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Education News >> Subjects >> Poetry
Poetry News
Unlike the American Poet Laureate, the British national poet is expected to write commissioned poems celebrating special occasions in the life of the British royal family. But Carol Ann Duffy has taken her post as the United Kingdom’s designated public poet well beyond the royals, writing poems about political uproar in Parliament, climate change, and the deaths of the last two surviving British soldiers who served in World War I. Now she’s written a poem for the wounded warrior of soccer (or football, as everyone outside the US calls it), David Beckham:
from The Telegraph (UK):
“David Beckham’s Achilles injury commemorated by Poet Laureate,” by Nick Collins
“A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy immortalises David Beckham’s Achilles injury in a poem that compares the former England captain to the classical warrior.”
Other Posts on Poetry and Sports:
Baseball in Poetry (2009)
Poets in Baseball (2009)
Baseball Poems -- Often Populist Summer Perennials (2008)
More on Poets Laureate:
Poets Laureate, a Brief History
Poets Laureate of the U.S.A., a Net-Annotated List
Our Profiles of Recent U.S. Poet Laureates
Kay Ryan (2008-2010)
Charles Simic (2007-2008)
Donald Hall (2006-2007)
Ted Kooser (2004-2006)
Louise Glück (2003-2004)
Stanley Kunitz (2000-2001)
Robert Pinsky (1997-2000)
A Poem for the Wounded Warrior of ?The Beautiful Game? originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 03:12:24.
Not quite... There’s an animated version of her poem “Advertisement” in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere video collection. And if you were in London in 2006, you could have seen Jenny Holzer’s projections of her poems on landmark buildings there... But it seems you would have to get Polish television in order to see Wislawa Symborska herself, in the new documentary that has been reported, but apparently not released, all over the world.
from Associated Press:
“New documentary on Nobel laureate Szymborska,” by Agata Klapec
“The 70-minute documentary ‘Sometimes Life is Bearable’ by Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska being aired Sunday is the first time the notoriously media-shy writer has offered such insight into her life and fascinations. She let a crew from Poland’s TVN television visit her at home in Krakow and accompany her on travels throughout Europe from Italy to Ireland.... Viewers see Szymborska, 86, enjoying her less-known literary hobby—composing saucy limericks.... In more personal moments, the document details Szymborska’s insatiable love of a good prank, too.”
It sounds as if she embodies in her person the same startling combination of wit, fun and profundity carried in her poems—has any of our readers managed to see the film?
More films about poets and poetry:
Our reviews and articles
John Keats’ Bright Star (September 2009)
Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (April 2009)
A new Poe(try) film: The Death of Poe (August 2006)
Neruda & Ferlinghetti: Two 20th century poetic icons captured on film (January 2006)
Do You Have to Go to Poland to See Szymborska on TV? originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 02:57:07.
Thanks to the efforts of a few member poets, our Forum’s InterBoard Poetry Competition folder has become a very lively place, with a wealth of good poems nominated for the monthly InterBoard Poetry Competition. Here are the poems entered from our Forum for March:
- “Loss of Face” by Christine J. Schiff, a deceptively simple piece that applies great subtlety and a light touch in a single conceit that deals with faces, masks, images, everything connected with the physical expression of experience.
- Alcaeus’ “Your Face in the Mirror,” another “face” poem painting in great detail the interplay of consciousness and external reality sparked by a mirror reflection, in two parts, “Her” and “Him.”
- “To Die For” by Tim J. Brennan (68degrees), a poem that beautifully captures the intensity of details experienced under medical stress by a poet whose heart remains open to the people around him—
“...with each elevator door
that opens and with each new floor
we arrive upon, another poem
steps out”
More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information, reading and book-buying links for January-March 2010 IBPC judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Our Forum?s Envoys to the March IBPC originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 17:30:24.
Here are the winning poems in last month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition, just announced by judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar:
- In first place, “What” by Jude Goodwin (whose poem also placed first in January!), “a poem about poetry, but also about humanity and art, struck through with humor...”
- In second place, “A Question of Nakedness” by Melanie Firth, liked by the judges “for its generosity to the aging body in all its guises, its scars and scabs and folds, its furrows and deadly moles.”
- In third place, “Absence of Detail” by Debbie Calverley, a poem that “moves from image to image” and finally “becomes a poem in spite of the poet’s most common complaint”—“there is nothing to write.”
- Laux and Millar also made honorable mention without comment of three more poems: “Ars Poetica #7” by Tim Blighton, “O Be Joyful” by Judy Swann, and “Triolet on a Line by Billy Collins” by Antonia Clark.
None of these poems came from our Forum, but hope springs eternal, and the Forum poets have been busily nominating and polishing poems for entry in the past month, so we should have a fine choice of entries for March. We will be back to report when they have been submitted to the IBPC editors.
More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information, reading and book-buying links for January-March 2010 IBPC judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Winners chosen in the February InterBoard Poetry Competition originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 02:20:50.
