This blog will continue to be semi-hibernating for the next month.

Have a happy, healthy, safe, holiday and new year.

• — Legend has it that in the same room, Robert Lowell taught aspiring poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and George Starbuck, all of whom went on to become pivotal figures in modern American poetry. —
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• — Mexican writer Jose Emilio Pacheco wins Cervantes prize —
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• — An example of a book trailer done wrong? Nashville Post’s book writer Betsy Phillips points her finger at the trailer for Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. —
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• — When hallowed beat goddess Lenore Kandel died six weeks ago, the Chronicle published a nice memorial, with quotes from fellow travelers Peter Coyote, Gerard Nicosia, and others. —
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• — Entertainment Weekly: Poetry You Need To Read: H.L. Hix’s ‘Incident Light’ and David Lehman’s ‘Yeshiva Boys’ —
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• — The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has presented the 2009 National Translation Award to Norman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, for French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff and the Pen —
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• — Poem of the week: Gascoigne’s Lullaby by George Gascoigne —
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• — Cause of Jane Austen’s death not universally acknowledged —
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• — In “Honor Thy Sow Bug,” Walnut Creek resident Seaborg shares his opinions on what makes a good poem and the state of contemporary poetry today —
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• — How to deal with poets —
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• — Dylan. Polka. Christmas song. Nothing more needs to be said —
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• — “I love rhyming for rhyming sake. I think that’s an incredible art form.” —
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• — “I want to leave a poem thinking that I’ve contributed to the larger conversation in a meaningful way.” —
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• — David Citino, Poets, and Baseball —
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• — Patrick Janson-Smith introduces Luis d’Antin van Rooten’s extraordinary transformations of classic nursery rhymes into 18th-century French poetry, Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames —
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• — The actor and polyglot Luis d’Antin van Rooten turned classic nursery rhymes into 18th-century French poetry in Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames (hint: try saying it out aloud). Here we publish his version of Jack and Jill, with scholarly notes, as well as a reading of the text by the publisher Patrick Janson-Smith —
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• — End of a chapter for Borders —
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• — The Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh is staging a celebration of sound poetry. It is part of a series of exhibitions and events that have looked at what is called concrete poetry. —
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• — A Love Letter to the Letterpress —
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• — Britain’s equivalent of the haiku is your challenge this time, with a number of fiendish variations available —
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• — In the age of the PC, a surprising number of authors remain wedded to rather older technology —
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• — After a recent call from Rose Metal Press urging more women to submit to their annual chapbook competition, I started to wonder how equal the gender line … —
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• — In her presentation, she analyzed an early prose experiment by Dickinson published in Amherst College’s student-run literary journal in 1850. … —
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• — Clarinda Harris – Clarinda Harriss teaches poetry, poetics, and editing at Towson University, where she chaired the English Department for a decade. Her most recently published collection is Air Travel, Half Moon Editions, 2005. Forthcoming from HME in the spring of 2007 is a new collection, Dirty Blue Voice. She is the winner of numerous awards for her poetry and short fiction. One of her primary research interests is writing by prison inmates; she has worked with incarcerated writers for many years. You may contact the author at charriss@towson.edu. —
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• — The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show with Rachelle Cruz – Join Rachelle as she talks to Lee Herrick Lee Herrick is the author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007). His poems have been published in ZYZZYVA, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Bloomsbury Review, MiPOesias, and others, including anthologies such as Seeds from a Silent Tree: Writings by Korean Adoptees, Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita, and the 2nd edition of Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine In the Grove and teaches at Fresno City College in Fresno, California. —
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• — The MoE Green Poetry Dissicusion with Rafael F.J Alvarado & Chelsea Bayouth – join Rafael & Chelsea as they talk to Cecilia Woloch – Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, earning degrees in English and Theater Arts, before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison, and residents at a shelter for homeless women and their children. She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop, and is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University. Her previous books of poems are Sacrifice, a BookSense 76 selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004; and a chapbook, Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Competition in 2006. Her poems have been anthologized in When She Named Fire: Contemporary American Women Poets; Best American Erotic Poetry: 1800 to the Present; Billy Collins’ 180 More (Extraordinary Poems for Every Day), Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times, among many others, and have been featured on Keillor’s The Writers’ Almanac as well as in Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column American Life in Poetry. She spends a part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles and Idyllwild, California; —
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• — Joe Milford Hosts Anne-Marie Cusac – Anne-Marie Cusac is the author of the poetry books, Silkie (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2007), winner of the Many Mountains Moving Press poetry book prize, and the Wisconsin Library Association award; and The Mean Days (Tia Chucha, 2001), which won recognition from both the Wisconsin Library Association and the Council for Wisconsin Writers. An As- sistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Roosevelt University, where she heads the Journalism Program, Cusac is also a George Polk Award-winning journalist and worked as an editor and investigative reporter for The Progressive magazine for ten years. She is currently a member of the blog team forThe Huffington Post. Her nonfiction book, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America, was published by Yale University Press in 2009. [mp3] —
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• — Joe MIlford Hosts Clayton Eshleman – Clayton Eshleman’s most recent collection of poems, Anticline, is a manuscript to be published by Black Widow Press in April,2010. Recent book publications by Clayton Eshleman include he Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), his translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007), Archaic Design (Black Widow Press, 2007) and Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007). From time to time, in June, Clayton and his wife Caryl lead a tour to the Upper Paleolithic painted caves in southwestern France, sponsored by the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL. Next trip will be in June 2010, with the ethnographer Wade Davis coming along as guest lecturer. [mp3]—
