Check out this exhibition via Poets House.

A brief description:

Poets House is proud to launch Founding Friendships: Celebrating the Legacies of Elizabeth Kray and Stanley Kunitz, an unparalleled exhibition of art works by leading post-war artists, as well as archival material by major poets. The show gives visitors a glimpse into the social circles and friendships that underpinned one of New York’s great creative eras and sheds light on the ethos that shaped the founding of Poets House 25 years ago.

The exhibition includes A Poet’s Circle — a selection of works by artists closely associated with two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), featuring works by Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Jack Tworkov, Saul Steinberg and Chaim Gross, among many others. A companion show, “Bettissima:” Treasures from the Elizabeth Kray Archives, showcases never-before-seen letters from E.E. Cummings, W.H. Auden and other literary luminaries.

“This comprehensive gathering together of the poetry and prose of one of the key figures of non-mainstream British poetry is long-overdue,” writes Matt Merritt for Magma Poetry about An Andrew Crozier Reader, a 276-page collection published by Carcanet this March and edited by Ian Brinton.

Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a major presence for the British Poetry Revival, yet at the time of his death, his poetry was out of print. (Sidenote: To familiarize yourself even more with contemporary British poetry of the avant sort, we’d recommend this article on Jacket2, as well as the British Poetry Issue of the Chicago Review (53:1), which even comes with a special poster entitled “Styles of British Poetry 1945–2000″).

Crozier was known for championing U.S. poets in England, and he helped to circulate the works of Douglas Oliver and Robin Blaser, among countless other writers and visual artists. “A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry,” writes Carcanet. A thorough and fond biography can be read in his obituary from The Independent.

As for the Reader, Merritt notes that its existence places the poet’s work “firmly within the poetic timeline of the last 50 years,” as well as in a geographical context:

Early engagement with American modernism, and especially Objectivism, is both energising and fruitful, and sees Crozier getting to grips with two of his recurring themes – the infinite possibilities of language, and the awareness that language creates reality as often as it reflects it.

So, in a piece called ‘How Does It Go?’, from around 1965, you find him asking:

Song’s failure
in its rhyme
to say what’s meant
that lovely ice that girl
how to have both
in the poem?

[Check original post for correct poem formatting.] That sort of aside is typical of Crozier’s style, and touches on his scepticism about the musicality of language – the result is a style that frequently replicates the thought processes of everyday living. In lesser hands that might be a recipe for flat or even banal writing, but Crozier was always capable of opening out new layers of meaning and perception from even the most seemingly mundane subject matter.

While Merritt finds “Crozier less engaging when he seemed more directly influenced by English contemporaries,” his critical prose is “never less than engrossing”:

…[I]t’s at its most enjoyable not when Crozier is attacking the mainstream canon (although he does give much credit where he feels it due), but when he’s making a passionate case for ‘lost’ poets such as the American Carl Rakosi (Crozier effectively rediscovered him and inspired him to begin writing again) and the Scottish 1940s writer J F Hendry, or when he’s taking issue with Donald Davie’s evaluation of Roy Fisher. Crozier may well have felt a close kinship to the work of all three, and certainly there are interesting parallels between Fisher’s ‘A Furnace’ and Crozier’s own poetry when read in light of his essay.

Australian poet Laurie Duggan gives us a bigger scope, emphasizing the book’s cruciality in her post about the April book launch:

Crozier, who died in 2008, had published numerous small press books (he ran one press, Ferry, himself) but the work had only been collected in All Where Each Is (Allardyce Barnett) in 1985. Further work had appeared in the ill-fated Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos edited by Iain Sinclair ten years later. Crozier had not written very much in the succeeding period and had been reluctant to collect work for that reason. It meant that his work had become largely unobtainable unless you trawled second-hand sites on the web. This publication rectifies things.

Photo and more information found on Tom Raworth’s blog.

Via CNN:

A controversial new book has hit shelves in Great Britain that contains poetry written by members of the group or authors who seem quite romantically devoted to it. It’s titled, appropriately enough, “Poetry of the Taliban.”

The spot on my heart makes a candle like the sun
To watch the earth and skies with.

That’s just a taste of the verse two Western researchers stumbled on while perusing the Taliban’s web site. Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, who have been living in Afghanistan for years, found the trove while they were working on a project called Afghanwire, an online resource they created to help foreigners understand what everyday Afghans were doing.

They noticed that new poems kept popping up on the Taliban’s site and kept clicking to find poems dating to the 1990s. They asked around to see if anyone was bothering to translate them to English.

No one was, so their translator went to work.

“The poems seemed part of our understanding of who the Taliban were. They meshed with what we’ve seen living in Kandahar – that it wasn’t enough to believe that the Taliban are fighting simply out of religious fervor,” Kuehn said. “There was a lot more to these guys.”

Beyond fighting, the poets penned odes to love, and to Afghanistan. They wrote about corruption in government and about NGOs that are failing to really help Afghans. They ruminated on money, loss of life, being a refugee and beauty.

Here’s a review of Don Paterson’s Selected Poems written by Ben Wilkinson for The Guardian.

A taste:

Sean O’Brien has written that “few poets can have covered as much ground in 20 years as Don Paterson”. Reading this remarkable Selected Poems, which ranges from the ludic depths of Nil Nil to the plainer cadences and frankness of 2009′s Rain, one is inclined to agree. Yet, coupled with “Nil Nil”, Rain’s title poem brings us full circle, as another double negative surfaces between release and restraint: “and none of this, none of this matters”. Alongside the poetry’s stylistic variety and growing tonal authority, what Paterson’s selection from his six volumes to date reveals is the underlying thematic consistency of his oeuvre.

The poems are often full of seeming paradox and contradiction, a feature which can wrong-foot just as it provokes and delights. “I took myself on for the hell of it,” says the poet of playing pool against his double in Nil Nil’s “The Ferryman’s Arms”, a sense of poetry’s artifice jostling with the conviction that a poem should enact some seriously complex thinking. The persona is swaggering yet (literally) divided; the planetary order of balls on the pool table is undermined as “physics itself becomes something negotiable”; the false doppelgänger ends up seeming truer than the departing speaker; strangeness swells up everywhere through initially grounded reality. Nothing is ever quite as it seems. Just as the speaker’s lover in “The Trans-Siberian Express” is seen “shedding veil after veil”, these poems seek truths beyond the waking dream-world through which we blunder. The darkness comes to envelop Nil Nil. A handful of poems explore social class, not least the punchy “An Elliptical Stylus”, but these also tend towards eerie territory, or else unpick the constructed nature of the self.

More after the jump.

But we already knew that, and now Out is confirming it with this Hot List recognition.

After introducing the “socially connected scribe,” the write-up focuses on Dimitrov’s American Boys, forthcoming from Floating Wolf Quarterly on June 1:

“American Boys is eight poems and has a variety of digital ephemera throughout,” he says. “There are Grindr screen grabs and text messages, and I’m debating whether or not I can use emails.”

For those not convinced that poetry, no matter how modern, addresses anything that might interest them, Dimitrov’s work speaks for itself.

“The poems feel very summery,” he explains, “and a lot of them are about sex and sadness.”

The Sarah Lawrence–educated scribe isn’t churning out the poet’s equivalent of a Katy Perry song, however. “I would say American Boys thinks about different things: how we communicate with one another and the America that we’re sold versus the one we actually live in,” he says. “In Begging for It are poems about emigrating, having sex for the first time, falling in love for the first time, writing and reading for the first time. It’s my coming-of-age book.”

After you make the jump, find out about all things Dimitrov here. And be on the lookout in 2013 for Begging for It, from Four Way Books.

Yesterday, NPR posted the latest installment in their very cool series they’re calling NewsPoet. This time around, Carmen Giménez Smith delivers the news-that-stays-news by riffing on Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” and acknowledging the very sad passing of Bee Gees’s Robin Gibb. From the article:

Carmen Gimenez Smith sat down with Audie Cornish to talk about her day spent with NPR’s All Things Considered. She told Cornish that she was preoccupied with the death of Bee Gee member, Robin Gibb. “I came in with that in mind,” she said.

After observing the morning news meeting, Smith immersed herself in the stories that would air on All Things Considered — many were still in their planning stages.

