A Poetry Daily Prose Feature:


"Beijing

Twenty poets speaking seven languages on a field trip to the outskirts of Beijing. A birdless summer day, no insect whirr. We enter the gate of the Summer Palace as a horde, then dissolve into pairs. Without his Persian translator, Emran Salahi is pensive, mute. I trail him through The Hall of Dispelling Clouds, past its discolored statuary and dusty tapestries symbolizing, say the placards, eternal power. Wandering to the corner of a side room, I peer around a painted screen and find, in the back warren, an old man face-down on a table strewn with syringes.

Behind everything
I see, something I don't
Know how to look for."

—Forrest Gander, The Pamirs Poetry Journal (American Poetry Review)

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Poetry Out Loud: 2008 Competition
Editors' Note: The 2008 National Recitation Contest, presented by the National Endowment of the Arts and The Poetry Foundation and their state partners culminated in the April 29 National Finals in Washington DC. We tracked events as they happened across the country on the road to the Nationals...

"We are taking the impulse of the electric popular culture and linking it to the masterpieces of poetry."
• Valerie Strauss reports on the culmination of this year's Poetry Out Loud competition, which saw 200,000 high school students from 1,500 schools participate. (The Washington Post)
• "Tone maps" help Poetry Out Loud competitors approach poems.
• Valerie Strauss chats with Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, about poetry and Poetry Out Loud. (The Washington Post)
• Current U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, and former Laureate, Billy Collins offer tips for writing and reciting poetry. (The Washington Post)
• What are poetry readers like? A survey commissioned by The Poetry Foundation has some answers. (The Washington Post)

The 2008 National Champion: Shawntay A. Henry!
• The 10th grader from the U. S. Virgin Islands wins top honors from among 12 finalists and 52 state champions. (Press release from the National Endowment for the Arts)
• An airport welcome awaits as the new champ heads home.(Caribbean Net News)
• Listen to Shawntay Henry's final-round reading of "Frederick Douglass," by Robert E. Hayden. (Audio from NPR)

Oregon's Sophia Soberon is national first-runner-up!
The Brookings-Harbor High School senior earns scholarship and the applause of a packed house in Washington, D.C. (Curry Coastal Pilot)

MORE....

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In the News:

American Life in Poetry:
Ted Kooser introduces a poem by Ann Struthers. (American Life in Poetry)

The "field poet:"
William Georgiades talks with Nick Flynn. (Los Angeles Times)

Other Ranks :
Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet. A New Life, by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, reviewed by Peter Parker. (The Times Literary Supplement)

Wales Book of the Year Awards:
Poet Dannie Abse honored with the award given to a Welsh author writing in English for his memoir The Presence. (Guardian Unlimited)

Brake for moose:
A visit to The Frost Place. (New Hampshire Magazine)

The imagination of death:
Adam Kirsch on Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. (The New Yorker)

"Poetry and criticism don’t interfere with each other, not exactly..."
A very quick chat with William Logan. (The New York Times)

"You have to be an agent of social change."
At Cloud Place, a Boston studio and performance space, teen "spoken-word curators" focus their work on social realities. (The Boston Globe)

Poet's Choice:
Mary Karr introduces poems by Miroslav Holub. (The Washington Post)

"Blissfully trivial" :
William Logan reviews Selected Poems, by Frank O’Hara, edited by Mark Ford. (The New York Times)

Two years, a lifetime:
Edna Longley surveys the work of WWI poet Edward Thomas. (Guardian Unlimited)

Elizabeth Bartlett, 84
An obituary. (Telegraph)

Sustaining not one but two livings on poetry:
A visit to Seattle's Open Books: A Poetry Emporium, one of two poetry-only bookstores in the U.S. (Crosscut Seattle)

"So much for the Tang dynasty, but what about poetry in China in 2008?"
Shirley Dent looks for signs. (Guardian Unlimited)

G. E. Murray, 62:
An obituary. (Chicago Tribune)

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Recently Arrived Titles
These just in... Highlighted titles may be purchased from Poetry Daily / Amazon.com. A complete list of all books and journals recently received at Poetry Daily is also available.

• The Usable Field, Jane Mead (Alice James Books)
• Ground Forces, Paul Allen (Salmon Publishing)
• The Fire Landscape, Gary Fincke (University of Arkansas Press)
• A Necklace of Bees, Dannye Romine Powell (University of Arkansas Press)
• Invitation to a Secret Feast: Selected Poems, Joumana Haddad, ed. Khaled Mattawa (Tupelo Press)
• Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, Peter Klappert (Six Gallery Press)
• Down the Sunlit Hall, Eileen Sheehan (Doghouse)
• Airs & Voices, Paula Bonnell (BkMk Press)
• No Face: Selected & New Poems, Judith Roitman (First Intensity Press)
• Thirty-Three Hats for Julia, Sarah B. Bein (Red Hen Press)
• Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po LISTSERV, ed. Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, Lesley Wheeler (Red Hen Press)
• Sunrise to Sunset (and all that lies between), H. E. McIntyre (American Literary Press)
• Sum, Yonat Hafftka (Six Gallery Press)
• The Unworn Necklace, Roberta Beary (Snapshot Press)
• Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese & English-Language Haiku in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Richard Gilbert (Red Moon Press)
• Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions, Robert McDowell (Free Press)
• Television Farm, John Korn (A Menendez Publication)

Recent Anthologies, etc.

• Why Poetry Matters, Jay Parini (Yale University Press)
• Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, ed. Dennis O'Driscoll (Copper Canyon Press)
• All That Mighty Heart: London Poems, ed. Lisa Russ Spaar (University of Virginia Press)
• River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things, ed. Pamela Michael (Milkweed Editions)
• The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, ed. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
• The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach (Graywolf Press)
• The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye, Donald Revell (Graywolf Press)
• The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, Adam Kirsch (Norton)
• Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Diane Boller, Don Selby, ed.s (Sourcebooks)

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Past Features:
Original articles, interviews, selections from special collections and journal issues, and more are available in the Archives.