News Archive

"The clock was on the verge of striking. And you know something?/ It never did! Not while I was there anyway": We love us some Ashbery.

Pow! Biff! Beowulf!

Gossip/tailoring alert: C. Day-Lewis wore very wide trousers.

Poetryfoundation.org—a/k/a the site you're reading right now—has won a Webby!

"We are the Hokies": Giovvani's most popular poem ever?

Robi Mahan memorizes Tony Hoagland, and other notes from the Poetry Out Loud recitation throwdown.

Creating Australia, and "radical pastoral" in the U.K.

"Peevish and befuddled"? Times readers respond to William Logan's Walcott review.

Canadian poets feel financial pinch.

Yeats's EARLY ESSAYS: sentences as "passionate and calculating" as his verse.

Nikki Giovanni's book reaches #6 in wake of VT killings, and more bestseller news Behind the List.

LOL: txt msg laureate.

"Your" "poems" "are" "great"!

"Nerve-wracking, exciting, and rewarding": Amanda Fernandez recites "Ma Rainey" to win Poetry Out Loud competition.

Teachers who get mileage out of comic books should check out The Poem as Comic Strip.

The Poetry Foundation's future home, at Dearborn and Superior.

Rhyme and punishment: A poem points finger in UK murder case.

Fantasia Lonjose and Robi Mahan compete in Poetry Out Loud contest.

Great "Iosif" Brodsky bio—but you gotta know Russian to read it.

No award check or crown, but it's still pretty fun to be named the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere.

Contemporary Poetry Review on "recent and indecent brouhahas" of the poetry world.

Quick: Name John Greenleaf Whittier's hometown.

Lucille Clifton, the first African American woman poet to win the Poetry Foundation's Lilly Prize.

In Pakistan: text message love poem contest. Does :) count as an expression of love?

A new anthology of ancient Hebrew poetry is called "astonishing."

Deborah Garrison: don't hate her for rejecting your manuscript and being a Superpoet Supermom.

Writer argues: If Art Garfunkel reads a mean poem about George Bush, nothing will happen to George Bush.

Pham Ho, Vietnamese children's poet, dies at 82.

More about Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize, and the work of recovering erased histories.

University literary magazine loses its funding because students claim they've never heard of the thing.

Elaborate preparations ensue for a showing of Anne Bradstreet manuscript. They even hired a professional page-turner. Sounds like a good gig.

A visit to Poet's House prompts writer to ask: is poetry the equivalent of an endangered turtle?

Josephine Dickinson's Silence Fell: should a deaf poet be read differently from one who can hear?

In India, a blowout for poet Rabindranath Tagore's 146th birthday.

A myth debunked: Siegfried Sassoon didn't actually throw his war medal into the river.

Pretty actresses overtake Welsh town to film Dylan Thomas biopic. Citizens scramble to get gigs as extras.

Scam alert: a poetry contest where everyone wins. The catch: you have to buy the book with your poem in it afterward.

Ted Kooser tells students: read 100 poems for every one you write.

Detroit celebrates Ann Mikolowski, painter whose portraits of writers were beautiful and four inches wide.

Don't let these disappear again: new anthology of overlooked poems.

Shhhhh! Librarians faced with question: how to shelve and categorize self-published zines.

Berkeley spawns a supermarket poet. He claims to make a living at it, too.

Downloading poems via PennSound: the ipod types are going nuts for it.

In India: Every Sunday for half an hour, poetry will be on television. Please make a note of it.

Man decides to pay the citizens of his town to listen to poetry.

Tony Harrison: a poet capable of withering parodies and corny punning titles ("The Ode Not Taken").

A report on the joint reading of US and British poets laureate. Maybe it's high time for a British invasion?

Our bestsellers columnist asks a few pointed questions about the success of Meghan O'Rourke's Halflife, and continues to describe books as "hopping" around the list, even though Easter is over.

Write a poem about Harry Potter, win a hideous bookshelf.

Laura Messner reps the Granite State at Poetry Out Loud finals.

Andrew Motion on the tumultuous life of C. Day-Lewis.

"My brain age is already old enough for a pension," and other salaryman poems from Japan.

Print reviews! The blogosphere! Can't we all get along?

The Rapture Club: Now they only eat guitars—and poetry!

Burying the lede: An interview with Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes: New John Donne bio.

Alvar Aalto, audio archives, all at Harvard's Poetry Room.

Baby Wordsworth? Tune your tots in to poetry.

"When you see a bunny sucking on a beer saying a one-line haiku, it's powerful."—cartoonist and poet Jim Behrle

Former British Prime Minister confesses to a secret poetry habit.

Delaware poet laureate to leave state. Article about it contains this regrettable phrase: "The poet laureate serves at the pleasure of the governor."