Much of Smith’s own planning was in figuring out what kind of poem to write — eventually settling on an elegy. “I decided to use Frank O’Hara’s poem, “The Day Lady Died,” as a backdrop for the other work that I wanted to get done in the poem,” Smith explained.

In order to do that she examined the O’Hara poem closely. “I thought about the sentences and the music of it” she said, “and I applied the language and the ideas that I heard in the newsroom.” In combining the different news items of the day, Smith joked — “I made them into a little mutant.”

Jump over to read the poem “The Day Disco Died.” And in memory of Robin, a little taste of the good stuff!

Tongue Journal’s got this bit of marginalia on their Tumblr–Ernest Hemingway’s “The Lady Poets with Foot Notes,” originally published in Der Querschnitt, 1924. “In satirical imitation of T.S. Eliot, Hemingway provided elaborate footnotes giving clues to identify ‘the Lady Poets,’” writes the Special Collections department at the University of Delaware. According to Hemingway scholar Michael Reynolds, these ladies were:

1. Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. Aline Kilmer
3. Sara Teasdale
4. Zoe Akins
5. Lola Ridge
6. Amy Lowell

Let’s take a further gander, if the gander don’t mind:

“College nymphomaniac” Edna St. Vincent Millay you know well: “I wish I could walk till my blood should spout” (from “Departure”). Good timing: Looks like the town of Camden, Maine is celebrating the 100th anniversary of their 1912 “discovery” of Millay with a summer full of events, including a June 7 screening of a documentary about the poet that “traces Millay’s poetic development from her Maine roots to her Greenwich Village years to her social and political activism.”

Aline Murray Kilmer, step-daughter of Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s, wrote a book of prose essays called Hunting a Hair Shirt and Other Spiritual Adventures (add to cart), which came out in 1923. Kilmer also authored two children’s books and three volumes of poetry. In 1908, at the age of 20, she married poet and critic Joyce Kilmer, who became insanely famous after the publication of his short poem “Trees.” Sara Teasdale wrote the couple letters, becoming friendlier with Aline after she lost her husband, who died in battle in World War I. “It sold her stuff,” joked Hemingway. Not anymore…

Sara Teasdale, the “Favourite of the State University male virgins,” was often rejecting suitors, including her lifelong friend Vachel Lindsay, “who was absolutely in love with her” but felt unprepared to support them both (he later wed someone else and had four children). Teasdale was the first 1918 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry for her collection Love Songs, which also won the annual Poetry Society of America prize. She married businessman Ernest Filsinger in 1914, but gave him a surprise divorce in 1929. Vachel Lindsay committed suicide in December 1931, and Teasdale wrote to Aline Kilmer of her battle with depression. Apparently “torn between her desire for love and her need for solitude,” the poet became increasingly preoccupied with death and followed suit in 1933 by overdosing on sleeping pills. She left a biography of Christina Rossetti unfinished. Reviewer J. Overmeyer wrote that her “simply stated thoughts are complex … and reverberate in the mind.” We quite like her poems “Epitaph” and “She Who Could Bind You.”

Teasdale’s St. Louis friend Zoë Akins, a poet and critic, became a famous playwright and was also a recipient of the Pulitzer for her play “The Old Maid” (1935), based on a short story by Edith Wharton. Many of her plays were made into silent movies—and one of them, 1925′s Declassee AKA “The Social Exile,” starred a young Clark Gable. Akins continued to work for Hollywood for a while, even co-writing Camille. Her original play “The Greeks Had a Word for It,” written for Broadway in 1931, was adapted in 1953 and became Marilyn Monroe’s star-turning How to Marry a Millionaire. Photo by George Eastman, 1921.

Lola Ridge–”One lady poet who never had enough to eat,” as Hemingway foots it–was, as Peter Quartermain described her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “the nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism.” Née Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin in 1873, she ended up a 33-year-old divorcee in San Francisco and reinvented herself as 23-year-old Lola Ridge, poet and painter. She received a Guggenheim and the Shelley Memorial Award, and a fact from her PF bio alludes to Hemingway’s blind item: “Ridge held weekly Broom salons, at which she momentarily gave up her vow of poverty to feed tea and cakes to other writers.” Despite such fodder, she has not received a proper biography. Thom Donovan posted some Lola Ridge book covers, including Sun-Up, Dance of Fire, and Red Flag, on his blog Wild Horses of Fire not too long ago. Studio photograph, 1935, courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.

