News Archive

National Poetry Month, from Jorie Graham to flarf.

Punishment for vandalizing Frost's house: You have to study him.

Charles Simic: No jacket required at CUNY reading.

Aafa Michael Weaver remembers MLK's murder and decaying Baltimore.

Zimbabwe DJ lets listeners hear "poetry in its raw form."

A good time to be Welsh: Gillian Clarke named national poet.

Iqbal Saju Ahmed: How poetry can change your life.

Did Coleridge translate Goethe?

Frank O'Hara: Of painting, poems, and rooming with Edward Gorey.

Contempt and desire for consolation: Mary Jo Bang's Elegy.

Here are your Stegner fellows!

Sinéad Morrissey, Rosemary Norman, and David Kennedy win this year's U.K. National Poetry Competition.

Cowboy poet to entertain U.S. troops.

Life as an adventure: Angelou at 80.

National Poetry Month, the Canadian version.

National Poetry Month, L.A. style.

Did Maxim publisher—and poet—Felix Dennis kill a man?

Poetry contest scam features whimsical illustration of either Shakespeare or Rumpelstiltskin.

Eco-poetry: Jorie Graham's Sea Change.

In today's money, Philip Whalen's 1969 book On Bear's Head cost over $100. (For more on Whalen, read our piece.)

"Just like every other citizen, you have a right to run": Ralph Nader writes a poem to Hillary Clinton.

The moon's an arrant thief: robbery and poetry.

What would Frank O'Hara think about the Internet?

Cornell boxes and the language of math in new book by Chris Vitiello.

Simon Armitage vs. Echo and the Bunnymen—who would win???

Michael Dirda: If you like Paradise Lost, try Samson Agonistes.

Naomi Shihab Nye: Just like honey.

Nikki Giovanni on music, childhood, Tavis Smiley, and education.

Here are your Guggenheim fellows in poetry!

Thinking outside the box, and playing with Trent Reznor: Saul Williams's The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!

Stanley's House: Kunitz doc is Worcester-centric.

The Koose gives a reading.

Catching up with Wave's Joshua Beckman.

Sidewalking: bpNichol hits the pavement for National Poetry Month.

Jenny Holzer projects Wislawa Szymborska.

What the Jackson Poetry Prize means to me: Tony Hoagland nabs honor.

Daniil Kharms glares at you.

Jazz singer Dianne Reeves, on finding herself in Gwendolyn Brooks.

Writing Frost.

Grace Paley as dramatist. (See more Paley here.)

Seamus Heaney: "I am not a playwright."

Forget the Bible, read Leaves of Grass instead.

The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library: “Anything you perhaps don’t recognize, please Google.”

Saul Williams just does it.

Global warning: Jorie Graham sees change.

It's a tie! Robert Hass and Philip Schultz win poetry Pulitzer.

The passing of Kadammanitta and the story of Malayalam poetry.

Billy Collins: a chief cause of apoplexy?

Small, awkward, mumbling, great: Isaac Rosenberg.

Early Obama mentor's verse praised Soviet army, dismissed Christ.

Tracy K. Smith: the poet at Princeton.

Hass: Time and materials and a Pulitzer.

Regenerating a language tainted by Nazism: Listen to John Felstiner talk about Paul Celan.

Langston Hughes's father agreed to pay for his Columbia education—if he studied engineering.

Sinéad Morrissey: Please please please let me want what I haven't got?

"He's one of us": Oscar Wilde's tombstone is covered with smooch marks.

Is that a poem in your pocket, or are you just against National Poetry Month?

Firas Saad: Syrian poet's articles lands him in jail.

Nothing compares to Sinead Morrissey, winner of UK's National Poetry Competition.

Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal are duking it out—not for the Stanley Cup, but for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Sierra Club talks to Mr. Pulitzer, Robert Hass.

Cold War Frost: Brian Hall's new novel imagines the poet meeting Khrushchev.

Attention Josephine Hart: Maybe William Shatner will be free for your next Poetry Night?

China's Olympic torch travails continue with PEN's protest poem relay.

Harriet vet Mlinko weighs in on National Poetry Month: What does it mean to follow Black History and Women's History months?

For better or verse: 18th-century memoirist Laetitia Pilkington and marriage and men.

A.S. Byatt's love for Donne: Just a quirk of neuroscience?

Mary Jo Salter: We're turning into machines!

Brian Turner: Hard-nosed in Mosul, secretly scribbling poetry.

Lunch poems—don't forget dessert.

The best piece of Sarah Jessica Parker trivia you'll read all day.

Beatriz Lagos on her brainchild, Poem in Your Pocket Day.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seen through the work of Yehuda Amichai.

The Guardian on . . . how The Guardian trivializes women's poetry.

Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley sharing bath and bed? Hmm. We'll only watch it if it has something to do with Dylan Thomas.

"To bow to the cultural": Mary Jo Bang reads from Elegy.

Pulitzer winner Robert Hass: Can't pass the buck in Libya.

Poetry therapy at work.

Amazing Grace: Paley's posthumous Fidelity. (See our piece.)

The last of the Black Mountain Poets: Jonathan Williams.

Fifty years ago: Release Ezra Pound!

Prospect hummer: The King of Giggle Poetry shares his secrets.

Park that inspired Dylan Thomas slated for spruce-up?

The eternal question: Are pop lyrics poetry?

John Adams, no sissy, read poetry.

Purge overkill? Colin Farrell's verse attracts publishers.

California laureate suggests tax breaks for poets.

"My home town lies under heavy snow": Japanese tanka poet executed after years on death row.

Illinois laureate Kevin Stein: Make poetry cool with technology.

How Guantanamo Bay lawyer Marc Falkoff became an editor.

Saul Williams: Poet's old song gets new life in ad.

Girls Write Now: New York writers help teens get the word out.

"Unreliable memoir" between Australian civil servant and a poet slipping into dementia.

"Seven Nights of Uncreation": Unpublished poet rounds out U.K. abolition sequence.

Yet another variation on the "April is the cruelest month" lead!

"Free and brave thought": New Whitman doc is passionate, sensuous, poignant.

M.H. Abrams: More than just the first name in a lot indexes.

Would Shakespeare have protested the Olympic torch relay?

W.D. Snodgrass: "I hate the term 'confessional.'"

Ailing: Negritude father (and Bréton pal) Aime Cesaire.

Wordsmithery and morality: rethinking Kipling's "If."

Monday trivia: "Which of all the British poets came from the most deprived background?"

"People copying people who are copying people": Yeats's otherworldly recitation style still holds sway.

National Poetry Month is still going on! The scoop on Mary Oliver, Li-young Lee, and other bestsellers.

Styron's choice: As WWII Marine, novelist sought solace in The Pocket Book of Verse.

Poets without borders: Physician Fady Joudah gets Yale prize.

HBO's The Poetry Show just wants to have fun.

Listen to five poets read work on everything from Crime Watch to doo-wop.

Robert Browning: Best use of the word dartles.

Scenes from the Mayakovsky Museum.

Book roundup, from Ted Hughes to America at War.

Irish poet Robert Greacen, RIP: From a "wordy spinner" to something more refined.

Kid's laureate Prelutsky: guilty of giggle-making.

Reading Tennyson's In Memoriam: an elegy in 131 poems.

Mary Oliver and Mark Doty: window vs. microscope.

Maxine Kumin: "If I didn't write, what would I do?"

Uzbek poet Yusuf Juma: jailed, possibly tortured.

Blackbird and Wolf: Henri Cole's knack for solitude.

Like Mark Strand, Katie Couric has been eating poetry.

It's still National Poetry Month: Tidbits for those in a non-reading rut.

Veteran's poems took four years to build.

Nancy Pearson: transcending woe.

Truth in its Sunday clothes, for only $1.

Fred d'Aguilar, Nikki Giovanni: Virginia Tech, one year after the massacre.

