Break out a cask of amontillado and let the pale sherry flow. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe are in for a treat this year, the bicentennial of the American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story’s birth.The Harry Ransom Center, the humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, is commemorating the two-hundreth birthday of Poe with the exhibition From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.The exhibition is based upon the extensive holdings of the Ransom Center and the Harrison Institute/ Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the...
Wall Street Bank For Poets Proposed. Never Too Big To Fail?
There are many contenders for Top Dog status in the bone yard of bonehead ideas. [Provide favorite to Comments]. In the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, the highest honors for magnificently cockeyed excogitations belonged to one known only as the Idiot.The Idiot, the creation of Harpers humor editor, John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), whose Idiot confections were collected into six volumes*, was a boarder in Mrs. Smithers-Pegagog’s High-Class Home for Single Gentlemen. I’m always anxious to learn as much as I can about the history of the fleabag with a foyer and threadbare lace doilies I currently call home, so,...
Golden Handcuffs Review. A Talk with Lou Rowan
The 2009 Spring/Summer issue of Golden Handcuffs Reviewis now out. The issue features sections on 'Nathaniel Tarn at 80' and Luisa Valenzuela at 70' along with contributions from more than forty artists and writers, among them Rebecca Brown, Pedro Calderon, Gwendolyn Diaz, Alice Notley, Pat Nolan, Toby Olson, Brian Strang, Rosemarie Waldrop and Raul Zurita.I had a chance to check in with Lou Rowan, the editor and guiding light of GH, to find out more about the history of GH and how things are going as a publisher of a literary/visual magazine in these times.Book Patrol: Merriam Webster defines Golden...
More Political Poetry – Denise Levertov and Vietnam
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.Denise Levertov, Life at WarThe latest podcast in the alt.NPR Poetry Off the Shelf series, Battle of the Bards, focuses on Denise Levertov's poem Life at War and how her relationship with fellow poet and mentor Robert Duncan was severely strained by Levertov's anti-war activism and her related poetry.Ange Mlinko has a related piece,"Craft Vs. Conscience How the Vietnam War destroyed the friendship between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov" at the Poetry Foundation's Online Journal.Previously on Book Patrol:A New Wave of Political Poetry