined poems about marriage and motherhood, gender and power, death and resurrection, and the sweet, enjoyable moments of everyday life.
Theodore Roethke created intimate, introspective poems distinguished by lyricism and a sensual use of imagery. Best known for his poems about the natural world, he was profoundly influenced by the events of his childhood and mined his past for the themes and subjects of his writing.
The work of Wallace Stevens presents a luxurious banquet of language and meaning. Many of his poems—some highly comic, others somber and spare—explore the relationship between consciousness and reality.
William Carlos Williams was a doctor who typed out his poems between seeing patients. His work showed readers the extraordinary in the commonplace—a broken bottle, a red wheelbarrow left out in the rain—in deliberately plain language.
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