Want to see Madonna? Contest awards tix/to poets who/write the four/best lines.

Historical whiplash: Wings star plays Anna Akhmatova.

Poetry forms huge constellation in the Iranian blogosphere.

Queen's English Society: Defenders—or antiques?

Beantown's first poet laureate, Sam Cornish, reconnects with John Ford, MLK.

Mikhail Tanich, RIP: Russian songwriter and Textile Town poet dead at 85.

Cinema giant Kiarostami to Iranian poetry readers: Stop focusing on rhythm.

It's an April thing: More pockets, more poems.

"She just said that John was a nice man": Betjeman's muse dies.

Aime Cesaire, RIP: Made French language "beat to the rhythm of his spells, his cries, his appeals to overcome oppression."

Automated acrostical poems: Not quite up to Shakespeare. (More here.)

Little song: A brief history of the sonnet.

National Poetry Month: It's not just for adults anymore.

Persian poetry from three centuries, set to music.

Compared to Frost, Billy Collins says, "a typical poem of mine would look like a college dorm room after a long weekend."

You will never catch up: Betjeman's first collection sold around 1,000 copies a day.

Could long book titles be Mark Yakich's secret to success.

Taliban to poets: Thanks for your jihad support, but maybe check with us first?

Posthumous Keats: How a resurrection really feels.

Anointed by Woolf: Joan Adeney Easdale, from poet to bag lady.

Bernard O'Donoghue: An Irishman in England.

In search of civilization: Auden to be subject of Alan Bennett's next play.

Poets fail, die in beguiling Bolaño collection.

Inch by inch: Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu's Secret Weapon.

"I smell a scene!": Nuyorican Poets Cafe turns 35.

"Vampyre Mike" Kessel, RIP: bluesman and open-mic poet.

WSU basketball star: Dribble, dribble—write.

Brian Hall's vision of Frost: When Robert met Nikita.

Michael Dirda on when poets break through.

Hirsch: spellbound by Brontë's "Spellbound."

Edward Hirsch on poetry: not a career but a calling.

If you live in the Bay Area, keep an eye out for poets laureate.

Queen's English Society: There goes rhymin'. . . .

Americans slim down—when it comes to poetry.

Sale of famous Australian poem's copyright to benefit animals.

My Boy Jack: If . . . you like the Harry Potter movies, maybe you'll want to see star Radcliffe as Kipling's son.

A 1958 letter from Kenneth Rexroth: "I had to come back to New York to realize how good [Ginsberg and Kerouac] are."

Who is John Ashbery?

Aimé Césaire, RIP: Sarkozy honors poet with state funeral.

Manic gloom: Philip Schultz's Failure a Pulitzer success.

In Dubaian battle: Ruler Sheik Mohammed's Struggle on the Sand script based on his own poetry.

More free Salt!

Yale Younger Poets winner Fady Joudah: shifting time, capturing texture.

St. Paul: Emily Dickinson marathon reading not a contradiction in terms.

Philippines: Poet Tomas Ongoco gets "environmental hero" prize.

Spring is here! Time to see Raymond Souster!

Hass talks about laureate days: "I went in feeling pretty good about poetry and came out feeling very good about poetry."

Bush rules! (We're talking outback poetry, folks.)

Indonesia: Reading Chairil Anwar's work as nationalism.

Late science-fiction maestro Arthur C. Clarke: The virtues of noncompartmentalizing.

George Oppen "centenary conversation" in Buffalo: Perfect index to our current "catalog of crises."

Dalai Lama praised Mao in verse . . . back in the '50s.

Canada's National Poetry Face-Off: Coulda been a contender?

Wynton Marsalis horns in on Yeats in PBS/Poetry Foundation videos.

New to Poetry City? Try to get Li-Young Lee to drive you around.

Poetry roundup: Action Books to Ashbery.

Poem by Shi Tao mirrors torch route, protests China.

Le Dat, Vietnamese poet censored in '50s, dies.

RIP, E.A. Markham . . . and Paul St Vincent . . . and Sally Goodman . . . and Pewter Stapleton.