Imagist poet Amy Lowell is of course at the gut of the modernist canon. She was central to establishing H.D.’s reputation in the U.S., and was in general a great supporter of other poets. Ah but did you know of the Amy Lowell Scholarship for U.S. Poets to Travel Abroad? And we’re fond of this book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. It starts with two epigraphs, the first from Shelley’s famous elegy on the death of John Keats, “Adonais“:

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.”

And the second from French Symbolist poet Albert Samain’s poem “Nocturne Provincial,” which Lowell translated for a 1916 issue of Fragments: A Journal for Artists:

“Le Silence est si grand que mon coeur en frissonne / Seul, le bruit de mes pas sur le pavé résonne.”

You shouldn’t be bored. But sometimes you need a little something to make the subway commute interesting. Check out this great story in the NY Times about a writing workshop held on the No. 7 train. All of this awesomeness comes from the New York Writers Coalition.

From the article:

On Friday afternoon, about two dozen people met on a platform in the Times Square subway station, corralled by a man wearing a green T-shirt with the words “the system is whack.”

The man, Aaron Zimmerman, is the executive director of the NY Writers Coalition, and he and several volunteers were leading one of several free writing workshops that the coalition was holding throughout the city on Friday, including one in Coney Island and another aboard the Staten Island Ferry.

But this session was being held on a No. 7 train on a round trip to Flushing, Queens. The group boarded the first car of the train and Mr. Zimmerman’s first instruction to the writers was to “ride this to the end.”

Mr. Zimmerman and a volunteer taped the coalition’s poster over one of the advertisements in the subway car and other volunteers offered pens and pads.

He told the participants that they could write anything they wanted.

For people who needed ideas, the volunteers offered slips of paper with suggested themes. Mr. Zimmerman said the writers could later share their stories, but added that if someone had a story “that nobody else, especially on a subway train should hear, you don’t have to share it.”

After leaving Manhattan, the train emerged from its tunnel and rose along elevated tracks into the bright sunlight in western Queens. It was an unconventional writer’s space, with the train rumbling into a new station every few minutes and absorbing a fresh group of passengers, then lurching onward.

Passengers jostled the writers, spoke on their cellphones, dozed with iPod earbuds in their ears. None of it seemed to bother the writers, who scribbled away, seeming to employ the same cone of concentration that an average subway passenger uses to zone everyone else out.

Mr. Zimmerman said the No. 7 line was chosen because its ridership was “as diverse as the city gets.” Indeed, many of the passengers were Chinese- or Spanish-speaking people. During the 75-minute round-trip, an additional two dozen passengers joined in the writing exercise. Some others declined.

Susana Gil, 28, who was returning from Manhattan, where she makes jewelry, to her apartment in Woodside, listed some of her favorite things about the city, including “the parks, the transportation and the people.”

Mike Gonzalez, 28, who works for a rental-car company, took a pad and held it in the same hand as his cigarettes and cellphone.

“I wrote that there’s three million reasons to like New York and three million reasons to hate it,” he said. “And if you don’t like this city, you can always take the next train out.”

More after the jump.

Another update on the Joseph Brodsky musuem. According to this brief post from The Voice of Russia:

Russia’s St.Petersburg is hosting the Brodsky Week dedicated to the May 24 birth day of the Nobel winning Russian poet.

The event is aimed at raising money to create a museum and a cultural center in Brodsky’s tiny “room and a half” that he had in a communal apartment wherefrom he left for the US in 1972.

