Copyright Matters May 31, 2007: Kenneth, First, a message for you. The legal folks at the New York Transport Authority have delivered a court order to me to testify against you. Apparently, they have decided to sue you for plagiarism. There is a very angry team of train schedule writers waiting to either get justice or jump you for robbing them. I tried to explain about "found [...] by Kwame Dawes

Calabash, The Third Day May 31, 2007: I have been writing this final entry on Calabash for four days. Having returned to South Carolina to finish teaching my short semester course, "Love African American Style", a close look at romantic black fiction, I have had to fit in the bits and pieces of the final day of the Bash between everything I have to do. It has been good to think about [...] by Kwame Dawes

My New Work May 31, 2007: My son, Judah Darwin Zucker Goren, was born at home (in the water) yesterday morning. We were gently and lovingly attended to by a midwife and a doula. My husband and our older two sons (and Lindsey, our poet/babysiter) witnessed Judah's arrival. It was everything I could have hoped for. It was, in the most profound sense of the word, awesome. by Rachel Zucker

Goldsmith on Poetry & Copyright May 30, 2007: Dear poets, we are privileged to live in an economy of no economy. Let me refine that: our economy is purely an intellectual one, not a financial one. I have no copyright restrictions on my work—economically or legally—in perpetuity. I don't believe that the result of my lifetime's labor will have any economic ramifications, even long after my [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Poetry & Copyright May 30, 2007: I would like to ask all of the bloggers the following questions: - Do you copyright your poems? Why or why not? - As a poet, what is your relationship to copyright issues, in general? It would be better if we each responded in a separate post as a comments-based discussion would inevitably get buried. - Kenneth by Kenneth Goldsmith

Why has Patti been so quiet? May 29, 2007: Almost every day at Calabash, I'd grab my laptop and head down to a lounge chair at the edge of the sea (sorry) to commune with Harriet. Then, fortunately and unfortunately, I would happen upon the copious, deftly crafted musings of Kwame Dawes. Each day he wrote with such unbridled exhilaration. He wrote about the festival with the love of a [...] by Patricia Smith

Calabash–Second Day and Night May 29, 2007: For the entire day, a sheltering cloud settles over Treasure Beach, and when it rains, the thousand and a half people find shelter under the tent where poets and novelists are reading, their voices clean and assured against the drone of rain beating against the canvas and hushing through the trees. Somehow, the lines marked out for passageways [...] by Kwame Dawes

Calabash–First Night May 26, 2007: It is just past midnight. From the seaward end of the tent, just at the edge of the stage with its rustic columns, its thatched roof, its gazebo-like utility when this tented area has been transformed back into a large hall filled with rows and rows of white plastic chairs into a thickly grassed sloping lawn; I am watching people greeting each [...] by Kwame Dawes

From Lebanon – Part Two via Tom Sleigh May 25, 2007: I spent the day in the Golan Heights, in a ruined Syrian town, Quneitra, absolutely destroyed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between the Syrians and Israelis. Before the Israeli army withdrew after the 1973 ceasefire, the Israelis evacuated the 37,000 Arabs living there and destroyed the town, stripping buildings of windows, doors, anything that could [...] by Emily Warn

No Sympathy, Please May 25, 2007: Thank you for the outpouring of sympathetic notes regarding my relegation to the Siberia of academia. But quite frankly, I'm happy where I am. I prefer the coolness and distance of academia. I feel comfortable with its glacial tempo, its seriousness, its studiousness, and the dryness of its protocols. I prefer the long shelf-life of the academic [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith