MetaFilter posts tagged with writers and poets

writers as journalists

dhruva — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:55:47 -0800

When authors and poets write the news "It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz (scroll down and select June 10th) editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. Read articles on integration at the giraffe enclosure, love in the cancer ward, mosaics in Tel Aviv, addicts at the Jerusalem rehab centre, and a visit to the grave of a holy man, among others. [via]

Autobiography of Read

zoomorphic — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:27:18 -0800

Happy Birthday, Anne Carson! The iconoclastic modern poet who published the arresting, compulsively readable Autobiography of Red turned 57 this weekend. The Canadian writer has been called “a philosopher of heartbreak” and “unclassifiable” due to her genre-bending novel in prose poetry, though in her own words she is measured and cerebral. Professor of the Classics, recognized as one of the definitive translators of Sappho, Carson’s appealing mastery of ancient literature and contemporary prose has garnered her more mainstream attention than many of her contemporaries, as well as peer accusations of shilling pretentious, anti-bourgeois pastiche, fomenting an intra-critics debate. So where do you stand? Read her poetry for yourself. Enjoy.

Unlikely stories, likely

jbickers — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:40:58 -0800

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. The “maker of imagined objects,” perhaps best known for "Lanark," also blogs his poetry/prose/plays, offers up a lovely archive of some hard-to-find volumes, and shows us the storyboards for the late lamented attempt at a Lanark film. If you’re curious, an excellent bio awaits, as does your new-found quest to locate his hard-to-find, out-of-print titles (requisite Wikipedia link for building your checklist). (Previously here and here.)

Anne Sexton- American poet

lee — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:08:04 -0800

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.

Ezra Pound Finally Makes The Library of America

MiguelCardoso — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 06:17:51 -0800

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.]