The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation
April 1, 2020
Our visitors to Tippet Rise may not realize that it has a twin foundation, whose website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org, brings young poets to the fore while also celebrating the work of the poets we’ve grown up with.
We founded the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation in the hope that we can be a small part of this moment, where so many brilliant people on both sides of the Atlantic are finding their voices, and where young people are embracing poetry as a way of defining the indefinable about their lives.
We love old books, the smell of the binding, the feel of the hemp, the texture of rough parchment, the visceral sense of history. We grew up with these magic puzzle boxes, which open when you press the right word. We also love the speed, the democracy, the universality of the virtual world, which sends ideas everywhere, instantly.
We love to film the spoken word, to layer quick perceptions over slow words. Mostly we love the speed of thought, which outruns our fingers, our tongues, our memories, and through which we share with others our unspeakable losses, our deepest selves, and our inexpressible hopes.
Peter and Cathy Halstead
The image for this news story is of actor Juliet Stevenson from the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation’s film of her reading Emily Dickenson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers”.