Getting a kick out of lesser Keats.

Financial crisis raises Rilke's question (sort of): Must I bank?

After suffering under juntas, Argentine poet Juan Gelman gets Cervantes Prize.

Tom Skeyhill: Legend of the blind poet.

Poetry Pals: Literacy program bought.

April is the goo-est month: Classical Baby's The Poetry Show.

Was a poet's work too erotic for a bookstore reading?

Catherine Breese Davis: New York is something new: / The toadies like the toads they toady to.

"David Wagoner is hardcore."

"Venus and Adonis": Bringing a lubricious Shakespeare poem to the stage.

Why Oppen now?

Paula Robinson: darkness visible.

Shaping Ohio AG Marc Dann's e-mails into poetic form.

Collins again, praising Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind as a "little amusement park of a book."

Billy Collins: Going where prose can't.

Left, right: Marine Tyrsa Pratcher tells audience, "I don't know what you've been told / Poetry will not grow old."

Did you sit on someone's book? Blame a cheeky literary festival stunt.

Simon Armitage: The Gawain diaries.

Fujiwara no Teika: So influential there's a card game based on his anthology.

August Kleinzahler: Bard of food, used bookstores . . . and Bolivia.

Jackie Kay: Girl loves book, girl loses book, girl gets new copy of book delivered.

Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry: Dominated by Virginians.

Jorie Graham frames eco-conscious Sea Change with Shakespeare.

Juvie verse.

Is Agenda on your agenda?

Really flowery poetry.

Plath gets props from alma mater.

Margaret Drabble on the Dorothy Wordsworth enigma.

"Lighght" comes in spurts: Richard Hell on Aram Saroyan.

August Kleinzahler is "committed to getting it right in an era of sloppy thinking."

"Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! Weakness of joy": Joan Jackson, Betjeman's muse, dies.

Frances Richey, mother and war poet.

Don't try to imitate Frank O'Hara. It's not going to work.

The "swift iron burning bee": Isaac Rosenberg, war poet.

Poetry around the piano.

Germaine Greer pens a life of Ann Hathaway in the conditional tense.

A, C, G, T: Gillian K Ferguson's genome poetry catches the long tail.

More charming Armitage! Maybe he'll be our MySpace friend?

This charming man of letters: Simon Armitage from Sir Gawain to Homer.

Adam Foulds: What if you were told to save your literary papers—at 16?

"I'll tell you a story": Kevin Prufer moves to narrative.

April is the YouTubest month.

"Homeless poet, sorry no poems, everything stolen while I went to eat."

Albert Goldbarth's Jagger moment.

Self-publi-Nation: Walt Whitman did it—why can't I?

Brad Leithauser on Elizabeth Bishop: canonized and demystified.

Military mother Fran Richey.

Behind the scenes of Poetry Out Loud: No need to scream your Sylvia.

A final poetry month roundup: Campbell McGrath, Thomas Lux, and others.

Gillian Ferguson's free genome poetry.

Marya Hornbacher: Madness author tiptoes the Lowell-Plath highwire.

George Oppen: crafting poems, furniture.

Mark Doty collects himself.

Illinois scholar praises Phillis Wheatley, who inspired Kant.

Paranormal: Brooklyn poet laureate Ken Siegelman sees his life translated to screen.

Site of Nikki Giovanni's grandmother's house gets historical marker.

I loved when the Who did that song about Li-Young Lee . . . oh wait, his book is called Behind My Eyes?!

Love and death: Is Kathleen Driskell's Laughing Sickness contagious?

Elizabeth Bishop warms up.

Coin of the realm: Norway marks Henrik Wergeland bicentennial.

Spot on: Maya Angelou supports Hillary.

Poet of the natural world: Gary Snyder wins the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

P.S. Poem: NYC public schools spur students to write, publish verse.

Got a pamphlet? Happen to be Scottish? Well, it's too late this year, but get ready for next year's Callum Macdonald Memorial Award.

Next stop: No poetry!