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A new book by Shel Silverstein has been released posthumously called Every Thing On It and is in book stores today! The book, containing 145 poems, was created though the efforts of editor Toni Markiet and the family of the deceased poet, in hopes of staying true to Silverstein's aesthetic and keeping it authentic. More »
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Artist Agustina Woodgate has been going into thrift stores and sewing tiny little poems into the clothes on the racks. Swoon. More »
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This morning, in a rare, light-hearted political moment for The View co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck read off a joke-y children's poem she wrote as a way to explain Osama Bin Laden's death. Granted, using a dead person to reveal your playful side is a little weird, but whatever. More »
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Today New Statesman published "Last Letter," a previously unseen Ted Hughes poem about the three days before Sylvia Plath's suicide. Drafts of the poem, which begins, "What happened that night? Your final night," were found in the British Library's archive. More »
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Spotted in Roddy McDowell's book Double Exposure, Take Three: A poem by Tim Burton titled "Johnny Depp." It was published in 1992, yet seems to foreshadow their 1999 collaboration on Sleepy Hollow. (Click for full image.) More »
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Most of you could probably use a little poetry in your lives.  We've mashed our brains together and made a list of ten amazing queer ladysexy poets that you should check out right now, if you haven't already. More »
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Unless you happen to work in a zoo populated exclusively by baby animals, this is the cutest thing you will see today: A three-year-old boy recites Tennyson's poem The Eagle from memory while dressed as superman. But wait! There's more. More »
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People are obviously reading too much these days. That must be why one critic felt the need to list the 15 writers (9 of them women) we should all stop reading right now. More »
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Hissa Hilal, a Saudi housewife and a contestant in an American-Idol-style poetry competition, read an incendiary 15-verse poem that criticized clerics who issue ever-more-restrictive fatwas, and referred to clerics as monsters "wearing death as a robe, cinched with a belt." More »
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Earlier today, we read a poem by a bro named "Andy," who felt he truly understood the "trouble with women." I asked our commenters to respond to him with their own poems, and, of course, they came through: More »
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The Times of London has a somewhat irritating series titled "The Trouble With Women," which gives a platform to a new dude each week so he can complain about the lady-folk. This week, we have a "poet" named Andy. More »
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National Book Award-winning poet Lucille Clifton has died at the age of 73. Says her sister: "Everything touched her. Everyone mattered to her. She was such a loving person." Here, Clifton reads her poem, "Homage To My Hips." [BuffaloNews] More »
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Kristin Wiig reads from the "early" poems of Suzanne Somers; hilarity ensues. Lesson learned: Don't waste your affection on dogs. [The Wow Report] More »
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Punk rock poet Jim Carroll, who is perhaps best known for his memoir, "The Basketball Diaries," has died of a heart attack. As Patti Smith told the New York Times, Carroll's "work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty." [NYTimes] More »
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Tired of making fun of Sarah Palin? Us neither. Watch William Shatner give a poetic reading of her farewell speech, and, after the jump, a mashup of Palin and a possible 2012 competitor. More »
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Although it wasn't found sufficiently romantic to serve as a setting in a new Keats biopic, the poet's actual Hampstead house - where he lived, wrote, and fell in love - has been restored to its 19th century state. [Telegraph] More »
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Is it just me, or is Ed Westwick, aka Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass, reminiscent of a modern day Lord Byron in this GQ photo shoot? Just me? Well: I added poetry by George Gordon Byron to images of Westwick. Enjoy. More »
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In what one columnist has compared, perhaps erroneously, to the battle between Clinton and Obama, British poets Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott find themselves at the center of a scandal that includes allegations of racism, sexism, and sexual harrassment. More »
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Carol Ann Duffy has been named Britain's poet laureate. Duffy, the first woman to hold the post in its 341-year history, is known for a wide and varied body of modern poetry. [NYT] More »
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Gentles: 'Tis "Talk Like Shakespeare Day!" For on this 24th of April, the bard turns 445. [CNN] More »
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CNN ran a brief profile today of a young Pakistani girl whose openly anti-Taliban poetry is bringing her notoriety. We admire her, but can't help wondering...is this kind of exposure safe? More »
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In non Rick Warren news: Yale University Professor of African-American studies and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander has been selected to write and read a poem for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony on January 20. More »
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Elizabeth Bishop. Laurence Ferlinghetti. Sarah Palin? Yup, there's a movement afoot to make the hottest gov from the coldest state...poet laureate. Argues Julian Gough, "A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges. A great poet does not self-censor; Sarah Palin seems authentically innocent of what she is saying. She could be the most natural, visionary poet since William Blake." Here's a Palin haiku, courtesy of Slate: These corporations / Today it was AIG/ Important call, there. Click for the full, ahem, oeuvre. [New Yorker via Prospect, Slate] More »
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It's easy to vilify Ted Hughes as the callous philanderer who broke Sylvia Plath's heart, had a suspiciously high number of suicidal wives, and went on write increasingly bombastic poetry. A somewhat different picture of Hughes, who died ten years ago, emerges from The Letters of Ted Hughes, which was just published. Papercuts runs the letter Hughes wrote to Plath's mother, Aurelia, after Sylvia's suicide, and its heartbreak has none of his poetry's remoteness. "Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American." Yes, "woman poet" and the dig at Americans, - he couldn't help it! - but still - you'll cry. It's always a revelation, too, to be reminded of what a loss letter-writing was for emotional expression! [NY Times] More »
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Poetry fans and voyeurs alike may want to check out Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, reviewed in The New Republic. Lowell was both prolific and bipolar, the scion of an old Boston family. Bishop came from money too, but her mother was institutionalized when she was young, and Bishop struggled with alcoholism as an adult. Lowell was in love with her, but Bishop was in love mostly with other women, and Lowell could never bring himself to propose. He later wrote, "asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had." [TNR] More »
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This is obscure Chinese poet Lin Zhao. She was executed by the Chinese government in 1968, at the age of 36 and the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For the decade or so prior she had been imprisoned, for the crime of not confessing to being a counterrevolutionary. Maybe a half million people died during the Cultural Revolution and Lin Zhao probably would have gone completely forgotten, but for the fact that she'd earned a reputation as being one of the few women at her college who liked to drink and dance and run her mouth, and also the fact that she was so pissed about being locked up and tortured when she'd been such a devoted Communist that she wrote hundreds of thousands of words worth of poetry about it, using her own blood. More »
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