News Archive

Locating "greedy narratives—where the poem boils over" in Lisa Lubasch's latest.

Anne Carson conjures J.M. "Coetzee basking / icily across from you at the faculty table."

All that is solid melts into Baudelaire.

Ah, did you once build Jamaica Plain?: The tale of the Carpenter Poets.

"Just the right amount of companionship and loneliness, stimulation and ennui, sex and loss": Clover's latest makes a "best of '06" list.

Rhyming "sorcery" with "sky": Statue of Liberty bard Lazarus flirted with Emerson.

Jane Gentry's Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig: "I alone have lived to tell this / little story."

Amiri Baraka looks for signs of outtelligent life.

Kerouac on Long Island: wearing khakis, lying on the road, writing "The Northport Haikus."

Joyelle McSweeney on Ben Lerner: A touch of Edson and Tate here, Ben Marcus's flattened tone there.

The comic vision of Charles Bernstein's Girly Man: "This is a totally accessible poem."

"Ted Hughes had translated seven stanzas of it, and this meant unfinished business": Simon Armitage translates "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

Connecticut laureate Marilyn Nelson promotes "waiting-room poetry."

Sound idea? Setting Dante to opera—and rock.

California laureate Al Young's '07 resolutions: "Memorize one poem per week."

Sandburg documentary maker goes for "more provocation."

Kicking off the Auden centenary: "Observing every man's desire / To warm his bottom by the fire."

Children's poet Jack Prelutsky smooshes animals together.

Japanese emperor pens waka to celebrate grandson's birth.

Pound and Bishop publisher Laughlin was "a kind man, a sensitive man, a forebearing man."

Statue of the Shakespeare of Ukraine stolen from Toronto park, head later found at smelter.

Trash talk: Gust of wind frees Vachel Lindsay letter from garbage bag.

It's the bicentennial year of Longfellow, the "most revered and reviled of all American poets."

Graywolf keeps backlist alive; Albert Goldbarth rumored to smile.

The Shevchenko saga continues: Smelter keeps severed statue head as conversation piece; should it be welded back on?

"My soul is made fresh by you/And our Baath Party blossoms like a branch turns green.": Saddam Hussein, poet.

Adrienne Rich: "I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire."

Edna St. Vincent Millay poem—destroyed in a hotel fire and reconstructed—to get dramatic reading.

Thanks, prof! Korean writer plagiarizes former student's 23-year-old work, claiming it deserved exposure.

Did Ginsberg’s generosity hurt his own art?

“Scream for help through a horn”: Yusef Komunyakaa always goes back to jazz and Vietnam.

Helen Vendler: “Art is about life, not something marginal.”

“She’s a god here”: Maya Angelou makes the move to Harlem.

“Creatures like vultures inhabit this poetry”: Chinua Achebe gets “nuff respeck” in Jamaica.

Charles Olson advises Edward Dorn: “Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt [sic] that than is possible to any other man.”

The N-word “is not made for public consumption”: Catching up with the Last Poets.

Here I go and I don’t know why: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts Patti Smith.

Alice Notley beats the big boys at their own game.

Chinese poet jailed for satire.

After the “Poetry Palace”: Detroit second-grader has poem in Kooser column, but tragedy befalls her teacher.

Septuagenarian John Haynes snags Costa Prize with book set in mud-walled Nigerian bar.

Elephant Man’s poetry: “‘Tis true my form is something odd. / But blaming me is blaming God.”

Swedish silence and light: Translating Tomas Tranströmer.

“2007”/“heaven” rhyme not enough: Kate Moss discards love poem from Pete Doherty.

Homerward bound: Odyssey fans circle around location of ancient Ithaca.

Double Billy: In addition to our regular list, we run down the top-selling poetry titles of 2006.

“But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust”: On infamous '20s poem “The Wild Party.”

As Thomas Hardy grew older, “it was failure that increasingly occupied his thoughts and inspired his best writing.”

“Lady—why didn’t you think of the children then? / when their homes were wrecked by your ambition?”: Ex-wife of filmmaker Shekhar Kapur blogs in verse about a homewrecking actress.

Tyger beat: Exhibit of Blake notebook also displays drafts by Philip Pullman, Patti Smith.

Burns poem condemning those who sold out Scotland was originally folk song about disastrous colonization scheme.

Chilean exile remembers a world of burning books.

A rare look into Ginsberg's stay in the psych ward.

