A forthcoming anthology of poems endorsed by the Taliban, Poetry of the Taliban, is marked as controversial in an interesting Guardian dispatch by Julian Borger. The book, which is being published in the UK by Hurst and Co. on May 17, and in the U.S. this…
With National Poetry Month coming to an end soon, poetry fans are taking advantage of Thursday’s Poem in Your Pocket Day, which is exactly what it sounds like: people celebrating will choose a favorite poem and keep it in their pocket to share with friends,…
For a week now debate has raged over a poem by Günter Grass (“What Must Be Said,” first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung) that harshly criticizes Israel’s nuclear program and its aggression toward Iran. But the story has now moved beyond debate: as the Guardian reports, On Sunday,…
The issue of manipulating the unpublished work of dead writers has reared its head again — MobyLives last week noted the addition of scenes in the paperback release of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous (i.e., unfinished) novel The Pale King that hadn’t been in the hardcover release.…
Poet Adrienne Rich died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, California, after a long battle with rheumatoid arthritis. Rich was 82. As a San Francisco Chronicle obituary by Meredith May notes, her “eloquent yet enraged poems ushered in the women’s movement and galvanized the…
At the wonderful Public Domain Review, Julian Barnes tells the story of when Guy de Maupassant met Algernon Swinburne, over lunch at the Normandy home of a man Swinburne was visiting named Powell. Actually, there were three lunches. Here’s how the second one went: Maupassant accepted…
On days when the unending visual onslaught of urban life begins to feel overwhelming, some of us (we are probably all artists or designers) bemoan the state of our culture or wish to live in a place like São Paulo, where nearly all public signage…
Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died at her home in Krakow yesterday. She was 88 years old. According to a New York Times obituary, “Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer … surrounded by relatives and friends.” As the Times notes,…
The 86-year-old daughter of Ezra Pound has launched a legal action to force an Italian fascist group that has named itself after her father to change its name. According to a Guardian report, Mary De Rachewiltz, who still lives in the remote Italian Castle where her…
What’s in a name? If the Best American Poetry blog is to be believed, the key to success in the presidential elections. In 2008 the blog proposed a ‘Trochaic Theory’, predicting Barack Obama‘s victory on the basis of the cadence of his name: Barack (an…
