The great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died this past Wednesday at the age of 88. And while she was never one for travel herself, her poetry did, and it touched millions around the world. Among her myriad admirers was Woody Allen, who, in the 2010 documentary Sometimes Life is Bearable,...

This past Wednesday was Robert Burns day in Scotland. The annual birthday celebrations in honor of the great 18th Century poet featured the traditional bagpipe music and boozy dinners, and, this year, the release of a Burns Night iPod app to help make the most of your celebrations....

Chinese writer and activist Zhu Yufu was charged with publishing a provocative poem this past week (the official charge was "inciting subversion of state power"). Zhu's poem is entitled "It's Time," and here it is in translation:

It's time
It's time, Chinese people!
It's time,
The square...

The fifth season of the American-Idol style poetry competition Million's Poet premiered this past Tuesday in the Middle East, and it seems that the Arab world's most-watched TV show is only getting more popular: in the run-up to this season, it attracted more than 20,000 applicants from more than 20...

The death of Kim Jong-il and the installation of his son Kim Jong-un as North Korea's new "Supreme Leader" has the internet abuzz with speculation as to why Jong-il's other sons were passed over for the position. The International Business Times covered the story with the headline, Poetry,...

For the past 14 years, Greg Clugston, a reporter for Salem Radio Network (SRN) News, has written and performed a Christmas poem for the White House Press Corps based on Clement Clarke Moore's classic "A Visit from St. Nicholas". The reading is usually a press-only affair, but this...

Ted Hughes is probably best known in this country -- when he's known at all -- as the husband of Sylvia Plath, and for the controversial role he played in her tumultuous life and tragic death. But across the pond, Hughes is remembered as one of the great poets of...

For 20 years now, commuters trudging down the pedestrian walkway between Port Authority and the Times Square subway station have been met with a series of lines of poetry that comprise what the New York Times has called "The World's Most Depressing Subway Poem." It's entitled "The Commuter's Lament" or...

Nothing says toughness like deep voiceovers, portraits of blue-collar Americans, and football. So the brains behind Chrysler's critically acclaimed new ad campaign have excelled by incorporating gritty, steel-toned Detroit street scenes with an Ajax of a football player named Ndamukong Suh. But their latest ad, which premiered during...

A number of musicians, including Rufus Wainwright, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, have performed at Occupy Wall Street, and many others, like Katy Perry and Kanye West, have stopped by to show solidarity. But Zack de la Rocha, best known as the frontman for the band Rage Against the Machine,...

A biographer has discovered seven unpublished poems by the great World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. Dr. Jean Moorcroft Wilson found the poems in some of Sassoon's war diaries kept at Cambridge University. Their discovery complicates our understanding of a man best known for being one of a handful of...

Poetry has been at the heart of many of the ups and downs of the Occupy protests these past few weeks. In New York, organizers garnered national attention and praise for their literary accomplishments, which include establishing a library in the Northwest corner of Zuccotti Park and hosting a weekly...

With Halloween just around the corner, I think it's a good time to share some of my favorite frightening poems. In the selection below, a Robert Browning monologue puts us inside the mind of a very disturbed individual; Edgar Allan Poe puts us inside his own -- also disturbed --...

Why a column about the great drug-induced poems? I wish I could say I got the idea while camping out with some of the more "colorful" protestors over at Occupy Wall Street, but the truth is more pedestrian: the idea came to me while trying to write a poem with...

A person can bet on just about anything in the UK. A few clicks on the website Ladbrokes and you've laid a few pounds on a volleyball game, a few more on the UK version on X Factor, and, if you aren't careful, you've bet last week's paycheck...

An American named Jesse Anderson has developed a computer program that tests whether enough monkeys typing on enough typewriters could ever reproduce the works of William Shakespeare. Anderson used Amazon's cloud computing system to set up millions of "monkeys" (which are actually simple computer programs) that randomly bang out nine-character...

Hiking in the redwood forests six months ago, bay area writer Michael Rothenberg was suddenly struck by a desire to use the power of words to unite artists and communities around the world. That desire grew to become 100,000 Poets for Change, a massive undertaking that, today, will...

An erotic poem by Frederick the Great was discovered in a Berlin archive this past week. The poem is entitled "La Jouissance," which can be interpreted to mean either general pleasure or, more specifically, the pleasure of sexual climax. Based on the lines first printed in the German newspaper Die...

Is the proliferation of texting among young people actually bringing them closer to poetry? Britain's poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy thinks that, in some ways, it is. Last week, she told the British newspaper The Guardian that there are parallels between poetry and texting.

The poem is...

The Indian city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) has hatched an odd, but perhaps ingenious, new plan to curb traffic, one that has the added benefit of incorporating poetry into the daily lives of the city's commuters.

Kolkata is a city that knows a thing or two about traffic management....