Poetry Hut Blog

Poetry News:

1. — She was a brilliant student, poet and author, who contemplated life and death with passionate intensity, so typical of an individual with an eighth house Sun in Scorpio —
2. — The good news is that the relatively dreary climate of poetry-publishing ensures that the chapbook will continue to flourish —
3. — ‘Paper Woman’ writes on body —
4. — For more than 2500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. —
5. — Asahi Haikuist Network —
6. — Nowadays acmeism is remembered only due to the names of outstanding poets, such as Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam —
7. — The Contester: Down Came a Contest, Cradle and All —

Poetry News:

1. — Sharon Olds: ‘I’ve tried to make sense of my life … make a small embodiment of ordinary life, from a daughter’s, wife’s, mother’s point of view’ —
2. — From terror to relief, humour to grief, death may be a black subject, but is one of the richest seams of inspiration to poets, and you simply can’t avoid it… —
3. — Traveling Poetry Hut —
4. — Tibet’s most famous woman blogger, Woeser, detained by police —
5. — Decatur Book Fest: Billy Collins is a sellout —
6. — There are certain notions about poetry that must apparently always automatically spring to mind. I’ve decided to start a list of them here. —
7. — Cheap & ridiculous poetry messages hurting fans —
8. — Jane Crown’s poetry radio invites poets,novelists and small press publishers to interview on their craft —

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One of the editors of Cider Press — Robert Wynne — has responded to (what appears to be) unethical behavior regarding their Cider Press Review Book Award. And Stacey Lynn Brown’s rebuttal. (I’ve read that Pavement Saw Press’ contest has been problematic. And did you know that there was no winner chosen this year for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize?)

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Every year, there are thousands upon thousands of poets contributing money into contests. In many cases each poet is spending hundreds and sometimes over a thousand dollars a year doing this. If we do a very conservative estimate that there are 4000 poets a year spending $250 (that would be roughly 5-6 contests and doesn’t include postage) a year — that’s a million dollars into this contest system.

— read the rest and take the Take the “Are Poetry Contests Killing Your Soul?” Quiz

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Game Show Vs. Riefenstahl. There are better (?) pictures:

Come On Down! — XXXOOO Love, Leni.

ps. Looking at the DNC pics also makes me hear rows of slot machines in my head. There needs to be a Harley in the background, rotating slowly on a turntable platform, surrounded by a bank of slot machines.

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Poetry News:

1. — This month, your task is to carry on with Coleridge’s unfinished masterpiece Kubla Khan —
2. — Was New American Review the Best Literary Magazine Ever? —
3. — Nike Langston Hughes commercial [you tube] —
4. — “An important piece from poet (and good friend) Stacey Brown on an unethical press and its dealings with her and her book.” —
5. — With a fresh, wry voice, Meghan O’Rourke can make the quotidian sound strange, the same way Joseph Cornell could assemble a magical collage —
6. — One of the problems with political poetry, then, is that like all speech, it exists at the mercy of time, history, and other people. —
7. — 50 Greatest Books: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats —
8. — Lansing Community College Professor Dennis Hinrichsen has won the 12th annual FIELD Poetry Prize for his manuscript, “Kurosawa’s Dog.” —
9. — Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, will speak about “The State of the Humanities” at Vanderbilt University, on Friday, Sept. 5, at Ingram Hall at the Blair School of Music. —
10. — Virgil, Monteverdi, James Joyce, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ralph Ellison and Derek Walcott are just a few of the artists to have transformed this spellbinding and mysterious epic into powerful works of their own —

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