Poetry News In Review
Specimen Days
The Fist
World Poetry
European Council President Publishes Second Haiku Book
Israel’s National Poet Bialik Honored in Odessa
Prince Charles Records “Favourite” Poem for Poetry Day
Recent Reviews
Backward Glances
Ashbery's Poetry Continues to Defy Criticism in Quick Question
Broadsides
Notes on The Incredible Sestina Anthology
To Our Readers
Drafts & Framents
Appleton Will Start Sidewalk Poetry Program in 2014
London Transport Authority Tackles Tube Etiquette with Poetry
London: Transport for London is aiming to use poetry to teach the capital’s commuters “poetiquette” and think twice about dropping litter, obstructing doors and other antisocial behaviour that contributes to travel delays on the tube. From Monday until Friday a collection of London poets, including rising star Amy Acre who appeared at this year’s Latitude festival, will give recitals at some of London’s busiest train and tube stations as part of a wider TfL Travel Better London marketing campaign encouraging commuters to be more considerate towards their fellow travellers. Read more at Gulf News.
Poetry In The News
"Michigan Poem" Goes Viral: Kinetic Affect's Video about State Pride “Caught Fire” over the Weekend
Forché Wins Poetry Fellowship
New Books
Headwaters: Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Ascension Theory by Christopher Bolin
Corona: The Selected Poems of Paul Celan translated by Susan Gillespie
Collateral Light by Julia Cohen
If you relish a poetry of the ear and eye, the light touch of vowels mingling in a breathing landscape, then you will feast on this book and these poems from Julia Cohen. Here the news is alive and subtly elegant. Here the cognate child builds her musings syllable by syllable to talk of insects on snow and little cliffs. Here the phrase is music and memory is inexhaustible. The things found in her night-garden mimicry should be deliberate; the colossal leaf; the broken dinner plate are replete with suggestive power. This is a voice indeed of an active and precise imagination. —Mark McMorris
Signaletics by Emilia Phillips
Dog Songs by Mary Oliver
Beloved by her readers, special to the poet’s own heart, Mary Oliver’s dog poems offer a special window into her world. Dog Songs collects some of the most cherished poems together with new works, offering a portrait of Oliver’s relationship to the companions that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. To be illustrated with images of the dogs themselves, the subjects will come to colorful life here. Dog Songs is a testament to the power and depth of the human-animal exchange, from an observer of extraordinary vision.
Correspondences
Poet Gregory Orr: Poetry Is "Concentrated Testimony" of Being Human
A Poem Close to Home
A Poet Reckons With Her Inheritance
William Logan
Scratching a Muse’s Ears
Envoi: Editor's Notes
Vicente and Me
From the Archive, 7 October, 1977: The Loneliness of the Nobel Poet
This article caught my eye. As the Nobel season is upon us, it's something of a memento mori to reflect on those who have won in the past and still have not achieved the height of recognition that we might naturally assume the award confers on its recipients. To be certain, I probably would not be familiar with Vicente Aleixandre had it not been for his Nobel Prize. But I feel as if my knowledge of him, a Nobel Prize winner within my adult life, is sorely lacking. There are so many new poets, new voices, new books that the ones from—when? 1977? —keep getting relegated to the bottom of the stack. But perhaps this is simply my own memento mori, the reminder that acquiring more books is not a stay against my own dwindling years, but a confirmation that if I were to stop now (which is unlikely), I would still have more books on my shelves than available time remaining in which to read them. But I will do not feel sorry for either Vicente or for myself. It's fall. The world is one big beautiful memento mori.