A preview of poetryfoundation.org’s new site March 31, 2011: In the next few weeks, you’ll notice some significant changes on poetryfoundation.org. With the help of Tierra Innovation, we’ve redesigned the site to offer a richer online experience for poetry lovers.  We’ve added to what poetryfoundation.org already does to make great poems available to the online world. SEARCH and [...] by Poetry Foundation

R.I.P. Silliman’s Blog, 2002-2011? March 31, 2011: It seems as if Ron Silliman is over the whole blogging thing. Sort of. News quickly spread earlier this week that Silliman’s Blog was closing up shop, after a note from the author suggested that he was moving on to explore other forms of social media, which he sees as having become more relevant: I’ve been maintaining the blog for more [...] by Harriet Staff

On translating Apollinaire: Pilgrims of Perdition March 30, 2011: For almost a year I’ve been working on a co-translation of Apollinaire’s Alcoolswith Jennifer Pap, a close friend and a scholar of twentieth-century French poetry. Our motivations for this project are manifold. First, we simply wanted to work together on something exciting and difficult. Second, we had noticed that only one full translation of [...] by Julie Carr

Your brain loves art March 30, 2011: Morgan Meis reviews V.S. Ramachandran’s new book The Tell-Talle Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human, which attempts to explain art and aesthetics in terms of neuroscience. Meis points out that theories of art have existed as long as philosophy has existed, but now, according to Ramachandran, we know enough about the brain to [...] by Harriet Staff

The future of collage March 30, 2011: Pavel Zoubok curates the visual portfolio in the new Paris Review, and is interviewed on the PR blog. Zoubok also curates a gallery devoted near-exclusively to collage, and so it’s unsurprising that the interview circles around the present and future of collage work, in both the visual arts and literature: There is such a rich tradition of [...] by Harriet Staff

Maury Povich (!) donates $1m to Kelly Writers House March 30, 2011: Maury Povich donated $1 million dollars to UPenn’s Kelly Writers House, an important hub of poetry and writing in Philadelphia, which hosts and organizes multiple readings a week. Povich’s gift won’t go to the poetry side of things, but will establish the Povich Fund for Journalism Programs: In 2006, Povich and his wife, Connie Chung — a [...] by Poetry News

Mary Karr lunches with Studs Terkel March 29, 2011: Mary Karr reads on Tuesday, April 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago's Rubloff Auditorium. She took a few minutes to talk about what she's reading, what she's read, and who she'd quote: What line or poem do you find yourself sharing again and again? Too many to count. My message to young writers always comes from Beckett: "Fail [...] by Poetry Foundation

A call for more poetry activists among the laureates March 29, 2011: In an opinion piece for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Julia Baird laments the relative invisibility of poet laureates among the general public. The deficiency isn't in the public's taste for poetry but rather the title itself, the kind of person it's bestowed upon and what it should require of its bearer. Baird recalls the efforts of Joseph Brodsky [...] by Harriet Staff

The state of digital poetry publishing March 29, 2011: In Publishers Weekly, Craig Morgan Teicher reviews the current landscape of e-books for publishers of poetry. There's a heavy emphasis on "current" because the struggle for a standard that will support all of the formatting needs of poetry (and any book with a need to maintain any sort of design elements whatsoever) isn't going to come to a [...] by Harriet Staff

Poetry may find its way back to New York’s subways after all March 29, 2011: The New York Times' City Room reports that the MTA has begun talks with the Poetry Society of America to bring back Poetry in Motion. The program ended in 2008 and was replaced with Train of Thought, which met its own demise earlier this year. Since then, the New York subways have been devoid of the literature and philosophical quotes that had [...] by Poetry News