Over at VICE, Blake Butler has reviewed three books that cause the good reader to reflect momentarily on sex and power. Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2001), a cult favorite, if we may encourage the term (and maybe this one’s ready for a reprint); Jon Leon’s newest, The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem 2011); and, unexpectedly for this gathering, Tomaž Šalamun’s On the Tracks of Wild Game, “[o]riginally published in Slovenia in 1979 and just now in new translation from Ugly Duckling Presse,” as Butler notes. He writes of the book:

…On the Tracks of Wild Game—in light of the two books above—presents what seems a calmer face, though one supercharged in language with layers of images. The voice here is at once vivid and precise, while leading us into a landscape that seems somehow capable of shifting a few feet. Where so often language is used to simply reflect, Šalamun’s is the kind of speaking that invents the world around it as it goes, pulling the parts of things we already know into new configurations. It goes up in the teeth of fascist regimes and god and nature and captivity and enlightenment and food and time and bodies. I best like books that make the saying A picture is worth a thousand words turn on its face, and though that could be true of most any sentence, so many of them feel like they wish they were a picture instead. I don’t see how you could take a thousand pictures and get most any of these sentences inside them. They would simply say no.

Read all of the reviews here.

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin appointed Marc Harshman as the state’s newest poet laureate on May 18, replacing Irene McKinney, who died in February.

Harshman is a poet and storyteller who has authored 11 children’s books. He lives in Wheeling.

“I’m pleased Marc has accepted this unique opportunity to serve as poet laureate,” Tomblin said in a release from his office. “Whether it’s one of his children’s stories or a prose poem, Marc’s creativity serves as a reminder of the immeasurable talent of West Virginia’s authors. I hope, in this new capacity, he will continue to challenge himself and inspire a new generation of writers.”

For those of you in Chicago who missed Catherine Wagner reading last Friday here, surf over to Pennsound to check out her reading here (with a Debrah Morkun bonus!).

The Publisher’s official statement reads, in part:

Today, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt filed a “pre-packaged” comprehensive financial restructuring plan that will strengthen the Company financially so we can continue to invest in our business and ensure we are well positioned for the future. This plan, which is supported by the vast majority of our key financial stakeholders, will eliminate $3.1 billion of debt through a debt to equity transaction, and reduce our annual cash interest costs. The Company today lodged voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. With a more appropriate capital structure to support our strategic plan and business objectives, we will have greater financial flexibility to pursue growth opportunities.

A bit more, in honor of Robert Creeley‘s birthday. Here, via The Allen Ginsberg Project, is a wealth of Creeley-specific links.

DISCUSSIONS are now underway on the best way to stabilise the Michael Hartnett Memorial Statue which stands in the middle of the Square in Newcastle West.

Concerns arose about the stability of the sculpture at the weekend, prompting fears that attempts had been made to damage or steal it.

“There is a suspicion that somebody tried to pull it from its foundations, that they tied a rope on to it and tried to pull it with a jeep,” Cllr Michael Collins told the Limerick Leader.

For safety reasons, the sculpture has been cordoned off. But Cllr Collins said it was his understanding that it would not be necessary to remove the sculpture to improve stabilisation.

“It would be virtually impossible to remove it from its foundations,” he said, pointing out that the life-size sculpture of the late poet was tied internally by rods, through the rough-cut limestone plinth, into the ground.

Here’s a video to get your week started right. Thanks, Jacket2!

Details:

Glazier’s talk is first; Bernstein begins at 11’50″; discussion follows. Bernstein reads “The Plan Is the Body” and other poems by Creeley, then “Hero of the Local:Robert Creeley and the Persistence of American Poetry,” originally published in the Brooklyn Rail. Video by Tammy McGovern.

Music! There’s a new trend of setting rudimentary poetry to rhythmic, melodic soundtracks. Poetry Crush turned us on to the stuff, and we’re starting to dig it.

Film! We’ve been pals with cultural ambassador James Franco for awhile, but we had no idea he also had a successful film career. Now some of his friends from that scene are getting hip to what’s hap in poetry.

Marketing! It worked for Disney, Coke, and Apple. Who’s to say the New York Shakespeare Exchange can’t rebrand the Bard for a younger demo?

The Internet! Sure, the internet can be a nuisance or worse, but it can’t be all bad when Patricia Lockwood is using Twitter to help fund her husband’s eye surgery. And when the Twitter bot @Pentramentron is writing verse to rival the works of @horse_ebooks. And when Anthony Madrid has a pulpit.

