The Domestic Lives of the Poets January 19, 2011: Neal Cassady, the inspiration behind both Ginsberg's Howl and Kerouac's On the Road, is a beat icon remembered for his wild behavior and fast driving. In an interview in The Guardian, Carolyn Cassady, his second wife, speaks candidly about his dual life: a family man at home, and a beat on the road. The interview comes on the heels of renewed [...] by Harriet Staff

Bernstein on Bernstein January 19, 2011: Check out this video interview with Charles Bernstein, in which he discusses readers' responses to his work and his relationship to audience. by Harriet Staff

Peter Bogdanovich defines poetry on film January 18, 2011: On his blog Blogdanovich (yes, sorry, that's really what it's called), Peter Bogdanovich attempts to explain when it's appropriate to call a film "poetry." The term gets thrown around a lot in cinema to the point where it could be used to describe nearly anything more eloquent than Jackass, and even then there are those who would argue with that. [...] by Poetry News

Colorado Quagmire January 18, 2011: Tom Clark’s book The Great Naropa Poetry Wars is a blistering and long out-of-print polemic against a certain strand of Buddhist thought then influential at Naropa. In short, the story goes that Chogyam Trungpa, who ran a local Buddihist organization, presided over a party in which W.S. Merwin and his then-girlfriend Dana Naone were stripped and [...] by Poetry News

Your Blog is Great January 18, 2011: Futurepost, the blog run by Futurepoem Books, has been featuring poets’ responses to their catalog. The project itself is an interesting one: if poetry books are not sold by traditional means of advertising, but by “word of mouth” and, in many cases, a sort of academic/theoretical/MFA-ical discourse applied to the book to make it legible, [...] by Harriet Staff

Is Dante the father of modern physics? January 18, 2011: If modern physics got its start in the Scientific Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution sprung from Newton's ideas, and Newton's ideas marinated in Gallileo's theories, and Gallileo's theories generated from Dante's Inferno, then, yep, Dante is the father of modern physics. Also the father of modern physics? Kevin Bacon. The Boston Globe [...] by Poetry News

Poetry takes an “ad break” on Yahoo! January 18, 2011: In the never-ending debate about e-books, online journals, and digital poetry, perhaps the biggest question facing commercial publishers has been overlooked: Where do you put all the ads? Alison Heller would suggest—ahem,  Yahoo!—that you don't put them right in the middle of the poem. It’s a short poem and you think I need to be [...] by Harriet Staff

European and Anglophone identities combine in experimental UK poetry January 18, 2011: On The Best American Poetry blog, Leslie McGrath talks with Carrie Etter, an American expat poet living in England, about the relationships between American and British experimental poetry. When McGrath was managing editor of Drunken Boat and saw it as part of her duty to fortify herself with as much experimental literature as possible, she had [...] by Harriet Staff

Benefit for Dean Young in NYC January 17, 2011: From Coldfront: Matthea Harvey, Edward Hirsch, Mary Karr, Matthew Rohrer, Gerald Stern, Dara Wier and others will read at a benefit for the eminent poet and teacher Dean Young in Manhattan this Thursday night. Young is facing a heart transplant, and all donations will be used to help with his expenses. Admission to the event is free. To read [...] by Poetry News

Peace In the Middle East (via Poetry) January 17, 2011: Reza Aslan talks to Guernica about putting together his new anthology, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. The book is an attempt to build understanding between the Middle East and the English-speaking world, as well as an attempt to further our understanding of literary history. Aslan has faith in the universalism of [...] by Harriet Staff