Happy Solstice. 
- — References to Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings infuse this week’s poem, a quietly angry look at unemployment and managerial greed by a poet who deserves to be far better known —
- — Weekly Poem: ‘Mount Kearsarge’ from NewsHour with Jim Lehrer | PBS Donald Hall —
- — Keith Waldrop on Radio Open Source —
- — On Poetry: Beauty part of metaphor —
- — Happiest Americans Live in States Ranked Highest for Quality of Life —
- — What I look for in poetry may not be what you look for in poetry. —
- — Currents of poetry: Asheville literary magazine edition blends local, international flavors —
- — SPD’s Best-Selling Poetry 2009 —
- — Best poetry books of 2009 San Francisco Chronicle —
- — Winter Solstice Monday: Facts on First Day of Winter —
- — By the way, I think we poets should watch out for each other so we’re not WASTING our TIME, so if you want to know the name of said literary journal, I will be happy to let you know. —
- — News of Hughes —
- — Much of what interests me about poetry these days is the way the line between fact and fiction is necessarily and happily blurred. In poetry we can place what might have happened alongside what did happen. —
- — Marie Ponsot’s sixth poetry collection is propelled by playful lines and mature perspective. —
- — Proof that pre-historic people placed bunches of flowers in the grave when they buried their dead has been found for the first time, experts have said —
- — Five Great Fairy Tales You’ve Never Read —
- — Lorca’s civil war grave found empty —
- — The Saturday poem: Christmas by Leigh Hunt —
- — Veterans turning to poetry to heal their war wounds —
- — In the Middle Ages, these girls were highly educated poetesses, often princesses, rather like the courtesans of Renaissance Italy —
- — Writing is not for the old, says Amis. Yes it is, says James —
- — With colleges and universities cutting back because of the recession, the job outlook for graduate students in language and literature is bleaker than ever before. —
- — Book Review | ‘Rail Splitter: Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln’ —
- — Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, the smart, lyrical album is a loose meditation on the connection between music and longing, full of hooks and impassioned vocals —
- — Am I making too much of this? The fact that he’s relatively well-known and I’m relatively unknown makes me think that in the future people will remember his cover and then if they see mine, they’ll think mine was the copycat. —
- — 5 Manliest 20th Century American Poets —
- — ‘Poetry Is Dead’ hammers a nail into the stuffy genre’s coffin —
- — “I really should do a musical or play set in Shakespeare’s time, and have a fictitious Shakespeare, and have critics having fun knocking the shit out of him.” —
- — “Sweethearts” Were The Muse —
- — Reviews of New Fiction, Poetry, Mystery, Science Fiction and Comics — Publishers Weekly, 12/21/2009 —
- — You can insure absolute privacy and secrecy with “SCHER’S IMPROVED TELEPHONE MUFFLER” —
- — Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007), and the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights, 2009) and coeditor of the literary journal Parthenon West Review. Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Verse, Black Warrior, Poetry International, Barrow Street, Denver Qtly, Passages North and American Letters & Commentary. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature/creative writing at Western Michigan University where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney. [mp3] —
- — Jennifer K. Sweeney’s first book of poems, Salt Memory, won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard, Spoon River and Passages North where she won the 2009 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She was awarded a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and a residency from Hedgebrook. Sweeney holds an MFA from Vermont College and serves as assistant editor for DMQ Review. After living in San Francisco for twelve years, she currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney. [mp3] —
- — Gillian Conoley’s most recent collection is THE PLOT GENIE with Omnidawn Publishing (fall 2009). The author of six collections of poetry, her work has appeared in over 20 national and international anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Nuova Poesia Americana, and Best American Poetry. She has received the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, several Pushcart Prizes, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she teaches in the Program for Writers and Poets at Sonoma State University. She is currently translating Henri Michaux’s Four Hundred Men on the Cross. [mp3] —
- — Dana Guthrie Martin has been described as akin to “watching someone eat their young only probably a lot prettier.” She and her husband share their Seattle-area home with two hermit crabs, their robot, Feldman, and their hand puppets, Princess Baby Toes and Captain Baby Pants. She is the founder of Read Write Poem (http://readwritepoem.org) and co-editor of Mutating the Signature (http://mutatingthesignature.org). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Blood Orange Review, Blossombones, Boxcar Poetry Review, Coconut, Failbetter, Fence, Knockout Literary Magazine and Weave Magazine. Her chapbook, The Spare Room, is available from Blood Pudding Press. She blogs at My Gorgeous Somewhere (http://mygorgeoussomewhere.org). [mp3] —