Labor Activism! Mark Nowak introduces “domestic workers – nannies and housekeepers” to creative writing through the Domestic Workers United writing workshops, which he presented at the PEN World Voices Festival.

Feminism! Did you know that some poets are also practicing feminists? Where do they find the time?

Game Shows! The next big thing in poetry is inspired, in part, by Bob Barker.

Saying Something Nice! The surrealists could be a prickly bunch, but even a surrealist can dish out an occasional complement.

Have a safe, happy weekend, and look out for the Type Rider.

The Troll Thread Collective is made up of poets Holly Melgard, Chris Sylvester, Joey Yearous-Algozin, and Divya Victor. They have fine affinities (Melgard and Yearous-Algozin also co-edit P-Queue) and use them to create chapbooks available for PDF download or purchase! Now that’s fair. Authors they’ve published include Josef Kaplan, Lawrence Giffin, Isaac Linder, Jeremiah Rush Bowen, Shiv Koteca, and individual collective members themselves (we’re particularly fond of the marvelous Shapes for Baby, Foods for Baby, and Colors for Baby, written and illustrated by Melgard).

Our friend CAConrad recently convened with these smarties in a nine-part interview! You must stay tuned to 8-Pointed Star for all parts. As of this writing, there are five parts up. We like watching them raise and lower their brown coffee cups. Conrad says to the Troll Thread in Part 1:

I feel like conceptual poetry, which is–I know you have different feelings about that, which you can talk about yourselves, but, I feel like that’s definitely going on right now in our culture of poetry, and I do believe that there are some conceptual poets who do lend to the idea that it’s sort of a bourgeois, apathetic exercise and that–personally, I’m an American who pays taxes here, and that Afghanistan is the most dangerous country in the world for women…and we need to be political on some level, but that’s different for everybody, and I want you all to talk about the things that I’ve just said.

And then there’s a mock proposal for a moment of silence for the death of conceptual poetry. And a reminder from Sylvester that terms and labels like “Conceptual Poetry,” which group together individuals into “one kind of thing” are often “typically the product of people trying to discern what remains unnaccountable for them, or undiscernable for them” and that each poet working will have varying levels of engagement in what they’re doing and various levels of intersection with the political. Awesome. Watch and learn!

Congratulations to Giovanni Singleton for winning the 81st Annual California Book Award for Ascension! From Counterpath Books:

In this diary of intentionality, the behearer and the beholder approach the world with an attitude of longing—for less: less sorrow, less suffering. Daily practice delivers the speaker to profound meditations on the nature of the self. These poems press against our deepest held questions: what is an I? Where are my borders? What or how am I “with”? “From whom—from what—do we hide?”

Back in the fall, we pointed to a great conversation with Singleton. Topics included Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, her literary influences, music, art, the works. Congrats again!!

Photo by Sarah Collins.

JCC’s coming to a TV screen near you, according to the BBC:

Essex based punk poet John Cooper Clarke is to have a documentary film about his life and work aired on the BBC at the end of the month.

Evidently… John Cooper Clarke will be shown on BBC4 on Wednesday, May 30 at 10pm then repeated on BBC HD at 11.30pm later that evening and show again on May 31 at 3.15am on BBC4.

The documentary looks at the career of the influential Salford lad who rose to prominence during the punk years for the mordant wit and biting social commentary of his poems.

Cooper Clarke appeared live with The Sex Pistols, Siouxie and the Banshees, The Fall and Joy Division in the late 1970s then returned to performance in the 1990s where he found a new following for his distinctive brand of poetry.

For more on JCC, check out this review of a recent reading given back in April.

It happened, and we have the documents to prove it. Check this out, from Chicago Tribune:

A one-page 1837 letter from the writer Edgar Allan Poe to the editor of a popular women’s magazine has been sold for $164,000 at auction.

Poe wrote to Sarah Josepha Hale, herself a well-known literary figure and author of the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” to decline an invitation to publish an article in a magazine she edited at the time.

“You usually don’t see a lengthy handwritten letter like this by Poe,” said Bobby Livingston, vice president of RR Auctions, a New Hampshire-based firm which handled the transaction Wednesday.

“To have him writing to the author of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ is pretty amazing.”

