Article Archive

Fueled by allegations of unfairness, Bin Ramke announces his retirement after twenty-two years as editor of the Contemporary Poetry Series.

In August, Amazon.com launched a program that offers customers short stories and essays in a digital format for forty-nine cents each.

As long as there has been war, there have been writers trying to understand it, turning battlefield horrors into narrative, trying to make something useful out of its debris, but in recent months an unusually high number of soldier memoirs have been released by American publishers.

During a recent trip to New York City, Joseph Bednarik, the marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, noticed something while riding the subway that got him thinking about the ways in which poetry is distributed. 

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Poetry Northwest, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Fence, Black Clock, Ninth Letter, and Eleven Eleven.

At no time on my book tour did I jump up and down, wave my fists, and scream, “It’s a novel! That means fiction!” At least I don’t think I did. It’s hard to be sure, because, in my head, I had that tantrum about three times daily as I traveled from town to town in southern Michigan, reading, signing books, and attending the Ann Arbor Book Festival. You see, my novel, Flight, was set in that region, where I had lived during my high school and college years.

Much has been written about some judges rewarding friends and former students, and I worry that a few questionable practices have detracted from the hundreds of contests that bring recognition to so many well-deserving writers. Nevertheless, there are steps that all of us—editors, judges, and writers—can take to help keep contests clean.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Borealis Books, Passager Books, and Gorsky Press. 

Fifty years later, a number of organizations are planning special events on October 7 to commemorate the anniversary of Ginsberg's legendary reading.

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation recently completed the pilot phase of a new program designed to raise the profile of poetry in high schools.

Perhaps because many writers and their adherents are poorly paid and often go unrecognized, they cultivate a variety of myths—some about the creative process, others about the profession itself—to justify what they do, to cheer themselves up, to inhabit a mystique.

In case anyone was wondering, the four most frequently used words in T.S. Eliot’s 1943 collection Four Quartets are “time,” “past,” “fire,” and “end.” It is this kind of information that can be found by using one of several new features recently added to Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book” function, launched in October 2003.