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Daniel Menaker's career moves are well known in publishing circles. After twenty six years at The New Yorker-he started as a fact checker and copy editor before serving as senior editor for twenty years-Menaker moved to the position of literary editor at Random House, where he worked for the past six years. Last month, he announced that he was joining HarperCollins Publishers as executive editor of the HarperCollins imprint. Menaker will report directly to Susan Weinberg, senior vice president and editorial director of HarperCollins, Perennial, and Quill.

On the evening of October 29, more than seventy-five people crammed into The Red Wheelbarrow, a newly opened Anglophone bookshop, to inaugurate a reading series and celebrate two literary magazines: Upstairs at Duroc, published at the Anglo cultural center WICE, and Pharos, edited collectively by poet Alice Notley's workshop at the British Institute in Paris. The enthusiastic crowd spilled onto the cobblestone street, smoking cigarettes and craning their necks for a view of the proceedings.

In December, Boston-based Beacon Press will publish Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, an anthology of sixty poems "to nourish our national spirit" after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Included in the anthology, which was edited by Joan Murray, are poems by W.H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Yehuda Amichai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Yusef Komunyakaa, D.H. Lawrence, and Sharon Olds.

Brenda Hillman's new book of poems, Cascadia, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in October. In it, Hillman returns to the ancient landform that preceded present-day California to excavate a poetics of place. Cascadia is a study of geologic as well as internal space, and the seismic shifts that occur in time through each.

In such a saturated culture, how can a poet clear away uninfluenced space from which to write a poem that is authentic, original?