Founded in 2001 as a joint venture of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English and New Virginia Review, Inc.
Copyright © 2023 by Blackbird and the individual writers and artists
ISSN 1540-3068
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| Levis Remembered | ||
| This year’s Levis Remembered reading loop contains poems from Devon Walker-Figueroa’s prize-winning collection Philomath and three new poems, as well as a review of Philomath by Katy Scarlett. Gregory Donovan provides a meditation on Levis’s poem “Elegy for Poe with the Music of a Carnival Inside It” and Levis’s time in Richmond in his commentary, “A Haunted Poem in a Haunted City.” Finally, artist David Freed introduces portraits of Levis and work created in response. |  |
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| A Correspondence with Brian Brodeur | ||
| “From one perspective, naming is the act of reading the world . . . From another perspective, naming conceals, falsifies, or even destroys an object,” writes Brodeur. Brodeur’s poems in this issue, as well as poems from his forthcoming book, serve as a catalyst for the discussion of themes that haunt much of poetry: the relationship between self and language, the slips between objective reality and perception, and the role of art in making meaning of the world. |  |
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| Correspondences | ||
| In the fall of 2022, Blackbird editors conducted interviews with current contributors Leslie Adrienne Miller and Marilyn Nelson. Miller and Nelson discuss their writing processes and more in these thoughtful, vulnerable interviews. Several themes touched upon here are the importance of defining poetry and its role in generating social change, the role of translation and the translator, and the capacity for syntax and poetic structure to illuminate the subconscious. |  |
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