Can “counterpoetry” win the war in Afghanistan? March 28, 2011: PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to Thomas Johnson, director of the Program for Culture and Conflicts Studies at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, about the role of poetry in galvanizing support for the Taliban and what it should teach US forces. Johnson recently co-authored two studies in which he found that "'the Taliban blow us [...] by Poetry News

Richard Prince loses copyright lawsuit; ordered to destroy paintings March 24, 2011: Appropriation artist Richard Prince has been ordered to destroy paintings worth millions of dollars after a court ruled that the work violates copyright, according to The Guardian. The paintings, which are “reworkings” of photographs of Rastafarians by French photographer Patrick Cariou, feature the addition of “spotches” and other [...] by Harriet Staff

Put your spine into it for National Poetry Month March 22, 2011: On the blog of the Association for Library Services to Children, Travis Jonker has put out an unusual call for submissions for National Poetry Month: book spine poetry. Last year, inspired by artist Nina Katchadourian, I tried my hand at book spine poetry and came away convinced that this was just the sort of thing that kids would take to. I [...] by Harriet Staff

Poets teach lawyers what the law is, who lawyers are, why people don’t like them March 22, 2011: Michael P. Maslanka (aka "Texas Lawyer") opines on Law.com about what lawyers can learn from poets: Poetry illuminates not just who lawyers are, but what they do. It provides not just a factual narrative but an overarching moral one as well. Such narratives, not facts, drive decisions. But, who knows how the narrative strikes a juror in [...] by Harriet Staff

Celebrating (and preserving) ten years of E-Poetry March 21, 2011: 2011 marks the 10-year anniversary of the E-Poetry Festival. The biennial "artist-oriented gathering" is returning to the place of its birth, SUNY Buffalo in May. On her blog, Lori Emerson, director of the Archaeological Media Lab at University of Colorado at Boulder, compares this year's program to that of the first in 2001, looking at how much [...] by Poetry News

Operation William Carlos Williams March 21, 2011: For one column, The New Yorker's Book Bench became a lab bench. Last week, Jeannie Vanasco visited a Poetry Lab hosted by Cabinet magazine in which Princeton professors D. Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven invited attendees to put on their lab coats, grab some alcohol (not the disinfecting kind) and operate on the work of William Carlos Williams to [...] by Harriet Staff

Finnegans Wake: The Movie March 17, 2011: Check out Mary Ellen Bute's 1967 filmic adaptation of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, now up on Ubu. From the site: A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce's [...] by Harriet Staff

Tone-deaf to sequencing? Try some Zappa March 16, 2011: John Wylam writes on his blog about the connections between sequencing music and sequencing poetry in a manuscript: if there is no justification for where a poem goes within a collection then maybe it should be left out entirely. Poor sequencing produces such a strong reaction that Wylam speaks of more than one occasion when he would  have liked [...] by Harriet Staff

Canadian poets take Manhattan (and Philadelphia) for four-day festival March 14, 2011: PennSound has posted over 20 videos and accompanying audio tracks from North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival. Taking place over four days in January at Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia and Poets House in New York, the festival was organized by Charles Bernstein and Sarah Dowling and brought together emerging and established Canadian [...] by Harriet Staff

A poet’s take on Wisconsin, as Wisconsin governor takes out poets March 8, 2011: Bloomberg reports that Wisconsin's Poet Laureate post, created by order of then-Governor Tommy Thompson in 2001, will be one of the casualties of embattled Governor Scott Walker's budget bill. The post comes with a stipend that covers up to $2,000 in gas money a year to make up for the poet's travels across the state to lecture and read. The [...] by Poetry News