Every week, the Poetry Foundation compiles information from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales from more than 4,500 retail booksellers -- from Borders and Amazon.com to 400 smaller, independent bookstores. This information leads to our weekly best seller lists for contemporary poets, anthologies, and children's poetry.

This is...

The red carpet for a movie about a poem is small, but it's still red. Here at the IFC Center in New York for the premiere of Howl the press people are complaining that yeah, it's red, but it's too crowded, and there isn't enough room for the camera equipment...

Howl starring James Franco. It sounds like it's going to be another biopic or period drama like most -- all? -- movies about poets, like Sylvia, Bright Star, Il Postino, Barfly. Movies where the idea of poetry trumps the thing itself. You might hear a clip of a poet reading...

As sales of e-books on various platforms continue to rise -- Publisher's Weekly reported a 176% increase over the past year -- poetry appears to be getting lost in the shuffle.

Hillel Italie filed a story this week for the AP detailing how contemporary poetry...

Are you a poet? Do you feel overwhelmed by negativity? Feel like there's no hope for a poet in this world? Especially a female poet? Well don't despair. Spend some time with Amy King. She's the author of Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox), and, with Ana Bozicevic,...

Are all poets dead poets? Not a super cheerful thought here in the midst of a rainy Chicago spring, but it would solve some things if it were true. The ceaseless debate over whether or not poetry is relevant to the living and breathing getters and spenders of the world--most...

On Monday, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded Versed by Rae Armantrout their 2010 award for poetry. The collection is, they said, "striking for its wit and linguistic inventiveness, offering poems that are often little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading."

As it so happens, Armantrout delivered...

It's National Poetry Month, so media outlets all across the country are shining a spotlight on the art form they normally ignore, mangle, or treat with derision. Hooray!

Every year some spittle gets flecked from speakers who question the value of a month specifically set aside for poetry, but...

On the bus, I watch two elementary school girls in the midst of an argument. One, a big slovenly thing, rains profanity down on the other, a prim looking girl in pigtails. The prim girl's face twitches in paroxysms of rage and frustration as her astonishingly foul-mouthed peer berates her,...

Starting a small press or little magazine is easy enough. You look around, you see all this great work that isn't being read, and so you put your shoulder to the wheel and show 'em how it's done!

If you're lucky, your labor of love is very exciting for...

Last fall, writer Abigail Deutsch peered over a Baltimore coffin to look at the pale corpse of Edgar Allan Poe -- or at a latex replica of it anyway.

She was in Baltimore attending a celebratory vigil for Poe -- and a curious re-do of the poet's...

In addition to gorging on chocolate, champagne, and videos of Zapp and Roger, the editors at the Poetry Foundation are celebrating Valentine's Day with a love poems page. From this mix of classic and contemporary poems, we've been happily surprised with what has received the most...

The Huffington Post's "Books" page is celebrating Black History Month with recommendations from Baratunde Thurston that range from how best to explore a "post-racial" society, to why this site should change its name to "The Blackington Post."

To supplement this advice from the vigilante pundit, I humbly...

Rachel Zucker is a courageous poet. Not because she dodges bullets in a war zone (though I bet she would), or because she yells outlandish things on cable TV (I bet she'd do that, too), but because she writes poetry in a way that interrogates what it means to tell...

Everybody's a critic. Though some people would like to think of themselves otherwise, we all make distinctions. That's a fact. It's just that some of us are more forceful in our distinction-making than others.

Some readers might have, for example, taken in that first sentence and thought to themselves,...

Do you like books?

The covers, pages, signatures, glue-ings, and sew-ings that have been around from Dante's time to Dickinson's?

Or do you like readings?

The platform that has launched a million neo-Beats, and a million more Mike Myerses from...

It's always a dicey proposition when people start in talking about songwriters as poets.

A peculiar alchemy happens when singers give voice to their written words, transforming "she aches just like a woman / but she breaks just like a little girl" from something your creepy uncle would say...

Every week, the Poetry Foundation compiles information from Nielsen Bookscan and puts together lists of the best selling books of poetry. There's a list for books by contemporary poets, a list for anthologies, and a list for books of children's poetry. Surprises abound--it's the only place you're...

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. This way of reading -- the way that tries to get something...

As you read this, Dr. Jacopo Annese is slicing up a brain. Not just any brain, but the brain of Henry Molaison, a man famous for his inability to form new memories after he underwent brain surgery in the early 1950s. Dr. Annese, a San Diego scientist, is digging into...