Written eight years before he published his most famous poem, “The Raven,” Poe, then a literary critic for a magazine in Richmond, Virginia, tells Hale he is too busy with other work after a recent illness.

“To send you a crude or hastily written article would be injurious to me, and an insult to yourself – and I fear that I could, at present, do little more,” Poe wrote.

More after the jump.

The descendents of eight famous Chinese poets from the Tang and Song Dynasties met in Beijing on Wednesday.

Dressed in traditional Chinese clothing known as Han Fu, they aimed to discuss the creation of a website designed to promote the poetry and literary works of their ancestors, the Beijing News reports.

“The eight great poets of the Tang and Song Dynasties” refer to Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Su Shi, Su Xun, Su Zhe, Ou Yangxiu, Wang Anshi and Zeng Gong.

See this article on the Stanford University website, in which poet Eavan Boland talks about her life as a “Woman Poet”:

Although the world of poetry has become much more inclusive than it used to be, Boland said one thing remains the same: “Every young poet has to have the courage of their own experience. That’s never going to change.”

“When I became a mother I felt the powerful necessity of honoring that experience in language, in poetry,” said Boland. “That subject matter wasn’t really sanctioned at that time in Irish poetry – it was thought of as merely domestic, or even less than that, and so I had to find my way to it.”

The “Status of Woman” clause in the Irish Constitution, which clearly defines a woman’s contribution to the state as that of a homemaker, added to the tensions that Boland encountered as a young writer. “The Irish Constitution is one of the very few in Europe that enshrined the woman’s place as being in the home,” she said. Thus, both state and societal expectations made it difficult for her to realize her dream early on.

However, this difficulty is not contained to specifically Irish women, Boland said. “For a lot of young women in my generation, that [tension] boded more difficulty for them to have this interior sense of permission to become the poet they wanted to.” Yet this self-authorization, once confronted, led to a powerful voice. “I learned a lot from thinking that I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote and … from thinking what would happen if you didn’t do that? You would end up writing someone else’s poem and not honoring the life you lived in terms of creative expression.”

More after the jump.

We are pleased to announce the BIG BRIDGE 15 YEAR ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! For 15 years Big Bridge has worked hard to present our readers with a wide and varied selection of poetry, fiction, art, essays, and more. And through this work we hope we have conveyed our respect and love for all the great creative efforts of poets and artists we have known. Below is an abbreviated summary of what you will find in this new, big, 15th Anniversary Edition. We hope you will like what we have put together and will continue reading and enjoying Big Bridge. Thank you for your many years of support!

What are you waiting for? Go go go!

Flavorwire did everyone a favor and made a list of “10 feminist poets you should know.” You might already know them. You might have more. We do! Like, a million! Michael Nicoloff, looking at you. Anyway, they’ve got Maya Angelou, Anne Waldman, Carol Ann Duffy, Margaret Atwood, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Walker, Katha Pollitt, Susan Howe, Carolyn Kizer, and Marge Piercy. All right! The tags below the post suggest there were other selections as well.

In introduction to the feature, they write:

When we think of feminist poetry, we think of Adrienne Rich, one of the most influential poets of the past century, not to mention one of the most important feminist poets. Had she not passed away earlier this year, today would have been Rich’s 83rd birthday, so to celebrate her life, we’ve put together a list of feminist poets still living and continuing her legacy. Because Feminist Ryan Gosling only goes so far. Click through to see a few feminist poets you should probably know about, and since there are of course many more than we can list here, let us know if we missed your favorite in the comments.

Do it! And oh, there are descriptions. Of Waldman:

Post-Beat heroine (she was a “poet in residence” in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics with Ginsberg), Anne Waldman continus to mix her experimental style, nurtured in the Outrider movement, with her own particular brand of feminism — an impolite, matter-of-fact, physical, Buddhist-flavored feminism that seeks a new world order with a winning smile. What else would you expect from Allen Ginsberg’s “spiritual wife”?

Find it all, plus excerpts from the works, here.

