Chilean government announces definitively that Pablo Neruda was murdered, maybe
In 2011, Manuel Araya, Pablo Neruda’s driver, told the Mexican magazine Proceso that—as we reported—it was not prostate cancer alone that killed the Nobel Prize-winning poet in 1973. No, Araya… Read more »
Okay, okay: Orwell was no Byron
Last month, despite apparent reservations, The Orwell Society decided to publish a slim volume of 42 little-known poems written by George Orwell. The poems were written over a 35-year span, from… Read more »
Winners of the 2015 National Translation Award announced
Last week, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) named the winners of the 2015 National Translation Award (NTA), an honor the organization has awarded annually to translators of book-length works since 1998. In the… Read more »
The other man behind “The Red Wheelbarrow”
His red wheelbarrow might be the most famous gardening tool in American poetry, but Thaddeus Marshall, the man who inspired William Carlos Williams’s classic poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” had been… Read more »
Poetry by extremists, radicals, jihadists, and other folks on FBI watch lists
The New Yorker recently posted an article on poetry written by jihadists, and while this might beg any number of wildly inappropriate jokes about poetry’s decreasing national readership, it’s also… Read more »
Juan Felipe Herrera is “going to do a back flip” into his new Poet Laureate appointment
Yesterday the Library of Congress appointed Juan Felipe Herrera as the Library’s 21st Poet Laureate. Former Librarian of Congress head James. H. Billington said in his announcement: I see in Herrera’s… Read more »
NYPL releases the weirdest reference questions from the 1940s-1980s
Librarians’ patience has been tested at least as long as there have been libraries. Oh, and as long as there have been people. People to bother them. People who need… Read more »
10-year-old South Korean poet shows up Bartleby
South Korean publisher Chulganil is recalling copies of A Single Dog—an anthology of poems written by children, published at the end of March—after parents expressed heated objections to some of… Read more »
The “unpublished” Larkin poem that wasn’t
Last week it was Shakespeare. This week it’s the turn of a more modern poet, Philip Larkin, to be the subject of a grand but ultimately false discovery. On Monday,… Read more »
AWP and Vanessa Place respond to this week’s events
The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) announced on Sunday that poet Vanessa Place would no longer sit on a committee that determines which panels will be accepted for next year’s… Read more »