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• — Weekly Poem: ‘Storm’ from Poetry | NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Podcast | PBS Kwame Dawes is director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute, where he also teaches as distinguished poet in residence. [mp3] —
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• — Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has called for Ted Hughes to be honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. —
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• — Inauguration of the Pushkin Monument in Asmara —
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• — First anthology of nature poetry from black voices debuts —
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• — Jack Elliot Myers worked throughout his adult life to write poems to get closer to people. —
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• — The Louisville-based literary magazine The Lumberyard, the most physically beautiful new journal I’ve seen this year, is a brother-and-sister operation. —
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• — December 1st Updates to the Online Best of 2009 Book Lists —
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• — Tune into “The Reading Is Poetry Review” with your host Hip-Hop/Jazz Poet A. K. Toney tonight. We will have the honor and privilege of listening to and reviewing selections from percussionist, spoken word producer extraordinaire Leon Mobley. [mp3] —
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• — One of our most tender poets (tough but tender), James Galvin, investigates his growing tendency toward poems that express his bitterness? toward politics, environmental despoilment, big business. Still he affirms, in poems that breathe with sweet relief, the ongoing possibility of love. [mp3] —
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• — Linda Benninghoff – from Jane Crown’s Poetry Radio | The author of the new chapbook “The Spaces Between Things”from Erbacce press.She is well published in numerous magazines including Ocho,Mipoesias and Agenda.She has four other chaps and won an award for her last “Elegies for Mary” published by Kritya press.India. She possesses a BA in English w/honors from John’s Hopkins University and an MA in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing from Stony Brook. —
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• — In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau revisits a single event nearly 100 times. His noble goal was to help literature unburden itself ‘of some of its scabs’ —
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• — Walt Whitman’s home earns literary honor —
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• — Art in Paradise: How Not to Become Yeats —
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• — I’ve seen Philip Levine’s face on the back cover of his books, and once in a while, on podiums at readings. When I saw him two feet away, in an NYU bathroom of all places, I was totally baffled. —
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• — ‘I began writing in mystery’ A few words with Philip Levine —
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• — Even if Jara’s murder is solved, she says Chile can’t achieve justice without addressing all 3,197 people, according to an official count, who were slain for political reasons before Pinochet finally ceded the presidency in 1990. —
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• — According to the Burma Media Association and Reporters Sans Frontieres, at least 12 journalists and dozens of media workers including poets and writers are still in custody —
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• — Two exhibitions now up feature works that strive to embody poems in art objects. —
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• — In her first book of poetry, “Water the Moon” (Marick Press, November 2009), Sze-Lorrain presents her entire life—from first memories to seemingly recent dinner parties—with elegance, boldness, and, perhaps most importantly, complete believability. —
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• — “Domestic Fugues” showcases Newman’s complete assurance as he takes his poems through a number of formal paces —
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• — SOU prof publishes book of flarf —
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• — Baudelaire poems fetch record price —
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• — Personal letters, first edition copies and even a suicide note penned by 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire are part of an exceptional set of items that go up for auction on Tuesday in Paris. —
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• — Nine days after becoming the first female professor of poetry at Oxford, Ruth Padel resigned when it was revealed she had sent emails bad-mouthing a rival. Now the poet gives her first interview since the controversy —
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• — ‘Bright Wings’ elevates birdwatching through verse —
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• — Anger as pub calls time on old poets —
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• — “I wanted to write poems of religious devotion in a less obvious and, I hope, more humble way – one people might more easily identify with,” says poet Franz Wright —
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• — Poet Marie Ponsot Celebrating Life at 88 —
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• — Meet Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick, poetry’s most artful kvetches —
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• — Joe Milford Hosts Al Maginnes – Al Maginnes is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently a chapbook, Dry Glass Blues (Pudding House Publications, 2007) and Ghost Alphabet which won the 2007 White Pine Poetry Prize and will be available in October of 2008. New poems appear or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Green Moutains Review, Terminus, Mid American Review and Southern Poetry Review. He lives in Raleigh, NC and teaches at Wake Technical Community College. [mp3] —
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• — The Poetry Show: Host Dennis Morton read David Baker and more. [mp3] —
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• — The poetic legacy of James Schuyler. [mp3] —
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• — Vintage Fringed —
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• — This poem began after a writers conference in Asheville, NC to which I took a small group of women students. Eudora Welty had just died, and we spent a portion of the morning session talking about her work, so her influence was much on my mind as the rest of the day unfolded. —
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• — Stephen Dunn, the Poetry of the Personal —
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• — Pennsylvania poet Sarah Dowling stands guard with language in her brave new collection, winner of the 2009 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. —
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• — Here you can listen to Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Osip Mandelshtam, Maximilian Voloshin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Arseny Tarkovsky reading their own work. —
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• — Homicide Rates Linked to Trust in Government, Sense of Belonging, Study Suggests —
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• — Brenda Starr makes way for Rumi, Neruda, and Merwin —
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• — SPD Poetry Best-Sellers November 2009 —
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