Of Love and Chain Letters (Borderline Ballads) August 6, 2009: The New York Post reported yesterday that the Madonna once called on Anne Sexton's poem "Love Song" to justify her love of a former bodyguard, Jim Albright. "In a fax dated Dec. 24, 1993, Madonna wrote to Albright: 'I was the girl of the love letter/ the girl full of talk of dreams and destination . . . the one with her eyes half under [...] by Travis Nichols

A Few of the Great Ideas I’ve Had August 4, 2009: 1) I got the alphabet tattooed around my right ankle in 1990. This is just one of those things that, once seen, seems so inevitable, or obvious, it's like "why aren't there hundreds and even thousands of people walking around with the alphabet tattooed around various limbs and joints?" Often I am asked, by someone who thinks they are being very [...] by Rebecca Wolff

One of my songs spins backward, while the other plays forward August 4, 2009: OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I'll take it down. Would be a shame, tho. Adrian Matejka's second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year's National Poetry Series, and I've finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, [...] by Joel Brouwer

Real life August 3, 2009: "I do not know what you think of departments of English, but the good ones are not random collections of tedious pedants..." (more...) by Don Share

Hand and Sensitivity August 3, 2009: I don’t mind dwelling on the contest so much. I thought I’d knock it out last night – the choice, the final reading and then I found that the four I had narrowed it down to I in fact didn’t like. If a contest is for a book, an entire manuscript, it puts a particular burden on choosing. It re-inscribes how we read a book as opposed to a [...] by Eileen Myles

Renaissance redux? August 1, 2009: Pop quiz: What do Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Frank McCourt, Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Edward Abbey, Elmore Leonard, Mario Puzo, James Dickey, James Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, Paddy Chayevsky, Rod Serling, Aaron Spelling, Terry Southern, Walter [...] by Joel Brouwer