The first poets in most human societies have been historians, keepers of the culture’s stories in what is often an oral tradition. It’s only in more recent centuries that the line has been drawn between poetry and history as different forms of “truth-telling”—poetry’s truth a matter of art and language and the spark of insight struck between words, while history has moved towards science and an accumulation of data on a larger scale. Perhaps it’s this modern assumption of a division between the two that caused me to be taken aback, at first, by the news that a poem was the source of “proof” for a revised assessment of the truth behind Anne Boleyn’s death.
As viewers of Showtime’s series The Tudors surely know, it has been thought that the accusations of adultery and incest which were the basis for the execution of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, were probably false, brought up so that Henry could get rid of her, marry again, and have a male heir to the throne. But in a new biography to be published this year by Yale University Press, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions, Professor G.W. Bernard argues that she was guilty of the charges, and offers as proof a poem written by the French ambassador to Henry’s court, Lancelot de Carles.
from The Telegraph (UK):
“Poem provides evidence that Anne Boleyn had numerous affairs”
“The king’s second wife was beheaded after being charged with having affairs with five men, one of them her own brother. However, a French poem written days after her death in 1536 has cast doubt over claims by historians that she was framed by supporters of the first queen, Catherine of Aragon, or that Henry made up the claims because he was not provided with a son.... Prof Bernard says he has found evidence to support its contents in letters and other sources from the time even though the poem was previously considered a literary work ‘unworthy of credence.’”
from The Guardian (UK):
“Anne Boleyn was guilty of adultery, new biography claims,” by Alison Flood
“A new biography of Anne Boleyn is set to claim that, far from being framed for adultery, Henry VIII’s second queen may not have been innocent of the affairs for which she was sentenced to death.... ‘It’s not that I’ve discovered the poem for the first time—it’s been known to scholars because an edition was printed in the 1920s—but on the whole scholars have dismissed it because it’s a literary source,’ said Bernard.”
Very interesting.... what do you think about using poems as historical evidence? I’d love to hear your thoughts in comments to this post....
Revision of History Found in a Poem originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 01:39:16.
Although poetry competition was not part of the original Olympic games in ancient Greece, poems were surely associated with the Olympics—great poets like Pindar were commissioned to write odes immortalizing the winning athletes. The modern-day Olympics are memorialized in photographs and on film, but poetry is there also:
- When the Olympics were held in Sydney in 2000, an Australian poet named Mark O’Connor was given a government grant to write poems about the events, and there has been some talk about poetry at the 2012 London Olympics.
- Two years ago, the International PEN Poem Relay sent a poem around the world and into many languages on a path paralleling the progress of the Olympic torch before the Beijing Olympic games as a potent symbol in the campaign for free expression.
- Slam poet Shane Koyczan performed his poem “We Are More” as part of the opening ceremony on Friday night—it was originally commissioned by the Canadian Tourism Commission.
- On the other hand, Vancouver’s local poet laureate, Brad Cran, declined to participate in the Cultural Olympiad associated with the Vancouver Winter Games.
- Jalena Keane-Lee, a freshman at Berkeley High in California, wrote a poem as her entry in the McDonalds Champion Kids contest and won a trip to the Vancouver Winter Olympics as a “correspondent” representing her hometown.
Poetry and the Winter Olympics originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 03:26:36.
Mystery surrounds Edgar Allan Poe--not only his spooky stories and poems, but the circumstances of his death, burial and reburial, and more recently, the annual birthday tribute placed at his grave site by an anonymous visitor known as “Poe Toaster.” Last year was the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, and this year it appears that particular mystery has come to an end--not because the Poe Toaster has been definitively identified, but because he or she has stopped coming. Sad....
from The Baltimore Sun:
“Poe Toaster tribute is ‘nevermore’,” by Liz F. Kay
“A longtime tribute to Edgar Allan Poe may have come to an end with the absence of the ‘Poe Toaster,’ who for more than half a century has marked the poet’s birthday by laying roses and a bottle of cognac at his original grave site. This is the first time since Jan. 19, 1949 that the person, whose identity is unknown, failed to arrive...”
“The man who wasn’t there,” by Mary Carole McCauley and Chris Kaltenbach
“Talk about a midnight dreary.... Dozens of fans of Edgar Allan Poe were left standing out in the cold Tuesday when a mysterious nocturnal visitor didn’t keep his standing date to toast the author at his Baltimore burial plot. The so-called Poe Toaster’s absence yesterday for the first time in more than 60 years has renewed the decades-long fascination with the visitor’s identity.”
More on Edgar Allan Poe:
Our biographical profile of E.A. Poe, American Romantic
Library: Poems by E.A. Poe
Poe Properly Buried, 160 Years Later (2009)
Celebrating Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th Birthday (2008)
A new wrinkle in the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death (2007)
The Mysterious Poe Toaster Revealed? (2007)
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe! The Empty House Tour, by Tom Devaney
A new Poe(try) film: The Death of Poe (2006)
No More Cognac and Roses for Edgar Allan Poe? originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 04:27:47.
