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On Wednesday, John Ashbery and Robin Blaser were named the winners of the eighth annual Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded to both a Canadian and an international author or translator for a book of poetry published in English during the previous year.
Poets House, the nonprofit poetry library and literary center in New York City, announced recently that it will honor Cave Canem founders Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady with the Elizabeth Kray Award, given biennially to individuals who serve poetry in the spirit of Kray, who founded Poets House, along with Stanley Kunitz, in 1985. The award will be presented to Derricotte and Eady following the thirteenth annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge, a benefit event for Poets House, on June 9.
Nineteenth-century poet William McGonagall, once dismissed as the world's worst, received posthumous compensation as a collection of thirty-five poems went for £6,600 (approximately thirteen thousand dollars) at auction last Friday in the poet's native Edinburgh, Scotland, BBC News reported.
New York City subway riders may be seeing a litte less poetry these days—thanks to a recent decision by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to discontinue the Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion program—but commuters on buses in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Orlando are seeing more.
Ordering poems becomes a familiar act if you consider the lyric poem in its original form—the song. And if you were the kind of incessant list-maker Nick Hornby describes in his novel High Fidelity, the kind who also made mix tapes from your album collection. If you were the kind of geek my college boyfriend, Tim, was and—admittedly—the kind I was too.
