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As National Poetry Month begins, poet Adrienne Rich is much on the mind of poetry readers in the wake of her death at 82 on March 27, 2012. Adrienne Rich’s poems are works you turn to when the fog of stress grows too thick and the static too loud, when the world seems cruel and [...]

The connection between medicine and literature is a long and noble one, including the works of Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, to name the two most readily cited. Women and men become doctors because they want to help and heal others, which are acts of compassion, and compassion is born of the imagination. To feel [...]

Although Booklist has enthusiastically reviewed books by the newly designated MacArthur “genius” long form journalist Peter Hessler, most recently, Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory, this year’s MacArthur Fellows include only one instantly recognizable literary name, that of poet Kay Ryan, a former poet laureate. I’ll never forget the first time I [...]

The 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship winners have been announced by the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazine. These five winners were selected from thousands to receive not only the honor of winning, but a grant to continue studying and writing poetry. All of the winners will be featured in the November issue of Poetry. These poets [...]

This morning I attended the dedication ceremony for the new Poetry Foundation headquarters building (which Blair Kamin gave a great review in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune). My presence was due to a trickle-down invitation: several higher-ups at ALA had been invited first but, as they were already en route to New Orleans and I’m not leaving until tomorrow, [...]

81-year-old Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott beat out Seamus Heaney to win the T.S. Elliot Prize for poetry. He will take home a $24,000 cash prize for his work,  White Egrets. Visit The Telegraph website for more on his win.

On the Guardian‘s Books Blog, Lesley McDowell writes about writers who are reviewers, and reviewers who are writers–and, honestly, I would have no idea what one of those looks like: It’s a strange hybrid, this author-critic creature. I can’t think of another art form where the “practitioner” and the critic overlap like this. Where are [...]

William Stanley Merwin’s poems are fully meshed in nature, and he lives his passion for the verdant world in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered plants. The profound connection between green entities and the poet is indicated in the title of the first collection of Merwin’s I reviewed, Flower & Hand. This launched my apprenticeship to this exemplary observer of [...]

The $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize was awarded to Eleanor Ross Taylor by the Poetry Foundation for her lifetime of achievement. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine had some wonderful things to say about Taylor: Her slow production (six books in 50 years), dislike of poetry readings (“It seems to me that it’s all for the [...]

All month long, I’ve been meaning to check out WGBH’s videos for National Poetry Month, made for the “Poetry Everywhere” series airing on public television. I thought it might be nice to embed a few of them throughout April. Then I watched the videos and changed my mind — and not only because they’ve disabled embedding. It’s not [...]