Tom Meschery: [Golden State] Warrior Poet January 31, 2011: SLAM magazine (think "slam" as in "dunk," not "slam" as in "poetry") looks back on the career of all-star basketball player Tom Meschery who they call "one of the most unique players in NBA history." Besides being the first Russian in the league, his family's exile during the rise of communism also made him the first to be born in China and likely [...] by Harriet Staff

“Poets and Music” at KEXP January 31, 2011: KEXP is rolling out a 10-part documentary series covering the relationship between "Poets and Music," particularly when they enter into the recording process together. The first three are up already, each focusing on a different writer and their approaches to collaboration. Starting out with William S. Burroughs and Jim Carroll, the series takes a [...] by Poetry News

Egyptians protest with poetry January 31, 2011: The Daily Dish has the text of a poem Egyptian protesters have been chanting during this week of upheaval. "To the Tyrants of the World," by Abu al-Qasim al-Shabihas has become a rallying cry: Wait, don't let the spring, the clearness of the sky and the shine of the morning light fool you... Because the darkness, the thunder rumble and the [...] by Poetry News

Ooh, Nice Colours (sic) January 31, 2011: Derek Beaulieu's Local Colour has been posted as a free PDF over on Eclipse. The project is described: Local Colour is a translation of Paul Auster's novella Ghosts. Removing all of Auster's text except for the names of colours, Beaulieu then rendered those words, positioned where they appear on the original pages, as swatches of their denoted [...] by Harriet Staff

Simplicity and Scale January 31, 2011: Lemon Hound checks out the minimalist poems of Aram Saroyan, and thinks about their relationship to the contemporary. The focus is not simply on the smallness or conceptual nature of these poems, but on their seeming sincerity and subtle lyricism: These poems made me consider the relationship between sincere, naive and clarity. There is [...] by Poetry News

Turning Back the Clock January 31, 2011: Michael Lista, for the National Post, reviews Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, her new book on conceptual and concrete poetry. Lista, while sort of sympathetic to the project, argues against these tendencies and for what he calls an “arrière-garde”—which seems to be, simply, contemporary [...] by Harriet Staff

Peripheral Poetry January 31, 2011: Poet Tan Lin edited issue 6 of EOAGH, for which he invited contributors to submit a piece of "peripheral" writing - that is, a text that doesn't directly supply the material or inspiration for the authors' work, but is in some tangential, peripheral, or ambient way, related. It's a nice extension of Lin's idiosyncratic poetics of the ambient, [...] by Harriet Staff

Poetry posters on display in Arizona January 28, 2011: Arizona Public Media features a video interview with Richard Shelton who, as director of  the University of Arizona Poetry Center  introduced the practice of commissioning original posters for each visiting poet in the early 1960s. “We were bringing in nationally known poets but we were having a hard time getting people to attend,” he [...] by Harriet Staff

Poetry as Charity January 28, 2011: As previously reported, singer/songwriter Tom Waits self-released a poetry chapbook, Seeds on Hard Ground, and is donating all proceeds to charitable organization that provide homeless services. Well, according to MediaBistro, sales of the chapbook have already raised $90,000 for the cause, and it’s going into a second printing. From Waits’ [...] by Harriet Staff

The Best Books of a Bunch of Years January 28, 2011: The nice thing about n + 1's "2010 in Books" roundup is that the editors don't even try to stick with books that were written in 2010. Instead of crudely assuming that the best books of the year are those notable books which happened, by some accident or other, to be published that year, each of the contributors writes a short blurb about a book [...] by Poetry News