This just in from Jack Prelutsky, our Children's Poet Laureate: "Kids are not stupid. They're just short."

Physician, rhyme thyself!

Dana Gioia is "not just another arts administrator in a good suit" (not that his suits are bad).

"I am exploring new things like writing poetry," sez model Jerry Hall. "It is my catharsis."

Matthew Rhys: Playing Dylan Thomas.

"No-one must know how I tremble/When I hear a siren moan": Who wrote it—Bonnie or Clyde?

Did you know that Kevin Killian was the 1966 New York State Spelling Bee champ?

If we keep linking to stories about baseball haiku, maybe it will become a craze!

The zen of Gary Snyder.

Bei Dao, China's rock 'n' roll poet.

All hail the "Bard of Lawnboro"—but don't say "suburban."

Was R. Kelly trapped in the closet with Hölderlin?

"Absalom and Achitophel," John Dryden's satirical allegory, disproves the idea that works of political propaganda can never be literature.

For $1,100, you can live in the house where Kerouac was born (roll of teletype paper extra).

D.C. poetry fans/opticians: Make sure you catch Helen Vendler's lecture on the "binocular" poetry of death at the National Gallery of Art.

Allergen-free verse: Rich, Olds, and others contribute to mommy anthology.

What rhymes with "kiwi"? New Zealand establishes laureate post.

R.J. MacSween: A poet some call a "great unknown."

In article on Dylan Thomas biopic, reporter is (understandably) ecstatic that Cillian Murphy will play a military nut.

Maryland Better Business Bureau targets phony, expensive poetry contests that claim to be judged by a select committee. Well no wonder—that "select committee" phrase always gets folks frothing at the mouth.

Stalin's poems: better than Hitler's "badly drawn postcards."

Some strangely sexist generalizations about the figure of the "literary widow."

Bollywood star tries to win back wife by "bombarding her with poetry."

Itty-bitty portrait of poet Robert Burns up for auction in Scotland.

Well knock me over with a feather: Writer speculates that if Keats had lived, he would've kept writing great poems.

More on the vanity press con game: guy writes crappy manuscript, just to see if they will take it. They took it.

In Brighton, a poetry brothel where nothing particularly dirty happens.

Bring me her head, and I will pay you $11,319: Fatwa declared on dissident Muslim poet Taslima Nasreen.

Abraham Lincoln's toast to poet Robert Burns sells for a pretty penny.

Writer describes trip to Chile where poets loitered in the streets, trying to sell their stuff.

Poetry from inside the ten-year-old war in Sierra Leone.

"I don't really know who I am, or what I think, or what I believe unless I'm in the process of writing." A profile of Erica Funkhouser who just hit the Guggenheim jackpot.

Hey, let's get soused with Keats's ghost: Tourists are drawn to 400 year old pub where poet worked on "Ode to a Nightingale."

Nintendo putting out DS version of Basho's poems. Btw, what in the heck is a DS?

The parent trap: our bestsellers columnist discovers that everyone wants to read poems about moms and dads.

The Summer of Love is over, but that doesn't mean a guy can't talk about it all the time.

Minnesota governor decides a poet laureate isn't such a bad thing.

You are the "poets of this republic," Martín Espada tells Hampshire grads.

Not-so-silent spring: Rachel Carson's verse.

Adrienne Rich hits scan for her new essay, "Poetry and Commitment."

John Freeman on Pulitzer winner Natasha Trethaway: The landscape of her grief is so linear . . . one could almost pluck out the line breaks and emerge with a beautifully written paragraph."

Taboo you: Afghani rap with DJ Besho.

Not just Waiting: Beckett's drama publishers to put out his poetry.

On the shores of Gitche Gumee, a six-CD recording is born.

we are fascinated / by rosie's poetry / at least in theory.

Spoleto festival director sez: Poetry "not a lively art."

Monk business: Cistercian John Slater compares monastic life to "living in a sonnet."

"Buddhism has a clear and impeccable argument with regard to violence and war": Prague fest attendee Gary Snyder on activism and the environment.

Blake makes for a toe-tapper.

Billy Collins on a deadly combination: "People are completely justified in . . . their antipathy toward poetry because much of it is emotionally serious but also emotionally miserable as well as being incomprehensible."

Blacklist: Mother objects to negative color associations in six year olds' poems.

Ted Hughes, found in translation.

Canadian laureate George Bowering remembers Buffalo: "I went to the Anchor Bar and ate real wings and learned one of the two things that promise redemption to the USA."

His fans include Simon and Garfunkel and Teddy Roosevelt.

Poet Paul Portugues had a fan in 2Pac.

Philip Glass on Leonard Cohen's poetry: "He anthologizes himself."

Effort at rest: Pulitzer and National Book Award winner William M. Meredith dies at age 88.