Poetry best sellers, October 17-24 October 27, 2010: Brian Turner’s two collections—Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise—both return to the contemporary best seller list this week in a big way. Turner’s books leapfrog the majority of the list to splash down at numbers 5 and 6, respectively. Turner recently returned from Belgrade, Serbia where ten years ago he had served as a NATO peacekeeper. He [...] by Harriet Staff

Verse wars October 27, 2010: The Atlantic has devoted a five-part series to a discussion about the value of verse in the 21st century. In this, the second installment, poet Adam Roberts takes on the issue of accessibility. Between the mainstream poets and the experimentalists, whose work do "the people" find most palatable? Rather than have both sides duke it out in a game of [...] by Poetry News

Maya Angelou’s treasured work finds a home October 27, 2010: A collection of Maya Angelou's personal notes, letters and documents has been acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. As the largest collection of her material, the archive includes a draft of the poem she read at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, letters from Malcolm X and James Baldwin, and many [...] by Poetry News

Free Verse Throw October 27, 2010: We’ve been following the Lebron James poetry contest closely, with bated breath and an irregular heartbeat that sounds like dribbling. Over 1,100 poems were entered, and the judge, Miami Herald columnist Dan Le Batard, wrote his own poem about the experiencing of picking a winner from a batch of bad poems. It's a bit of a letdown, after all our [...] by Poetry News

A Day in the Life of a Blog October 27, 2010: Bhanu Kapil’s blog, Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi, is subtitled “A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor.” But instead of bitching about her students, or grooving on the joys of teaching, Kapil uses this space to write of daily experience in a style akin to her published books, in which narrative is built from impressions, [...] by Poetry News

I Like What You Like October 27, 2010: Every year since 2003, Steve Evans asks poets from all walks of post-avant poetry life to contribute a list of their favorite books of the year. The project, called Attention Span, is like a snapshot of current trends and interests. The books mentioned range from poetry to philosophy to fiction and beyond, but most poets choose to limit their [...] by Poetry News

The rhymer, just in timer October 27, 2010: Because you've always wanted to know what rhymes with hardboiled, thankfully a Free Online Rhyming Dictionary called the Rhymer is now at your disposal. From GalleyCat: The online tool allows poets to select from six different kinds of rhymes. End Rhymes (blue/shoe), Last Syllable Rhymes (timber/harbor), Double Rhymes (conviction/prediction), [...] by Poetry News

Bring on the beta October 26, 2010: Perhaps you've already heard about Google Translate's epic Jabberwocky fail. If not, the Google Empire has developed a translator specifically for poetry, and while Harriet loves a pie-in-the-sky idea, it doesn't take a botched French translation of the "Jabberwocky" to tell us the machine-poet isn't going exactly as planned. If Google Translate [...] by Harriet Staff

Elizabeth-inspired eels October 26, 2010: Eels: An Exploration, From New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish is the title of James Prosek's new book (his first one was about trout). Prosek talks with Jacket Copy about how the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop influenced his work and inadvertently inspired his descriptions of the slinky sea creatures: JC: What did you [...] by Harriet Staff

So you want to get a PhD in the humanities? October 26, 2010: by Harriet Staff