"I wish ... that someone had flown me to Iraq and Afghanistan and encouraged me to write about the wars in those places."

'No writing is as hard as this' - poet laureate's parting shot Stephen Bates
The Guardian, Saturday 21 March 2009

Son of Sylvia Plath Commits Suicide
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
New York Times March 23, 2009

"Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, killed himself at his home in Alaska, nearly a half-century after his mother and stepmother took their own lives, according to a statement from his sister

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The Red Issue
Fairy Tale Review

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"'The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry,' said Virginia Woolf after the First World War. This phenomenon has repeated itself. Following September 11 and, subsequently, following the most recent invasion of Iraq, people who weren't ordinarily interested in poetry suddenly read poems. Poets who didn't ordinarily pay attention to ( Read more... )

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 Going Negative: A “necessary skeptic” says what he really thinks about new books by Jane Mead, D.A. Powell, and John Poch.

Poetry March 2009 BY JASON GURIEL

"But negativity, I’m starting to think, needs to be the poetry reviewer’s natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line. Because really, approaching every new ( Read more... )

"EVOLUTION" AT POET'S CHOICE

"With its change to a Web-only feature, Poet's Choice is evolving. We'll be asking a different poet each week to share with us a poem he or she has written. Mary Karr, who has been our eloquent columnist since March 2008, starts us off on this new format."

Washington Post March 8, 2009

"T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. Auden, Yeats, Pound, Frost and others...were amateurs-in the best sense of the word. They wrote poetry for love whether or not they were paid. They had day jobs: banker (Eliot), doctor (Williams), insurance executive (Wallace Stevens), librarian (Philip Larkin). As they say: subsidize ( Read more... )