PoetryFoundation.org
A daily digest from the Poetry Foundation's Web site, which publishes feature articles on poets and poetry, news about the poetry publishing, and reading guides to poems from its comprehensive archive of more than 8,000 poems.
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Learning Lab: Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias” by David Mikics
Mar 11, 2010 2:00am
The critic Leslie Brisman remarks on “the way the timelessness of metaphor escapes the limits of experience” in Shelley. Timelessness can be achieved only by the poet’s words, not by the ruler’s will to dominate. The fallen titan Ozymandias becomes an occasion for Shelley’s exercise of...
24/7 Relentless Careerism by Jim Behrle
Mar 8, 2010 4:36am
“Let’s just begin by saying that there are more poets than ever before in the history of literature—and therefore more magazines, reading series, and tiny publishers. There are probably 800 or so active writing programs in the United States alone. I could have looked up the actual...
The Soul That Grows in Darkness by The Editors
Mar 4, 2010 1:39am
In the last 100 years, perhaps no other artistic medium has provided more fodder for poetry than the cinema. Movies have become central to the poetic imagination, whether the poet celebrates the movies or reacts against celluloid saturation. While Sidney and Shelley exhausted a good deal of...
Good Poems About Ugly Things by Molly Young
Feb 24, 2010 3:48am
Frederick Seidel. I wonder: Is it all true? I begin to read his Poems 1959–2009, and the first thing I notice is his poetry's dazzling mix of the historical and the individual. Into the emptiness that weighs / More than the universe / Another...
Nevermoreland by Abigail Deutsch
Feb 17, 2010 7:38am
At midnight on October 8, 2009, about 50 people gathered on the sidewalk before Baltimore’s Westminster Church. Some wore jeans. Some wore pajamas. Some wore capes and gowns and girdles. The drivers rolling down Fayette Street slowed to peer at the assembly, which bulged beyond the...
Inventing Michael Field by Michelle Lee
Jan 27, 2010 4:37am
Some 125 years ago, a new playwright named Michael Field created a buzz among London literati with the print debut of two blank-verse dramas in a single volume: the ancient Greek Callirrhoë and the English historical Fair Rosamund. Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund announced the “ring of a...
Carl Sandburg Stops Making Sense by Ross Simonini
Jan 13, 2010 1:42am
Nonsense is for everyone. It falls off the tongues of all speakers of all languages everywhere, from Hugo Ball in Switzerland to Aimé Césaire in Martinique to SpongeBob SquarePants in Bikini Bottom. True, nonsense words and sentences can’t make arguments or walk through A-ergo-B lessons, but this is part of...
In Memoriam: Ruth Lilly, 1915-2009 by The Editors
Dec 31, 2009 5:18am
The Poetry Foundation is grateful for Ruth Lilly’s extraordinarily generosity and kindness. The staff and trustees of the Poetry Foundation are greatly saddened by Ms. Lilly’s death and extend their condolences to her family. Thanks to Ms. Lilly’s munificence, the programs of the Poetry Foundation bring poems to 19 million...
The Poetry of Deep Winter by Annie Finch
Dec 22, 2009 8:04am
“Unlike autumn, in whose complex and fertile imagery poets love to linger, winter, that stylized season, is often evoked as a single deft emblem in just a line or two—lines that can be cold and heavy with the press of everything not said. It could be pain at a parent’s...
2000-2009: The Decade in Poetry by The Editors
Dec 21, 2009 7:05am
The past ten years have changed poetry in ways that have shocked and delighted even the most forward-thinking readers and writers. Online communities have flourished, dominant paradigms have shifted, and readers have found new solace in traditional forms. Poetry—and poetry communities—will never be the same. We asked poets and critics...
The Robert Burns Zombie Cottage of Hotlanta by Nick Marino
Dec 16, 2009 1:50am
“To get to the Robert Burns replica cottage in the Ormewood Park neighborhood of Atlanta, you turn right at the Zesto burger hut. You pass a white picket fence draped in kudzu, then turn again when you see the Georgia Department of Public Safety building at the corner of Alloway...
The Good, the Bad, and the Good Bad by Abigail Deutsch
Dec 8, 2009 6:09am
“Yet just as cheese sometimes gets too moldy—to plunge forward with my metaphor in the blithe manner of James McIntyre—so can bad poetry rot beyond possible appreciation. Charles Lee and D.B. Wyndham Lewis discussed this problem in their famed anthology The Stuffed Owl (1930), a collection of bad poetry that...
The Cranberry Cantos by The Editors
Nov 20, 2009 3:36am
A list of Thanksgiving poems for family and friends. Read the list....
Learning Lab: Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker” by Jessica Burstein
Nov 18, 2009 6:54am
Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. While the actress Myrna Loy starred in the “The Thin Man” films, the Modernist poet Mina Loy was busying herself with the avant gardes of Italian Futurism, Dada, and to a lesser extent American Surrealism. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar...
Washington, DC, Poetry Tour by The Editors
Nov 18, 2009 6:53am
The Washington, DC, Poetry Tour reveals our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets, including Archibald MacLeish, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. From the hallowed halls of the federal buildings to neighborhood side streets, the tour features poems written in and about DC, as...
Absolute Necessities by Jeff Gordinier
Nov 18, 2009 1:24am
“See, I can’t seem to stop myself. The other day I left Baby Grand Books in Warwick, New York, with John Keats. Last spring, somewhere between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, I stumbled into a boxcar-shaped used-book outpost next to a taco stand and ended up riding northward with Tom...
Learning Lab: Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Emily Warn
Nov 11, 2009 4:51am
Why was Anne Hutchinson punished for being outspoken about religion and politics, while Bradstreet became a cultural icon? One answer can be found in her poem “To my Dear and Loving Husband.” From our contemporary perspective, it reads like a traditional Elizabethan love sonnet (composed of 12 lines instead of...
Poetry and Project Runway by Stephen Burt
Nov 11, 2009 2:13am
Many poets, like many designers, love technical challenges; some poets have organized books (Robyn Schiff's baroque Worth, Angie Estes's nimble Chez Nous) around haute couture. No wonder, then, that Project Runway counts poets among its fans.—Stephen Burt finds a connectiton between poetry and Project Runway....
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