Last year, a Burmese poet named Saw Wai published a Valentine's Day poem in the aptly named Love Journal, a popular Burmese magazine. His poem, entitled "14th February" read, in part,

Millions of those who know how to love
Laugh and clap those gold-gilded hands

It seems innocuous enough,...

Very early Wednesday morning in Grant Park, Barack Obama gave us one last smile and wave before following a gaggle of beaming Bidens and Obamas out of the spotlight. And that was that.

For someone who'd begun to base his daily routine around the tracking polls (Zogby before bed and...

Walt Whitman lived in that tenuous time before flag pins when threshing the patriots from the terrorist-loving socialists was a difficult business. So John McCain and Sarah Palin, no doubt, would have had a hard time deciding if they should accept the great grandfather of American poetry into their ranks....

If you're like me, you've recently found yourself lying awake at night worrying that Reverend Wright might decide it's time to head to Washington to make another speech, that bin Laden might emerge from his cave to announce he has a man-crush on Obama, or that the fate of the...

I loved reading Shel Silverstein as a kid. His poems stirred my imagination more than anything else I remember reading back then. Sure they could be a little creepy:

But this afternoon by the lion's cage
I'm afraid I got too near.
And I'm writing these lines
...

This past Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK, and many British media outlets got into the spirit by asking readers (or viewers) to submit poems on this year's theme of "work." Judging from the submissions, "out of work" would have been more appropriate. The poems made clear just...

When Hayden Carruth's collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award for poetry, it was no great surprise that he chose not to attend the ceremony. He was always something of an outsider. For most of his life, he kept a distance from the literary mainstream, publishing his...

The pending publication of Osama Bin Laden's poetry in the academic journal Language and Communication next month is sparking some debate. While the poems could provide insight into Bin Laden's psyche, many people wonder why the heck you would give the guy another forum.

The poetry is...

British poet laureate Andrew Motion is planning to resign next year. And while he has long professed his desire to leave the lifetime appointment early, he is more anxious than ever to get back to living without the laurels. Motion, it seems, has developed a nasty case of writer's block...

Has poetry officially jumped the shark? I came across an NPR story this past week on a composer who set the "found poetry" of Donald Rumsfeld--pulled from some of Rummy's more quixotic press conferences and poeticized by Slate writer Hart Seely--to music. The composer, Bryant Kong, plays piano while an...

I was wondering what kind of mother, being an avowed evangelical and knowing that her underage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, would choose to accept the vice presidential nomination and thus subject her daughter to a vicious and unrelenting spotlight for, potentially, the next eight years. And I was...

Presidential nomination acceptance speeches surely aim to create great quotes, not to repeat them. So I should have figured that when I went digging around in such speeches this past week looking for lines of poetry, I'd come up empty handed. Well, almost. George McGovern quoted William Butler Yeats in...

When renowned novelist Ahdaf Soueif said that the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was "the last poet who could fill a football stadium," it wasn't hyperbole. A Darwish reading in Beirut earlier this year drew more than 25,000 people. His funeral two weeks ago, which garnered little attention here in the...

Spreading an appreciation for poetry isn't easy in a country that doesn't read as much as it used to and doesn't value the arts as much it should. Let's face it: unless Maya Angelou is on Oprah, we poets don't tend to register on the national consciousness. It's partly our...

The National Poetry Slam--or so-called "Superbowl of spoken word"-- took place in Madison, Wisconsin this past week. The event featured more than 75 teams that had won their way through preliminary slams and city championships around the country to reach the final. This year, there was even a team from...

"In Spanish, there is poetry before and after Rubén Dario," Yale professor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria wrote in a February 2006 article in The Nation. And yet I'm ashamed to admit that if it weren't for a couple of thieves, I still wouldn't have read him.

In a story that rippled...

In 1971, James Dickey wrote a letter listing the top ten living American poets. Slotted in third place behind Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden was...James Dickey! Arrogant? Sure. But that kind of hubris isn't unprecedented in the poetry world. Let's not forget John Milton's belief that Paradise Lost might "justify...

Kay Ryan the poet may have just been thrown into the spotlight, but her work has been there for a while. Her poems have filled six books, won her more than a few prestigious prizes, and appeared regularly in the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. Now they have earned her...

White Stripes rocker Jack White came under fire recently for disparaging his home town of Detroit, so he decided to prove his love for the city in a rather unorthodox way -- by writing a poem.

This wasn't your everyday means of damage control -- let's face it, trying...

Medical experts say that 30% to 50% of us occasionally suffer from insomnia, your intrepid poetry columnist included. Your anxiety kicks up, your heart starts to race a little bit, the sheets start to itch and...crap. Have you been there? Then comes the counting and the breathing exercises. I know,...