Happy Birthday, Anne Carson! The iconoclastic modern poet who published the arresting, compulsively readable Autobiography of Red turned 57 this weekend.
posted on Jun 23, 2008 - View this thread

Poet, playwright, novelist, mural painter, experimentalist, illustrator; a “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”; and perhaps “the greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott,” Alasdair Gray has a new book out.
posted on Feb 20, 2008 - View this thread

Poets on YouTube: Bukowski; Dylan Thomas; Jim Morrison; Allen Ginsberg; Sylvia Plath; Billy Collins; Cookie Monster; and what the hell, even Jacques Brel.

But there's plenty of readings by amateurs as well: for example, lilcutiewithabooty06 reads e e cummings; Michael reads cummings really fast; Tom Waits and Bono read Bukowski; bearded men read Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare; and what if Emily Dickinson had a ukulele?

Mouseover links to see titles; feel free to add your favourites.
posted on Mar 26, 2007 - View this thread

He complained to [Kingsley] Amis in 1943...that "all women are stupid beings" and remarked in 1983 that he'd recently accompanied Monica [Jones] to a hospital "staffed ENTIRELY by wogs, cheerful and incompetent." ...His views on politics and class seemed to be pithily captured in a ditty he shared again with Amis. "I want to see them starving,/The so-called working class,/Their wages yearly halving,/Their women stewing grass..." For recreation he apparently found time for pornography, preferably with a hint of sado-masochism".
John Banville on Philip Larkin.
posted on Feb 6, 2006 - View this thread

"So, tomorrow I take to the trail again, to the canyons south." With these words young artist Everett Reuss left the town of Escalante, UT to head into the desert never to be seen again. He was only twenty but had rubbed elbows with the likes of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Reuss has been described as a "total artist" [angelfire] working in paint, woodcuts and poetry to describe the marvelous wilderness of the Southwest. [more inside]
posted on Nov 10, 2005 - View this thread

“To speak in a flat voice / Is all that I can do. / . . . I speak of flat defeat / In a flat voice.”
James Wright's letters chronicle many of the major innovations in American poetry in the middle of the twentieth century. They also provide a compelling personal narrative of his life. Here, the American Poetry Review publishes a selection taken from the new volume "A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright". More inside.
posted on Aug 16, 2005 - View this thread

Anne Sexton, American Poet.......172 of her poems online I am reading a biography on her and thought I would share with the class. She had a tough time.
posted on Sep 16, 2004 - View this thread

"With his blue ox, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman traveled across young America . . . and helped the nation grow into the angry powerhouse it is today." End of the year (2000), pressure from Mr. Farlow to take the class seriously and pick a real poet, Honors Student has 15 cups of coffee and cranks out a masterpiece . . . Not Walt Whitman. Anyone have any information on teacher, student, or their subsequent careers? (via Blogdex)
posted on Apr 25, 2004 - View this thread

Seamus Heaney's Top Hip Hop Picks. Sort of. (You know: Seamus Heaney.)
posted on Apr 19, 2004 - View this thread

Some Of Our Best Poets Are Fascists: An interesting article by Guy Davenport. My own theory is that an inordinate percentage of great (and minor) Modernist writers were, politically speaking, bonkers. Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa and T.S.Eliot were all distastefully authoritarian, anti-semitic and, in general, rancorous old farts. Why is this, if anyone still cares? [Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted on Mar 26, 2004 - View this thread

Poets Against The War
Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:
The hour of your liberation draws near
We extend towards you our white hand
Once embraced by many in vain:
Indian, African, Vietnamese,
And washed clean of their colored red stain.
posted on Mar 22, 2003 - View this thread

Poets Against the War At Sam Hamill's Poets Against the War, the story of the recent cancellation (link to Canada's Globe and Mail), by Laura Bush, of a Feb. 12 poetry symposium at the White House. From the G and M article: Stanley Kunitz, poet laureate 2000-01, told reporters, "I think there was a general feeling that the current administration is not really a friend of the poetic community and that its program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the centre of the poetic impulse."
Hamill is gathering contributions from poets around the world, including Pulitzer Prize-winners Yusef Komunyakaa and W.S. Merwin, National Book Award winner Marilyn Hacker, novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, and Adrienne Rich.
This post is not intended the fan the flames of 'War on Iraq: Yes or No', but to explore Kunitz's contention: Is there at the centre of the poetic impulse a particular type of humanitarianism? Is there a space for poets and poetry in political debate? Are poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world"? [more inside]
posted on Jan 31, 2003 - View this thread

The Red On The Blue (And On The Button): Terry Eagleton's description of T.S. Eliot's politics is easily the best definition of traditional Conservatism written by an untraditional Marxist I've ever read.[More Inside]
posted on Oct 7, 2002 - View this thread

An aesthetics of inadequacy. "Despite Aeschylus's statement, 'All knowledge comes from suffering,' all that came from my suffering was suffering." An interview with Alan Shapiro, the author of Song and Dance, about poetry as an attempt of mourning.
posted on Aug 16, 2002 - View this thread

The Animated William Blake "embraces both the freak and the genius, illuminating the artist's visionary poetry with juggling and physical theater." Earthly delights include t-shirts and fortune cookies.
posted on Mar 29, 2002 - View this thread

National Poetry Month begins, or rather, began.
posted on Apr 3, 2000 - View this thread