News Archive

Rumsfeld's peculiar language, set to haiku. You know you can't know what you don't know, right?

Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda wins the Cervantes Prize.

Have a read between the bombs and the raids: sending poems to Iraqi citizens.

Mother jones: In Forty-Five, Frieda Hughes mourns in the style of Sylvia.

"I regarded sandbox society with trepidation": Silver Jews bard David Berman's misspent youth.

Tupac-like, the late A.R. Ammons's oeuvre grows by three.

How to get your audience to sit still during a long reading.

Anne Carson: “I have no idea what this sentence means but it gives me a thrill.”

From eye to I: Lisa Robertson’s sweet new style.

You KNOW you've been waiting for this: the Harold Bloom–Minutemen mashup.

Gothamites gripe about the subway via verse.

Frederick Seidel: The discomfiting work of “a very luxury man.”

Who are you: Pete Townshend’s windmill technique residue from past life as Sufi?

“The rubric of the interesting”: Weighing in on the National Book Award finalists.

All about the Betjeman: the Times reviews A.N. Wilson’s new bio.

Text-messaging the 19th century: Muldoon, Carson, and more top year’s best.

The Braille world: Blind 12-year-old writes poem about prisoners who translate words to bumps.

So much depends on “Ginsberg’s compelling ambivalence”: Rethinking Allen Ginsberg.

“The poet’s house was a city of glass”: Martín Espada’s shape-shifting verse.

Talk about the passion: an elaborate love poem, laid out street by street.

“Real simple”: Pearl Harbor poem from late WWII vet.

“Venim shall spew from the angels hearts”: Making peace with your poorly spelled juvenilia.

Make it big: New graffitist sprays Irish rhymesters and Wham! in Manchester.

How to get ahead in the poetry world: Busboy Langston Hughes slips verse to diner Vachel Lindsay.

Did Emma Hardy die of syphilis?

James Laughlin and New Directions: the true, cracked story.

From the New York Times: a very polite "Poetry Chronicle."

Can't sell your poetry in bookstores? Try motorycle shops.

Eleanor Lerman: a visitor from a "psychic twilight zone."

"I think the 'Aeneid' should have been burned and Kafka's works should have been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art."—Helen Vendler.

Wrestling over the corpse of Aeneas, hoping the poor dead guy will tell us something about the world.

Ever heard of a looking-glass prarie?

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner continues to exert its influence.

Emily Dickinson: Certainly we should "resent a redemption" that didn't include flowers.

The cult of Rumi spreads to the UN.

Late night TV: James Lipton reads poem about amorous sea mammal.

Somebody needs to get fired: Missing comma discovered in Emma Lazarus poem at Liberty Island.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is now a French Commander. One can't help but wonder what his army would look like.

Why is the idea of writing so narrowly defined? Shelley Jackson interviews Vito Acconci.

Shakespeare: poet or philosopher? Wait a second, didn't he write some plays too?

Group to translate 100 works of Iranian literature.

Man, somebody really loves that T.S. Eliot guy.

That's Ms. Homer to you!

Pre-riot-grrrl rants: Charles Bernstein looks at the fiery verse by the women from the Weather Underground.

In the restored Keats house, you'll be able to see the love poem he wrote in his copy of Shakespeare.

Rapper Nas: "Yo, I wonder if Langston Hughes and Alex Haley got blazed before they told their stories."

What poets are really pushing product this week? Check out our best sellers column.

In between all that spying who knew those folks at the CIA even had time to read?

Paul Muldoon + Jim Morrison = Love.

Ever get the feeling you’re never going to finish Wordsworth’s The Prelude?

We love titles that are sentences: Oulipian Jacques Roubaud’s The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart.

Of spirit: Bloom’s American Religious Poems.

Galway Kinnell poem conjures “fluorescent mustard” and book lice eating through a dictionary.

Leithauser on Fagles’s Aeneid translation: “Free verse, with the ghost of a hexameter serving as loose armature.”

Tips for dub poets on big Jamaican stages: “You haffi come wid vibes, lyrics, voice must be powerful.”

Listening to Wisconsin inmates’ anger-freeing verse.

Hey—what rhymes with lagi beramai-ramai?: Underperforming Malaysian tourism czar responds with poem.

Parlez-vouz ’Political Jabberwocky?’

Insomnia today, via C.K. Williams: “Not to sleep / wasn't always so punishing.”

“I feel used up”: Ford plant downsizes, and lifer starts writing poetry.

In Italy, an ailing poet’s death wish: “I am neither melancholic nor manic-depressive. . . . But what is left to me is no longer a life.”

Buy this pub: Dylan Thomas drank here.

A visit from St. Moneybags: “‘Twas the night before Christmas” original fetches $280K.

The ancient and the local in A.N. Wilson's Betjeman bio.

A talk with Marge Piercy: “I remember living on oatmeal for a week or more.”

Can you quote me now? Korean cell phone features engraved poem.

“No stocking on the mantle, just boots filled with sand”: Christmas verse for our wartorn time?

Bly at the Y: Telling stories and eating flowers.

Ailing Italian poet gets euthanasia wish, conservatives call for doc's arrest.

Are we in the midst of a Baudelaire revival?

This is your brain. This is your brain on Shakespeare.

The buried life: Problems with a new T.S. Eliot bio.

Adonis on Islamic countries: “There can be no living culture in the world if you cannot criticize its foundations—the religion.”

Is this a poem by an unknown soldier—or just a variation on this?

R.I.P.: Rubaiyat translator John Heath-Stubbs, 88, and Urdu poet Munir Niazi, 78.

Ralph Angel works through a “whole bag of things.”

Remember when Ginsberg read at Moody’s Skid Row Beanery?

“Sharp hogs that . . . grunt for crumbs”: D.C. described in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “heroically unfashionable” epic.

Adventures in landscaping: Spiffing up the Langston Hughes marker.

It takes one to tango: Collecting C.K. Williams.

“Oldest punk rocker in history” left behind 30-40,000 songs. The lyrics resembled “beat haikus.”

Going back to Chaucer: Canadian rapper channels English bard, LL Cool J.

Nathaniel Mackey on the “imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become.”

SoHo is SO over: Poets House is loading up thousands of poetry books and moving downtown.

Policeman loves poetry, but don’t make a federal case out of it.

Creative writing: it’s so hot you might burn your fingers on your overheated laptop.

“To convey pain, you must be happy!”: Roberto Benigni plays nonsensical poetry prof in Iraq.