News Archive

Winning poem in Bad Poetry Contest: “Brain chiggers on my brain!”

Courtney Love’s memoir to include poems.

"If Wordsworth wanted to write some beautiful poem about a sunset, he just waited for the right sunset. I don't have that luxury. Calvin Trillin on his deadline poems

Sylvia Legris and Kamau Brathwaite share the Griffin Poetry Prize.

The most talked about poem this year.

Voices from the National Recitation Contest.

“The cold fact is that general bookstores sell few poetry books.”

“Where poetry grows like weeds.”

The Beats are still at Café Trieste, talking about who’s the greatest.

Jean Valentine remembers ’50s at Radcliffe.

At weddings, “Rilke gets a real workout.” —David Orr

Edward Field’s Bohemian rhapsody: The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.

Leonard Cohen on his “small, shabby” life and his big new book.

Wole Soyinka’s priestly authority.

Claudia Emerson back in print: "makes you wonder what you might be missing."

“The only way the public can become more comfortable with poetry is to be bombarded by it.”—Lisa Buscani, Poetry Center of Chicago

Famous Pakistani poet spurns Bollywood.

Need to throw a book launch party but don’t have a place to do it? Try Mt. Everest.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on this day in 1917.

The obsessive search for a missing 1966 Neruda tape.

The “Howl” book, one more take.

Poetry poised to be ignored on iPods, too.

Bob Holman vs. Sherman Alexie in the World Heavyweight Bout Poetry Championship.

Walt Whitman, Chuck Berry, and their long American lines.

In the Twin Cities, poets board buses, read to passengers.

A teacher known for digressions and dramatic readings of death poems.

The Walt Whitman “Invincible City” tour.

Anna Akhmatova: great poet/saint or self-interested bad mother?

Politically charged slam poet says he’s under surveillance.

Samuel Menashe in his crowded SoHo apartment.

Robert Pinsky on bad poetry.

The World Cup: hooligans, headers, and . . . poetry?

Poet Jose Suarez Donoso: "a living piece of Chilean political history."

"Nobody does a better Heaney imitation than Heaney."—William Logan

Seamus Heaney on his new book, his rustic cottage, and the underworld.

William Butler Yeats was born on this day in 1865. And, yes, it is possible he is rolling over in his grave right now.

Do we need any more manly poems?

"The person who reads X Marks the Spot (both the book and poem) and is not moved has a heart of stone." John Yau on Bill Zavatsky

"Guantanamera," a poem about freedom, is overshadowed by the realities of Guantanamo Bay.

Donald Hall is “outspoken.” Also he is a New Hampshire “state treasure,” a writer of “edgy, anguished” verse, and “very down to earth.” He is, in other words, a piece of work.

Fighting to bring back a banished alphabet.

"There is a ferocity in Mr. Hall's voice that undoes the pastoral." Verlyn Klinkenborg on Donald Hall

The quest to make the poem exactly right: Meghan O’Rourke dissects the Elizabeth Bishop brouhaha

A review of new poetry from Wave Books by a guy who hates most poetry.

Tamil poet Jayapalan on the Sri Lanka crisis: both sides are behaving like "arrogant football hooligans."

Maybe some poets don’t belong on your iPod. Maybe they’re bad for your ears.

Revisiting Ezra Pound in the loony bin.

Anselm Kiefer and the Russian poet. Every 317 years, something really big is going to happen.

Beowulf & Grendel: a scary movie where giant arms come out of the water and pull men from boats.

Billy Collins on voice, clarity, and the back seat of his parents' car.

Asbury Park poet has a new book: “How to Raise Children in the Year of the Apocalypse.”

Keillor is “the shock jock of wholesomeness.”

New Directions at 70, and a labored analogy to a cherry pie.

Blind taste test: Niedecker or Reznikoff?

Poet laureate doesn't cost taxpayers a dime.

Bukowski papers bought by Edmonton library: “His chronicles of a hard-drinking, bar-brawling life in Los Angeles will be ensconced with the likes of Chaucer and Dickens.”

Poet’s work praising the south is rejected by Mississippi, accepted by Louisiana. OK, but what are “cathead biscuits?”

A guy named Thomas Newton positions himself as the Ann Coulter of poetry, saving us from liberals. But is he scary-thin and hopped up on something?

Written Lives, a collection of short, playful literary biographies by Javier Marias. T.S. Eliot is described this way: “His whole face exudes a strange, almost vehement sense of hope.”

An appreciation of Paul Zweig, a master of “dramatic thinking.”

Bank buys Sir Walter Scott’s will, will display it in a money museum.

A poet and her day job: perhaps you can pay your credit cards and still write sad poems.

In A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme, Calvin Trillin writes poems that conservatives might not like.

New poet laureates for: West Tisbury, MA; Three Oaks, MI; James Monroe HS in the Bronx; and Victoria, Canada.

Blind, 95-year-old poet publishes his first book, working on second.

73-year-old publishes first book of poetry: “‘I have recently written about a cat,’ he said.”

Drug-addled rocker Pete Doherty to publish journals of drawings, photos, and poems, but doesn't show up for his own poetry reading, “probably because a soccer match was on.”

More than a century of collaborations between artists and poets on display at New York Public Library.

Do all limericks have to be “seamy”? A new collection tries to rescue the form from the gutter.

New: Summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Listening to poems about the countryside whilst cycling through the countryside.

Man writes poems in between shifts on the evaporator line at Denso Manufacturing Michigan Inc.

Review of Robert Hershon's Calls from the Outside World: poetry grounded in the workplace.

Poems about anxiety for anxious investors.

New biography of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. As a teenager she wrote under the pseudonym “Tatar Princess.”

A flamenco musical meant to evoke Lorca.

Women inmates write poems about the trouble they’ve seen.

Alice Quinn on memorizing poems and her you-know-what about you-know-who.

A poetry hoax that would’ve made JT Leroy proud.

Revising Indian history text books, taking out political poems and “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

Virgil bust disappears, reappears in Queens.

Listen to Leonard Cohen on his Book of Longing.

Houston bookstore rescued by well-heeled patrons.

Frank O’Hara would’ve turned 80 today. "Grace to be born and live as variously as possible."

Experimental Canadian poet wins Griffin prize, finds herself too distracted to finish reading Vikram Seth epic.

Teacher assigns "The Wussy Boy Manifesto" while on maternity leave.

Poet, former Osama captive, now writes for Days of Our Lives.

Poems to read at a gay wedding. Or not.

Former football player takes off his shoulder pads and his jockstrap and publishes a book of poems.

Deadline poet Calvin Trillin finds a candidate who could make his life easier.

What if writing poetry was like taking the driver’s exam?

The Bronx tries to come out from under a mean old rhyme.

John Ashbery interviewed: remember when poets could live cheap in the Village?

Chemistry and poetry: a match made in hell?

Play evokes life of Vietnamese poet who invented the genre “crazy poetry.”

World Cup referee writes romantic poems. But that doesn’t mean he’s a pushover.

In Burma, four are jailed for publishing anti-government poems.

Poems for Good Morning America’s departing anchorman. He was a “housewife’s dream.”

“Vendler loves poems. How strange it is to compliment a literary critic on this as a special virtue.” Mark Halliday on Helen Vendler’s Invisible Listeners

“The Iraq War: what and whose nostalgias animate this?”—John Keene answers three questions for Gapers Block

Donald Hall reminisces about his Harvard days, when everyone was a philosopher, even if their brains were pickled by martinis.

“I always thought of myself as a competent, minor poet.”—Leonard Cohen

Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow: poems smothered in correction fluid.

In Taiwan, poet uses occasion of book party to announce that she would like to run the country.