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Adrienne Rich Dies

 
Baltimore native Adrienne Rich, an award-winning poet whose socially conscious work influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died at 82. She died Tuesday at her ... [ read more ]

Herrera Appointed California Poet Laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday. Herrera, 63 and son of Mexican migrant workers, will be the first Hispanic writer to serve in the post. ... [ read more ]

Elizabeth Spires, Smartish Pace Reading

Elizabeth Spires reading for Smartish Pace at The Walters Art Musuem in Baltimore, MD on September 19, 2009. Intro by Stephen Reichert of Smartish Pace.

Interview with Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro's newest collection of poems, How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems, will appear in 2001. Born in Chicago in 1924, educated at Yale and Columbia, an Air Force gunner during World War II, Shapiro settled in New York and worked as a journalist, serving for eight years as the editor of the New York Times Book Review and eventually becoming a senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. In his Introduction to Shapiro's Selected Poems (1997), James Atlas, his colleague at the Magazine, observes the "rare unity" in Shapiro's life and work: "He has lived in the same place, Brooklyn Heights, for nearly his entire writing life; he has immersed himself in the rituals of his own neighborhood with an almost religious intensity." Mentored by the Objectivists but belonging to no one school, Shapiro is often regarded as a quintessential New York poet, tough but compassionate, jazzy and modernistic, but almost classical in his humane skepticism. His lyrics have the sound of chastened conversation-and his conversation produces a kind of punchy lyricism that is, for his interlocutor, both chastening and immensely pleasurable. This interview took place on March 17, 2000, at the home of Galen Williams ... [ read more ]

Lovely, Rasberry

The Comedic EffectA number of poets and critics, including Stephen Burt and Tony Hoagland, have recently sounded the death toll for what Burt has called "elliptical" poetry and Hoagland, "hip contemporary skittishness." Hoagland sees a return to autobiographical narrative of the 1980s, Burt, a renewed interest in the objectivism of Pound and Williams. Yet, while I think (and hope) that the worst of the elliptical poets will fade, others, whose work is less ... [ read more ]