Monday marks the first day of winter (though it's an absurd 57 degrees here in Washington as I write this column) and I've put together some poems for the occasion. I've overlooked classics like Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" hoping for a few that...

The Huffington Post's William Petrocelli recently recounted meeting Al Gore at a signing for Gore's new book on climate change, Our Choice. The two men discussed why Gore had written and included a poem in the book. Apparently, when Gore's editor said no to a chapter of doom and...

For a time, if you were lucky enough to be on Robert Frost's Christmas list, you could count on a card in the mail each year. Each married a Frost poem with a simple but beautiful rendering of the natural world or the New England landscape (you can view a...

On November 19th, Herman Van Rompuy was elected the first permanent president of the European Council, the powerful body that provides direction to the European Union. The (soon to be former) Prime Minister of Belgium was reportedly the only candidate no one objected to, no doubt succeeding, in part, because...

If you read a review of Keith Waldrop's "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy," this year's winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, there's a good chance it will include the word "postmodern" or "avant-garde." These are terms that put a lot of readers on guard, signaling experimental verse. And it...

Lou Dobbs resigned from CNN on Wednesday night, and rumor has it that the immigration-obsessed nightly news anchor will be following the Glenn Beck plan: if your shtick appeals to the fringe, why not head for a network with no qualms about stoking some far right-wing rage and cashing...

The new website PoetrySpeaks is aiming to serve as a social networking hub and online marketplace for poets. Visitors are greeted with a sleek, jukebox-style display of poet portraiture and an unpretentious atmosphere. And it's immediately clear that PoetrySpeaks casts a wide net: among the home page's...

The newly released Michael Jackson album This It It, a twenty track, two-CD set accompanying the release of the movie of the same name, features one of Jackson's poems, called "Planet Earth." The poem is rich with deep (if cliched) metaphysical questions, and, as you could probably guess, is a...

Fred D'Aguiar's latest book, Continental Shelf, has been nominated for the T.S. Eliot Award, a prize given annually to the best collection of new verse first published in the UK. The chair of this year's judges panel stressed a focus on poets "who have dreamed and who have dared." D'Aguiar...

I've been trying to track down English translations of poems by Herta Muller, the newest Nobel Laureate in Literature, but they are awfully hard to come by (if they even exist). Here in the U.S., Muller is primarily known--when she is known at all--for her fiction, though poetry lovers can...

In honor of National Poetry Day this past Thursday, the BBC commissioned a poll to name "the nation's favourite poet." The Brits, interestingly, chose an American...sort of. T.S. Eliot was born in Saint Louis but moved to England at the age of 25, where he eventually became a British subject....

A series of letters penned by the great English Romantic poet Lord Byron to his friend the Reverend Francis Hodgson will go up for auction at Sotheby's in London (no date has yet been set). The letters have been in the family of a former Prime Minister, the Earl of...

This week is Banned Books Week here in the U.S., an event sponsored primarily by the American Library Association (ALA) to draw attention to recent acts (and attempted acts) of book banning. You might be familiar with the well-publicized challenges to classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The...

The Pumpkin Spice Latte is back on the Starbucks menu, a sure sign that autumn is almost here (it actually begins on Tuesday). To help celebrate the season, I've collected excerpts from some of my favorite autumn poems below. SCROLL DOWN TO ADD YOUR FAVORITES!

John Keats, who is...

A soon-to-be-released movie by director Jane Campion explores the relationship between the great English poet John Keats and his love, Fanny Brawne. A poetry-based period piece might seem like a tough sell to theatergoers, but early reviews have been positive. Campion, at least, is in her element: her best-known film...

I tuned in to Tuesday night's Tampa Bay Rays/Boston Red Sox game hoping to watch Sox pitcher Josh Beckett carry my fantasy baseball team into the league semifinals. But Beckett was shaky, and I had grumpily turned off the game by the time Fernando Perez, a speedy outfielder called up...

One of my old professors liked to say that a poem isn't any good unless you can explain it to a three-year-old. I never would have thought one could apply that same standard to a doctoral dissertation, but then I came across a brilliant little website called Dissertation Haiku.

Two months ago, the Afghan poet Latif Pedram published the poem "Kabul" in the French newsletter Nomade. It is a poem of witness, sorrowful but necessary, that speaks to the city's violence and struggle--something Pedram learned about firsthand when, almost a decade ago, the Taliban forced him to flee Afghanistan....

Sixty-eight slam poetry teams from as far away as Fort Worth and Vancouver descended on West Palm Beach, Florida last week to compete in the 2009 National Poetry Slam. Over a five day period, the teams were culled down to four finalists hailing from New York and San Francisco--cities that...

There's a saying in the literary world that good poets borrow while great poets steal. By that standard, Madonna shouldn't be accused of anything more than borrowing, and some sage news outlets are accusing her of doing exactly that.

At issue is a love poem the pop star wrote...