Posts Tagged ‘Poet Laureate’
June 7, 2012 | by The Paris Review
“I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people.” Ray Bradbury answers a fan letter, 1974.
Natasha Trethewey is named Poet Laureate.
Telling tales on the mid-century New Yorker. Just who was Janet Groth’s thinly disguised cad, the Great Deceiver?
Protesting New York City library cuts.
An Emily Dickinson garden party in Amherst.
Controversial words in China and the USA.
The android head of Philip K. Dick is terrifying.
TAGS Emily Dickinson, Natasha Trethewey, news, NYPL, On the Shelf, Philip K. Dick, Poet Laureate, Ray Bradbury, roundup
August 10, 2011 | by Sadie Stein
A cultural news roundup.
Philip Levine is America’s new poet laureate.
Save the Words is dedicated to bringing underutilized vocabulary back into circulation. A locupletative goal!
The Popeye Cookbook is, not shockingly, heavy on the spinach.
Bienvenue en France, Google Books!
An unlikely hit: The Waste Land app earns back its costs in a mere six weeks.
“I think it’s one of those things where you’re standing in a room, and you’re like, ‘Let’s make a new food magazine.’ And that’s a terrible idea. The world does not need a new food magazine ... But if it’s such a bad idea that you can do a good version of it, then that’s a cool challenge.”
An Edinburgh marathon reading of Theresa Breslin’s Prisoner in Alcatraz attempts to break the world reading record.
Signs of a publishing rebound?
John Burnside on researching a book: “I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.”
Watch Britten’s Turn of the Screw, live.
“There was something a bit Wellsian about photographs of riots and looting across London this weekend. Pictures of burning shops and broken windows and young men confronting uniformed police included crowdsourced images snatched by witnesses in the rapid, unexpected diffusion of trouble. The most dramatic, of Tottenham on fire and the blackened aftermath, are positively apocalyptic. To me, it all seems uncanny and reminiscent of late Victorian science fiction. Even the place names have that quality of ordinariness that Wells exploits in his fantasy of a London apocalypse: Tottenham in flames, insurrection in Enfield, anarchy in Leyton and Islington ...”
TAGS Arctic Circle, food magazine, France, Google Books, H.G. Wells, London, looting, Philip Levine, Poet Laureate, Prisoner in Alcatraz, record, riots, Save the Words, spinach, The Popeye Cookbook, The Waste Land, Theresa Breslin, Tottenham, Turn of the Screw, vocabulary
July 1, 2010 | by Lorin Stein
We congratulate W. S. Merwin on being named Poet Laureate of the United States. Merwin published his first poem with the Review in 1955, and we have been proud to publish him ever since. Herewith, to celebrate his appointment (and for the pleasure of retyping it) one of his more recent contributions:
To the Long Table
The sun was touching the wet black shoulders of olives
in a chipped dish descended from another century
on that day I remember more than half my life ago
and you had been covered with a tablecloth of worn damask
for lunch out on the balcony overhanging the stream
with the grapes still small among the vine leaves above us
and near the olives a pitcher of thin black acrid wine
from the cellar just below and an omelette on a cracked white platter
a wheel of bread goat cheeses salad I forgot what else
the ducks were asleep down on the far side of the green pond
Jacques came and went babbling fussing making his bad jokes
boasting about old days that nobody else remembered
the lacquered carriages the plumes on the horses and what his mother
had replied to the admiral whose attentions amused her
all the castles they had lost before he had grown up
and when the meal was over he said you too were for sale
he had discovered you in a carpenter's shop
where you had been used as a workbench without regard
for your true worth and the scars on you came from there
your history without words upon which words have gathered
TAGS congratulations, Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin
