Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the land / We hoped Santa Obama would bring fortune in hand. / Small businesses hung stockings by the chimney with care, / In hopes that stimulus funding soon would be there.
The days of poets scribbling their thoughts with quill pens are over. Today's young poets post their verse on the web, where they can instantly receive feedback from fellow romantic poets in Argentina.
Two poets -- singing the same song in different keys -- create new maps of poetic consciousness.
"No makeup, all attitude." The cast of Brenda Ann Kenneally's documentary photo project is comprised of single upstate mothers living beneath the radar of the mainstream American dream.
Sir Andrew Motion succeeded Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson and, immediately, Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He can sound like the el...
We cannot get away from the romanticism of war -- indeed, we romanticize it every day, even as we curse the notion. And this war is epic, to be sure. Think back to the first act in this play.
Every week, the Poetry Foundation compiles information from Nielsen Bookscan and puts together lists of the best selling books of poetry. Here are 2009's best selling books of contemporary poetry:
Who would not want a little more poetry in their life? And I am not talking about drama, I am talking about poetry. And not necessarily Keats either.
Keith Waldrop eschews any intention or meaning that you could point to in his work. He makes statements here and there, but his poetry, he's said, is about "having nothing to say and saying it."
The infidels are here to crush your pearls of wisdom. Sorry. This is especially bad news for readers who hope that the poets of the world know something special, and that poems exist to deliver the goods.
Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence will be interpreted by clueless reviewers as one about "obsession," just as they might view Nabokov's Lolita to be about "pedophilia."
David Starkey of the Santa Barbara Independent listed ten poetry books he finds fit for giving this season. The new Wallace Stevens collection stands out for me.
Memory has generated great poems from Simonides, famous for eulogizing ancient Greek nobility, to Coleridge, to the contemporary poets writing an "experiment in collective autobiography," The Grand Piano.
Just after reading the latest story about a famous golfer whose behind-the-wheel driving has turned out to be not quite up to par, I had a dream in which William Blake appeared to me and dictated the following.
It is the task of poetry to bring our eyes to bear on the heart breaking nature of our disappearances, which are unavoidable no matter our economic standing or our education.
It took me months and years before I finally gathered enough courage to print off a bunch of my poems, and plonk them furtively on the table of a trusted friend.
The dream of Obama is now dead. He has turned out to be, as I had begun to fear a few months back, really just like the others that came before him.
Van Rompuy is becoming known throughout the continent for his passion for writing poetry. Dubbed "Haiku Herman" by the British press, he is said to regularly compose haikus during his daily meetings.
In Mary Rowlandson's hugely popular captivity narrative from 1676, she describes her colony's struggles with the natives and how, when such a struggle was won, the town leaders held days of public thanksgiving.
I wake up every day with the belief in the power of a new day and beginning, the belief that good can come from the efforts I put into the day.
Nicholson Baker is a writer who can talk the afternoon away in the quirky, wise, erudite, fluidly funny high style that we know on the page as Nick Bakeresque.
