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As literature concerned with today’s often-grim realities gains new prominence, a handful of literary organizations are highlighting the connection between poetry and politics and strengthening the network of socially conscious writers.
Melville House wonders when publishers will speak out about Amazon; New York City's Algonquin Hotel announced that when it reopens this spring after a renovation, the famed Oak Room will be gone; E. B. White answers a charge levied by the ASPCA; and more
Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, as well as Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning, passed away yesterday in their respective countries; novelist Paul Auster has engaged in a war of words with Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey; Open Letters Monthly examines the hidden life of Virginia Woolf's institutionalized half-sister, Laura Makepeace Stephen; and other news.
In response to the Deep-water Horizon oil spill, writers Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King created Poets for Living Waters, an online poetry forum featuring works written in response to the disaster, spurring a host of nationwide events that give poets not only an opportunity to take action against the catastrophe but also to speak out in support of our natural environment.
Moving into new poetic territory, Major Jackson, in his third collection, Holding Company, corrals the ecstatic in a ten-line form.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Dan Chiasson's Where's the Moon, There's the Moon and Monika Fagerholm's The American Girl, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
Beginning this year New Poets for Peace, the New York City branch of Poets for Peace—a grassroots group that for the past decade has held free, donation-optional readings across the country to raise funds for international relief organizations—plans to host an event every six weeks in Manhattan, including a special reading and silent auction on March 21 in observance of the seventh anniversary of the U.S. military's invasion of Iraq.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone and Catie Rosemurgy's The Stranger Manual, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
For Anselm Berrigan, whose fourth book of poems, Free Cell, is just out from City Lights, the work that pays the bills is in frequent opposition to the work that fills the page.
A team representing Saint Paul has won the twentieth annual National Poetry Slam (NPS) in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Minnesotans beat out sixty-seven other teams from across North America to claim the two-thousand-dollar grand prize on August 8. Rounding out the final standings were, in order, teams from Albuquerque, San Francisco, and New York City.