Poets! Are you snowbound? Have you been woodshedding over the winter, poring over your poems, trying to get them published in a magazine or put together a book manuscript? Then maybe now that spring approaches, it’s time to think about sending your poems off to be judged in a publication contest. Here’s a sampling of upcoming competition deadlines:
- Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prizes, First Book competition and Open competition (postmark deadline February 16)
- Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books (postmark deadline February 16)
- National Poetry Series, five book publication awards with HarperCollins Publishers, Coffee House Press, University of Georgia Press, Penguin Books, and Fence Books (postmark deadline February 16)
- New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition from Finishing Line Press (postmark deadline February 28)
- The American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press (postmark deadline February 28)
- Fence Modern Poets Series (postmark deadline February 28)
- Tupelo Press Snowbound Series Chapbook Award (postmark deadline February 28)
- Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press (postmark deadline March 1)
- The Washington Prize from The Word Works (postmark deadline March 1)
- Del Sol Press Poetry Prize from webdelsol (postmark deadline March 15)
- Grub Street Book Prize in Poetry for books published in 2009 or 2010 (postmark deadline March 15)
- The Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers (with one published book, postmark deadline March 31)
- Four Way Books Intro Poetry Prize (postmark or online submission deadline March 31)
- Passager Poetry Contest for Writers Over 50 (postmark deadline April 1)
- Robert Watson Poetry Award from Spring Garden Press and storySouth (postmark or online entry deadline April 2)
- Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Competition (postmark deadline April 15)
- Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review (postmark deadline April 30)
- Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (postmark deadline April 30)
- The Anhinga Prize for Poetry (postmark deadline May 1)
- Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award (postmark deadline May 15)
- New Letters Prize for Poetry (postmark deadline May 18)
- Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest (email entry deadline May 18, postmark deadline May 31)
- Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from Calyx (postmark deadline May 31)
- The Bordighera Poetry Prize for Italian American poets (postmark deadline May 31)
- Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College (postmark deadline May 31)
Required reading before you submit to any contests:
“What’s Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?,” by David Alpaugh
How to put together a poetry manuscript for publication
“A Word To the Wise: On entering your poems in competition,” by Kurt Heintz
“You Do It Because You Love It,” by S.A. Griffin
Related resources:
More contest links
A Roundup of Poetry Contest Deadlines originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 23:39:10.
A few years ago, we took note of the online incarnations of Dante’s Inferno, among them Todd King’s “virtual tour of hell,” a Flash project that allows you to explore the Dark Wood and the nine circles of hell, with Virgil and Dante as your guides. Now Electronic Arts has remade the poem as a “quest” video game, set to be released February 9, in which the game player takes on the role of Dante as a medieval warrior, venturing into hell to rescue Beatrice, wielding “Death’s soul-reaping scythe” and a magical cross given to him by Beatrice. We feel the same way about this game as we did about the CGI-filled film of Beowulf a few years ago: The real art is in the words of the poem. At least the Web site for this new version of the Inferno includes a portion of the poem itself, in Longfellow’s translation—and the game producers have arranged for publication of the classic poem in a new English edition to accompany the game.
Related articles
“Dante & the Response Poem,” David Shapiro and Frank Lima create another kind of collaboration
Terza rima, the rhyme-linked 3-line stanza form originated by Dante
More Medieval poets
Dante?s Inferno jumps off the page originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 04:49:20.
We’re happy to report that our Forum poets put forward a good number of excellent poems during the past month to be considered for entry in the InterBoard Poetry Competition—enough that Poetry Guide Margy Snyder faced some difficult choices in winnowing down our entries to the limit of three. These three poems went to the IBPC editors for February:
- “Drying in the Rain” by Theo Vogdanis (boyatthewindow), a poem that paints in delicate watercolors the melancholy residue of a memory that has ostensibly “washed away.8221;
- “Virgin” by Tim J. Brennan (68degrees), a memory beautifully compressed into just a few short lines and sparkling images, so that it is not crushed but shines.
- “Are You Dead?” by T. Obatala (trkyounger), a strong example of this poet’s myth-making that prompted this response from one reader: “knocked out completely senseless by a spectacularly good punch of a poem.”
We will be back to report when the judges have selected the winning poems. In the meantime, we’ve posted a page of background information on the current IBPC judges, Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar, for those of you who’d like to explore their poetic predilections, and we urge the Forum poets to keep the nominations coming in for next month. To nominate a poem you’ve seen anywhere on the Poetry Forum, post it in the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder and be sure to address your post to the poet whose work you are nominating, so that the poet will be notified and can post the required permission and information before we select next month’s three entries.
More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information, reading and book-buying links for January-March 2010 IBPC judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Poems representing our Forum in the February IBPC originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 01:45:52.
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