Happy Birthday, poets! We got you some pop-up poetry. October 18, 2011: Earlier this month, the British Library in London organized a pop-up poetry reading in honor of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who would have turned 100 this year. Anyone/everyone was invited to pick up a book of Milosz's work, select a poem, and read it aloud to passersby. The London-based Polish Cultural Institue put together a nice video of the [...] by Harriet Staff

Fanny Howe is not afraid October 18, 2011: A new feature on the BOMBLOG is Elsbeth Pancrazi on Fanny Howe’s Come and See (Graywolf 2011), a book published in May that is also, as Pancrazi writes, an "argument for a kind of art that teaches us to contain a large amount of uncertainty." More on that: (In Howe’s own words: “While a painting takes time and gives headaches,/A [...] by Harriet Staff

Timothy Donnelly’s Days of Yore October 18, 2011: Timothy Donnelly--author of, most recently, The Cloud Corporation and reader at tomorrow's Danny's Reading Series in Chicago--speaks to Astri von Arbin Ahlander at a blog called The Days of Yore, which indulges our interview fantasies with talks of childhood dreams. Here, the two also chat about writing programs, cooking, gardening, systems of [...] by Harriet Staff

“Beyonsense”: An evening of sound poetry with Ilya Kutik and Christian Bök October 18, 2011: Mark you calendars, Russophiles! Metarealist poet Ilya Kutik and sound poet Christian Bök will join forces November 2nd for an evening of avant-garde readings in Russian and English. The event will take place at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, as part of the exhibit Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, [...] by Harriet Staff

James Shapiro: “Hollywood Dishonors the Bard” October 17, 2011: Roland Emmerich, the filmmaker who obliterated the White House in Independence Day, razed New York City in The Day After Tomorrow, and destroyed the entire world in 2012, has now turned his sights to Shakespeare. His newest film, Anonymous, advances the controversial view that Shakespeare was a fraud and his plays were actually penned by [...] by Harriet Staff

The Poetic Merits of Drug-Induced Writing October 17, 2011: John Lundberg at the Huffington Post looks at the "great drug-induced poems," citing, firstly, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Lundberg writes: Coleridge didn't think much of the work, writing, "The following fragment is here published as far as the author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of [...] by Harriet Staff

Jarvis Cocker: “Lyrics are not poetry” October 17, 2011: Over at The Guardian, Jarvis Cocker, formerly of rock group Pulp, lays down the law, or at least his take, on writing lyrics/their importance/non-importance to pop songs and how they aren't, as many Intro To Poetry students think, poetry. He begins with a bit of personal history with the (pop) lyric: Many of my lyrics were hastily written [...] by Harriet Staff

Scan ‘em: An option for those who’d rather not die beneath their books October 17, 2011: “Print has an inherent flaw. It needs shelf space," said Evan Schnittman of Bloomsbury Publishing at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. A company called 1Dollarscan "has come up with a somewhat radical solution to this problem." And so The New Yorker's Book Bench reports strange news for bibliophiles. Here’s how it works: you ship them [...] by Harriet Staff

Baseball’s Poet Laureate? October 17, 2011: According to this column in The New York Times, Tom Miller wants to be baseball's Poet Laureate, "a role that has been vacant since, well, forever." We think since, well, Marianne Moore, but ok. Miller has been tweeting Milwaukee Brewer-related haiku here. From the article: Tom Miller Tweets haikus about Brewers games, and he wants to [...] by Harriet Staff

RICKEY’S POEM October 17, 2011: Rickey Laurentiis’s poem is one of the great ones. A poem that upon hearing aloud at a deliberately queer reading at AWP instantly became part of my vocabulary and I wanted to hear more and have and yet I keep helplessly returning to this one, called “Black Iris” with a dedication: “for Georgia O’Keefe.” I apologize, cornily, and I [...] by Eileen Myles