Paul Muldoon's Favorite Rock-and-Roll Books, Cloud Atlas Postmortem, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
2.20.13

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

"The truth is, however, that people do listen to poetry, even if the group that does so makes up a very small minority of the general reading public." Nick Moudry delivers a close examination of the live poetry reading. (Jacket2)

President Obama could have pursued a career as an editor. (GalleyCat)

In response to allegations of abuse that surfaced in a documentary on German television, Amazon fired the security company accused of mistreating foreign-born Amazon temp workers. (Washington Post)

A federal jury awarded Patricia Cornwell over fifty million dollars in damages in a lawsuit against the author's former financial managers. (Boston Globe)

The Guardian offers a postmortem on the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, which is "crawling into profit, thanks to strong showings in Russia."

PEN World Voices Festival events, panels, and readings will run from April 29 through May 5 in New York City. A major theme of this year's events is bravery. (New York Times)

New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, whose new collection is called The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics, shared his favorite books about rock-and-roll with the Daily Beast.

In the new Meredith Maran-edited collection of essays, Why We Write, Susan Orlean offers: "Writing gives me great feelings of pleasure. There’s a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to." (Utne)