T.S. Eliot’s prize posse October 22, 2010: What do you get when you put together an American veteran of the Iraq war, a recovering heroin addict, and a godfather of modern poetry (who also happens to be a poetry-prize magnet)? No, it's not a bad joke and they don't all walk into a bar together. You get the "unusually eclectic" shortlist for the T.S Eliot prize. More from the Guardian: [...] by Poetry News

Roger Ebert hearts Samuel Taylor Coleridge October 22, 2010: In honor of the Romantic poet's birthday, Roger Ebert has posted film clips meeting at the intersection of Coleridge and Orson Welles on the Sun-Times blog, including this gem: by Poetry News

Translations of Japanese Modernist and Avant-garde poetry October 21, 2010: Eric Selland has been maintaining a blog where he posts his own translations of Japanese Modernist and Avant-garde poetry. Not only is it an incredible resource for poetry otherwise unavailable in English, it also features short essays about the translated authors, providing historical and aesthetic context for their work. Most recently there [...] by Poetry News

Gotta Win ‘Em All! October 21, 2010: The BBC reports that, along with Annie Freud, Fiona Sampson, Derek Walcott and Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize for his new book, Human Chain. He has already won the Forward Prize for the book, as well as having won the Eliot Prize a few years back. The only logical conclusion: prizes are in love with Seamus [...] by Poetry News

Panda! October 21, 2010: Poet Chris Alexander's new work consists of collecting descriptions of the main character from the film Kung-Fu Panda, and posting those descriptions online, along with terrific pictures of pandas and people in panda costumes. Alexander has been disseminating Panda! in many forms, including on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. It'll also be [...] by Harriet Staff

Weakness as a form of power October 21, 2010: A recent provocative blog-post by Dodie Bellamy attempts to re-configure the notion of a feminist poetics by suggesting that writing from a position of weakness (or ignorance or misery) paradoxically flips the power relations inherent to writing on their head. She terms this strategy “oppositional weakness”, and writes that: an in-your-face [...] by Poetry News

A broken homecoming for a popular poet October 21, 2010: The poet Zakariya Amataya, who grew up in a province of Thailand now splintered by violence over ethnic and religious differences, manages to bridge the divide with the universality of his verse A Muslim poet from a largely Buddhist district, Amataya's background is just one of the many attributes that sets him and his work apart: Next month, Mr. [...] by Poetry News

University press springs eternal October 21, 2010: The once-notable poetry series form Princeton University Press has experienced something of a dry spell over the past two decades — until now. The press relaunched its poetry series by enlisting New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon to oversee the process, who in turn chose Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City as the first book of poetry. [...] by Harriet Staff

Finnegans Wake gets illustrated (finally!) October 21, 2010: A French blogger named Stephen Crowe is illustrating Finnegan’s Wake. Surprisingly, the images are not necessarily dream-like, and closely resemble the familiar cartoonishness of contemporary children’s books. It’s not nearly as trippy as, say, Mary Ellen Bute’s wonderful 1963 film adaptation of the book, or as startling, say, as Zak [...] by Harriet Staff

UVA audits the Virginia Quarterly Review October 21, 2010: The University of Virginia issued its report on the audit of the Virginia Quarterly Review yesterday, a process instigated by the July 30th suicide of Managing Editor Kevin Morrissey and the workplace bullying allegations against Editor Ted Genoways that followed. Though the audit found "no specific allegations of bullying or harassment prior to [...] by Harriet Staff