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:
“I’m no doubt a frustrated novelist. Maybe I should try, but at barely three months shy of 88 it seems unlikely.” In this week's installment of the New York Times By the Book series, poet John Ashbery—whose new collection, Breezeway, is released this month—talks about his love of Proust, and the poets that have inspired his work.
In the latest PoetryNow podcast from the Poetry Foundation, Ashbery reads and discusses his new poem “The Mauve Notebook.” (Harriet)
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Loren Glass discusses the Beat Generation, jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, and what became the "whole new language" of marijuana.
Penn Books, an independent bookstore located in New York’s Penn Station, has closed. The owner of the decades-old shop, Craig Newman, cited a $45,000 monthly rent as his reason for shuttering the store. (DNAinfo)
Meanwhile, Boston’s Commonwealth Books will consolidate from two locations to one. The independent shop’s Milk Street location will close this month. (Boston Business Journal)
In better indie bookstore news, a new pop-up bookshop will open in Washington, D.C. next Monday. The temporary store, a branch of the downtown Carpe Librum, will be 3,000 square feet, and will sell used books, CDs, and DVDs through at least part of the summer. (Hill Now)
Macmillan will begin distributing audiobook titles to public libraries via the digital platform Hoopla. Macmillan is the first of the Big Five publishers to team up with the platform, which was launched in 2013 and allows library patrons to stream and download movies, TV shows, music, audiobooks, and, soon, e-books to computers and mobile devices. (Publishers Weekly)
“There is a kind of truth—that’s a big word—that we hate to look at. It could be a face in the street, someone who looks in pain, someone who’s suffering. We turn away—we can’t look at everything. But I like poems that occasionally do that to the reader: make them look.” At the Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic discusses Walt Whitman’s “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.”