Hey kit-cats. You remember Circumference? Not Protractor. Oh-ha, poets are bad at math humor. Anyway, we’re talking about Circumference: Poetry in Translation, which was, ioo (in our opinion), expertly co-edited by poets Jennifer Kronovet and Stefania Heim. Now passing the torch! The mag is re-launching, and celebrating its re-launching, with new editors Elizabeth Clark Wessel and Iris Cushing. If you’re in Brooklyn today [Friday, May 18th], stop by their party at 323 Dean Street, 8:00 p.m. Featuring free refreshments, and readings from Heim herself, Idra Novey, Matthew Rohrer, and Eliot Weinberger.

A bit about the mag, if you weren’t aware:

Since its inception in 2003, Circumference has been the place where serious translators get their start. The magazine has been an invaluable source for teachers, students, poets, translators, and editors seeking important work from other cultures and languages. Several influential book-length projects launched in the pages of Circumference have been published to widespread acclaim, including: Kim Hyesoon’s Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (tr. Don Mee Choi), Gennady Aygi’s Into the Snow: Selected Poems (tr. Sarah Valentine), and Takashi Hiraide’s For The Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (tr. Sawako Nakayasu), among numerous others.

More on the newness:

With its new website, Circumference will be continuing and expanding upon its mission to support poetry in translation. The website will allow Circumference to feature a podcast series, audio and video, and other work that lends itself to the digital format. It will also be an ideal place to facilitate conversations about poetry in translation, to feature interviews with poets and translators, and to blog about current events in the world of translation. Work from the Circumference archives will also be made available in a searchable database ideal for students and researchers.

Most importantly, the website will afford another platform for publishing the kind of work Circumference has always been interested in: translations of new work from around the globe, new visions of classical poems, translations of foreign language poets of the past who have fallen under the radar of American readers, and, as always, pieces that illuminate translation as a vibrant, necessary interaction.

Mon Dieu!

Here’s a snippet from an article, via the Star News, on his visit to a Wilmington, NC middle school:

In his classroom visit, Rybicki told the students, “Ordinary words are rooted to the great fires in the human heart. The same words we use every day, at the playground, at the bus stop, at the grocery store – when the poet takes hold of those tarnished, dirty words, they dunk them in the deep fires of the human heart and splash them on this canvas to bust open the chest of someone who’s listening.”

“When All the World Is Old” features poems inspired by Rybicki’s wife and her 16-year battle with cancer, a battle she lost in 2008. Rybicki recited one of those poems, titled, “Julie Ann in the Bone Marrow Unit, Zion, Illinois,” and then described to the students the feeling of “this colt kicking the barn wall in her chest. Wait, it’s just her heart beating Mr. Rybicki. No, there’s a colt kicking the barn wall in her chest. The common tongue does not satisfy the poet.”

And, check out the book trailer made by Publishing Laboratory Director Emily Louise Smith’s students.

Atlanta’s Coconut Books and Coconut Magazine are back in full effect. Publisher and founding editor Bruce Covey is now accepting submissions for the magazine, one of the first web-based literary journals. Covey has brought on board Gina Myers, Kim Gek Lin Short, Danielle Pafunda, and Laura Solomon as editors. They hope to launch the first new issue this summer.

Coconut Books will offer eight new titles in 2012. Four titles currently available are Molly Brodak’s chapbook The Flood and the following full-length collections–how to survive a hotel fire by Angela Veronica Wong, Desiring Map by Megan Kaminski, and Covey’s Reveal: All Shapes and Sizes, which Coconut is distributing for Bitter Cherry Books. Collections coming in October are: Slope Move by Hanna Andrews, I Am Going to Save Your Life by Christie Ann Reynolds, Like Likeness Renders by Emily Toder, and a new collection by Jenny Boully. In 2013, Coconut Books plans to publish new full-length titles by Serena Chopra, Amber Nelson, Gina Myers, plus their book contest winners and an anthology. They hope to publish one or two more titles, but those are currently top secret. SPD will stock all of the new titles, plus backlist titles by Gina Myers, Reb Livingston, Jen Tynes, Natalie Lyalin, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Look out for these by the end of June.

For more on Coconut book prizes make the jump.

Poetry, fiction, what-have-you, these bloggers cover it. Make the jump and browse the annotated list the Hound has compiled.