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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.
International PEN, the parent organization of PEN American Center, recently launched a "virtual demonstration" to raise awareness about freedom of expression in China as protests continue during the twenty-one-nation Olympic torch relay leading up to the Beijing games in August. The international association of writers arranged to have the poem "June" by imprisoned Chinese poet and journalist Shi Tao translated into over sixty languages. The poem is being sent electronically to cities around the world to correspond to the different destinations of the Olympic torch.
