Olympic athletes hit the (poetry) wall in London December 13, 2010: With pretty much every other "boosting" substance in sports coming under scrutiny these days, London thinks Olympic athletes could use a little inspirational help from poetry, according to the BBC. Winning Words asks fans to nominate their favorite works until January 6th for inclusion on a poetry wall that will live in the Athletes' Village, [...] by Poetry News

Chet Baker album with Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold gets a proper release December 13, 2010: eJazzNews reports that one of the last recordings of Chet Baker's career, Telemark Blue was also his first jazz-and-poetry album. Recorded with the Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold in 1988 three months before Baker's death, the album will finally see a proper international release on Norway's Hot Club Records. Vold himself worked with many jazz [...] by Poetry News

China My China December 13, 2010: Graywolf Press is scheduled to release a bilingual edition of poems by Liu Xiaobo, the currently incarcerated winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Price. The collection will be entitled June Fourth Elegies, and will mark the poet's first translation into English. According to Publisher's Weekly: Liu, who is serving an 11-year prison term in China [...] by Harriet Staff

Punk’s Not Dead, and Poetry’s Not Either December 13, 2010: Anis Shivani, in The Huffington Post, asks a number of “prominent” poets a series of totally abstract questions: Is American poetry at a dead-end? Have American poets betrayed the great legacy of modernism? Why or why not? What worries you about the present moment in poetry? Do you see signs of life? Where is the most promising new work [...] by Poetry News

Dave Haselwood & The Auerhahn Press December 10, 2010: Dave Haselwood founded the Auerhahn Press in 1958. The first title he printed was The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners. The story I have heard (from Dave himself) is that he loaned Wieners his own room at the Hotel Wentley, as Wieners was without a place to stay; when he returned, he found the room empty but for a sequence of poems typed and [...] by Cedar Sigo

Conceptual Dump December 10, 2010: Daniel Nester, on his We Who Are About to Die blog, has posted “lots of conceptual writing links and clips." Of course a dump of links, such as this one, is a great way to immerse oneself in a writing practice, but it also raises serious questions. Nester includes not only the obvious choices (Goldsmith, Place, etc), but also a number of [...] by Poetry News

Copy This Book December 10, 2010: Listen here to an interview with Marcus Boon, whose new book, In Praise of Copying, argues that “copying is inherently human, to do so is technologically inevitable, and is really the greatest complement.” The show also includes interview clips with DJ Spooky, Susan Scafidi, and Carol Randel. by Harriet Staff

National Science Foundation experiments with Poet Pops December 9, 2010: On KUER, Utah Poet Laureate (and former Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute director) Katharine Coles reports from Antarctica, where she is currently based as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The program, designed "to enable serious writings and works of art that exemplify the Antarctic heritage of [...] by Poetry News

Cedar Sigo Speaks! December 9, 2010: Craft Work with Cedar Sigo by Harriet Staff

In the case of Classroom v. Chatroom, everybody wins! December 9, 2010: Lisa Russ Spaar writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the divide between writers inside and outside the academy. This divide, she says, is acutely felt by those on each side. From the point of view of the academic: Those “inside” tend to be acutely conscious of poets teaching at other institutions, many of whom were our [...] by Harriet Staff