• Please go here to view more photos from this event and past tournaments.
2011 National Book Festival
Summer in East Hampton - dogwalks on beach with Mark Doty
• Carol Muske-Dukes is part of the curatorial team of America: Now + Here and directs the poetry aspect along with Bob Holman.
• Sotheby's Benefit Auction for America: Now & Here in New York on June 23, 2010. From left to right: actress Swoosie Kurtz, playwright Marsha Norman, poet Carol Muske-Dukes, and poet Bob Holman.
• Please check out my friend Carol Olson Coote's splendid blog -- "Her Own Society" - with a nod to Emily Dickinson!
Donate online today at the USC Online Giving Site Please go the website to make a secure credit card donation. Your donation is tax deductible and a USC gift receipt will be sent to you via US mail.
The scholarship, established in memory of the late actor David Coleman Dukes, is awarded annually to a third-year Theater Arts student working toward a career in stage acting. A bronze plaque commemorating the scholarship benefit held in David Coleman Dukes' name can be seen in the lobby of the Bing Theater, off Queen's Court on the USC campus.
- Madeline Puzo, Dean, USC School of Theatre
• Saturday, June 9 and Sunday, June 10, 12:00-4:00pm
Carol Muske-Dukes is a former Poet Laureate of California and a professor at the University of Southern California. Her most recent books of poetry are Twin Cities and Sparrow, a National Book Award finalist.
Application Deadline: Friday, May 25
Master Classes offer advanced writers of poetry an opportunity to work intensively with some of the most respected poets of our time. Applications are required; space is limited. $390 each.
Application Guidelines: Send three poems accompanied by a cover sheet with your name, address, email address and phone number to
Poets House
10 River Terrace
New York, NY 10282
Attn: Classes
or by email to classes@poetshouse.org. Poems must arrive by the designated deadline. No names or addresses should appear on the poems themselves. >>
Carol Muske-Dukes: A Partial New York Times Archive
• Past New York Times articles by Carol Muske-Dukes >>
Life and Work
• Carol Muske-Dukes, USC Professor of English and Creative Writing, talks about how poetry is part of her life -- and her work. >>
Video by Mira Zimet & USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences
Support the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012
Total outstanding student loan debt in America is expected to exceed $1 TRILLION this year. Millions of hardworking, taxpaying, educated Americans are being crushed under the weight of their educational debts, while the economy continues to sputter. Support a REAL economic stimulus and jobs plan. Support the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012 (H.R. 4170). Sign this petition. >>
Note from Carol Muske-Dukes
Though I've stepped down as California Poet Laureate - I am still committed to The Magical Poetry Blimp (and GET LIT/Words Ignite)! Please help The Blimp fly high with our continuing projects -- provide a tax-deductible donation:
Click on http://getlit.org/support-us/ in order to donate to the Blimp (Magical Poetry Blimp is found under the "Organization" drop-down menu) --
Thanks - and we'll keep you posted (re: our upcoming projects)!
- Carol Muske-Dukes, Former CA. Poet Laureate
Carol Muske-Dukes, as now-former California Poet Laureate, salutes Juan Felipe Herrera, California's new Poet Laureate!
Novels
• Channeling Mark Twain, 2007
• Life AFter Death, 2000
• Saving St. Germ, Viking, 1993
• Dear Digby, 1989
Essays
• Married to the Icepick Killer:
A Poet in Hollywood, 2002
• Women & Poetry, 1997
Anthologies
• Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, co-edited: Carol Muske-Dukes & Bob Holman, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011
• The Magical Poetry Blimp Pilot's Guide, editor: Carol Muske-Dukes, with Diana Arterian, Figueroa Press, 2011
Many of these collections were New York Times Most Notable Books.