Maybe Dante didn't look so tough after all. Maybe he looked kind of worn-out.

Are poetry teachers a bunch of left wing longhairs?

Holy cow! Richard Wilbur has a swimming pool and sometimes he finds live cows in it.

T.S. Eliot, a brilliant, super-famous, undeniable bigot.

Discovery promises to "electrify 19th-century Romantic scholars around the globe." That is, if their electricity is not out.

Charles Bernstein knows how to answer a question like no one's business.

Well knock me over with a feather, Seamus Heaney wins another prize.

John Ashbery in the New York Times: "There can be such a thing as too much poetry."

A restaging of Amiri Baraka's 1964 play Dutchman: a still-relevant rage, and a clear thread of misogyny.

Southern literature conference raises the questions: does it matter where you're from? Do collard greens affect the imagination?

British-born Indian poet causes critics to go bananas.

Eavan Boland: "I can always recognize people who are out of their own country."

Poetry and music together again via Ms. Patti Smith, o' course. Notice ex-Sonic Youth Lee Renaldo's handsome gray hair.

The fight to save Rimbaud and Verlaine's Camden Town garrett.

Victim's poem leads to arrest of sex offender.

Hardy wrote love poems to his wife even though they fought like cats and dogs until she moved into the attic.

British poet Betjeman had a bevy of girlfriends.

Presumably bored and broke, men steal statue of Ukranian poet and take it to the chop shop.

Can someone live to be 125 by eating granola and reading Gregory Corso?

Water marks: Hurricane Blues captures plight of New Orleans.

“51st (dream) state”: Poet’s multimedia show attempts post-9/11 insight.

Kevin Young reimagines the Civil War—and creates an assassin named Jim Crow.

“I think that I shall never see / A touchdown lovely as a tree”: Activist/ex–Berkeley prof tree-hugs, rewrites Kilmer.

Ooga-booga! National Book Critics Circle names poetry award contenders.

Q&A with Emory poetry prof yields at least one prejudice: “I tend to shy away from ‘cowboy poetry.’”

Paging Willard Scott: Derek Walcott turns 77 today, and Louis Zukofsky would’ve been 103.

Communication breakdown: Lesbian poem, told in phone messages, yanked from Chinese exhibit.

Heartful Dodgers: High-schoolers love Ko-Un at Wordstock.

Robert Burns Day is coming up—time to grab some haggis.

“Take my death shroud and / The remnants of my body”: Lines by Jumah al-Dossari, captured in late 2006 and still imprisoned at Guantánamo.

NBCC rundown: Frederick Seidel’s book pulses with cheek, finery, and decadence—he’s the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry, and beloved by bikers.

Torill Kove’s Oscar-nominated short: Bad weather, hungry goats, and a broken heart.

Indie-film aesthetic, pregnant teens: Close-up on NBCC award finalist Daisy Fried.

Dante’s skull reveals intense frowning.

Padgett: I remember Joe Brainard.

Lampooning the airless: Kenneth Koch in poetry and prose.

Robert Bly: more than Iron John.

A new Vallejo translation finally sees the light.

Wilfred Owen's final hours.

The Baltimore Ravens were named after Edgar Allen Poe's poem. That is just weird. Maybe Plath's hometown football team could rename themselves The Daddies?

Jay Parini reminds us why Lewis Hyde's The Gift should be read and re-read.

One thing Hart Crane proved: It was entirely possible to stay drunk throughout Prohibition.

"A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed."—Jim Harrison on Karl Shapiro.

What poets will be wearing via Fashion Wire Daily. Poets with fashion sense? Have these people ever been to the AWP convention?

David Gates on Robert Frost's "whacked, contradictory" mind.

Poet stops writing, realizing Creeley will always drown me out.

New biography reveals Thomas Hardy as a rebel among prisses.

A victim's confession: Poem about rape leads cops to rapist.

In his Washington Post column, Robert Pinsky riffs on Girly Men and the rise of fascism.

Jordanian-Palestinian poet always sees trouble around the corner. Can you blame him?

Poems by Coleridge's daughter discovered.

Cannon, writer of light verse, dies at 84. She even made it into Golf Digest.

Jim Morrison poem will be set to music, and the great New Order will come out of hiding.

Mystery solved: Leonard Cohen is The Man.

Readers fight about peace and war. Well, that certainly seems like a worthwhile topic to fight about.