Four More Laureates! Four More Laureates! December 9, 2010: Lauren Gunderson, over at the Huffington Post, wonders why there’s no Playwright Laureate. Her argument stems from the fact that the job of Poet Laureate entails “raising the status of poetry in the everyday conscience of the American public,” and drama, in her view, is also in need of some status-raising. Furthermore, she argues that the [...] by Poetry News

Dean Young needs your help December 9, 2010: Poet Dean Young has a degenerative heart condition that has deteriorated rapidly recently, and now he is in need of a heart transplant. Young has lived with congestive heart failure due to idiopathic hypotropic cardiomyopathy for years, but his condition has taken a turn for worse. Tony Hoagland has written this request for help on [...] by Poetry News

What is Poets Theater? December 9, 2010: John K blogs about his experience as a participant in an evening of Poets Theater, organized by Patrick Durgin, who also published The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil. The interesting part of this post is not simply the detail surrounding the preparation for such a production, but the [...] by Poetry News

Closed captioning provided by used books December 8, 2010: The Wave Pictures - Sweetheart from Ben Reed on Vimeo. This music video for The Wave Picture's "Sweetheart" is made out of animated, torn up, drawn on and maybe even a few intact secondhand books. "I will write you without poetry," they sing, but no matter-- it's all in the visuals. The text and images go together beautifully, just like [...] by Poetry News

Poetry best sellers November 28-December 4, 2010 December 8, 2010: Not much has changed at the top of the contemporary best seller list this week. The game of musical chairs between Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Kay Ryan, and Terrance Hayes continues, with Oliver’s Swan perched in the number 1 spot. Further down the list, James Richardson’s new collection, By the Numbers, makes its first appearance at number [...] by Harriet Staff

Voice Alpha offers advice for the reading-lorn December 8, 2010: Voice Alpha describes itself as "a repository for thoughts, theories, suggestions, likes and dislikes and anything else related to the art and science of reading poetry aloud for an audience." After posts comparing how different readers can approach the same poem; the benefits and perils of things typically taken for granted at readings, such as [...] by Harriet Staff

The Texture Queen December 8, 2010: Over on the Verse magazine blog, Amani Morrison has soaked in Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes: The narrator’s hyper-awareness of the eccentric and the mundane paired with her curious, exploratory nature push the reader beyond the bounds of the ordinary, stimulating contemplation of “ant-sized objects,” “Tokyo advantages,” and “the [...] by Harriet Staff

Live interview with Cedar Sigo TOMORROW 4pm EST December 8, 2010: Join us here at Harriet tomorrow, December 9, at 4pm EST for a live interview with "Craft Work" blogger Cedar Sigo. The CoverItLive comments section will be open for questions, so feel free to ask Cedar about his writing process during the course of the interview. San Francisco poet Cedar Sigo was born February 2, 1978. He was raised on The [...] by Poetry Foundation

Blind item from the last century’s literary world December 8, 2010: Half-century-old blind item: An anonymous user asked the MetaFilter offshoot MetaChat to help find the name of the poet her artist aunt had an affair with in 1950s New York. As the aunt is getting up there in years, the user had only a few clues to go on. He is anthologized "in that famous book with all the poems." "The Oxford Book of English [...] by Poetry News

The 18th century poetry police and an electronic cabaret December 8, 2010: Jeremy Dibbell reviews John Darnton's new book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris on his PhiloBiblos blog. The book centers around the 1749 "Affair of the Fourteen," referring to the number of men arrested for distributing (in various not necessarily material forms) poems critical of Louis XV. These poems [...] by Harriet Staff