A sophisticated and lyrical new collection from one of today's finest living poets
Carol Muske-Dukes is an acclaimed novelist and poet whose latest collection, Sparrow,
a haunting elegy for her late husband, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Twin
Cities is an emotionally rich book of poems about how things double - by reflection,
by reproduction, by severance. The poems embark from the twin cities of Minneapolis
and St. Paul, divided by a legendary river, and then move on to the parallel histories of
a life lived and a life imagined - and the random intersection of the two. Lit by loss,
these moving poems navigate between the poles of love and grief, curse and blessing,
abandonment and rescue - they are two, and they are one.
Praise for Twin Cities:
"Exploding with capacity and ambition, Carol Muske-Dukes' new poems are the
strongest yet from a poet whose work has long been essential reading. Twin Cities
formal and architectural intelligence is stunning, as well as heart-stopping in its insight
into 'how damage is made.' The richness of the language is made to carry the maximum
bearable amount of emotion - political, spiritual, social, familial, erotic - via brightly-lit
imagery which astounds with its originality, felicity, and honesty."
- Jorie Graham
Poet, essayist, and novelist Muske-Dukes discerns metaphorical resonance in her birthplace, St. Paul,
Minnesota, and its twin city, Minneapolis. The symbiosis between the twin cities with a river between
them inspires reflections on various forms of doubleness in poems as beautifully contoured and polished as river stones turned and lathed and buffed by deep currents. Muske-Dukes' language is earthy and
unadorned, and yet, within her gleaming lines, common words shape-shift and morph into fresh and
disarming imagery and realizations. In vibrant tableaus, wrenching stories, portraits, elegies, social
objections, and metaphysical equations, the poet––lyrical, mournful, and funny—considers such "twins" as
life and death, past and present, war and peace, men and women, art and life, yes and no. Ice-skaters do the whip; two kids labor over a condolence note; a mirror frames the essence of a relationship. The poet,
Muske-Dukes muses, is a "go-between," a "double emissary," and she nimbly and exquisitely performs the
poet's spirit-sustaining art of observation, remembrance, protest, connection, and drollery in a lucid,
involving, and deeply gratifying collection.
— Donna Seaman (from BOOKLIST)
Adrienne Rich
We mourn the death of Adrienne Rich - she was a longtime friend and great mentor. R.I.P.
• LA Times - An Appreciation: Adrienne Rich >>
• Lingua Materna: The Speech of Female History >>
New Huffington Post Blog Entries
• Don't Bank on Banks -- Except for One! >>
• Scattershot Poetry Reviews -- Three Books >>
• April is National Poetry Month. The Women's Conference and California's First Lady Maria Shriver want to honor the importance of art, creativity and poetry in our lives. During April, they'll be sharing some of their favorite poems. They have chosen to feature two of Carol Muske-Dukes' poems (Twin Cities and Boy) here.
Articles
• Voice of America -
US National Poetry Month Encourages Reading, Writing Verse >>
• Suttee at Slate.com. You can also listen to a podcast of Carol reading this poem. >>
Multimedia
• Video clips of The Creative Community and Poetry Readings >>
• Podcast of Carol's 2007 interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Terri Gross >>
• Poets Rita Dove, Carol Muske-Dukes, Marilyn Nelson and Lisa Russ Spaar perform as "The Pink Tuxedos" at the 2001 conference of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) in Palm Springs, CA. [Watch video clip]
Crossing State Lines:
An American Renga Edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes
Order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
A collaborative poem about America, from fifty-four of our best poets
Crossing State Lines: An American Renga is a poetic relay race across the continent: fifty-four poets responding to ideas of America-and to each other. This is a collaborative journey of impressions-from the election and inauguration of President Obama, through foreclosures, job losses, chords of country music, and bombs in Baghdad, to a poet-soldier's rifle-sight in Afghanistan.
The renga itself, in the ancient tradition of Japanese linked verse, provides the form of this historic conversation among the poets, as they meditate, within ten lines, on a moment in America. Crossing State Lines begins with Robert Pinsky's recounting of a line of poetry by Lincoln as fall deepens and "maples / kindle in the East," and ends some five hundred lines later, with Robert Hass's "greeny April" on the Pacific coast.
Donate online today at the 
