W.S. Merwin, a Hawaii-based poet born in 1927, has been named the 17th Poet Laureate of the United States. A fellow poet writes, “There is something monklike about Merwin … He is trying to achieve a contemplative distance from desire and ambition.”
W.S. Merwin named as 17th Poet Laureate of the USA
Twitter Fiction Festival
On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.
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On Children’s Lit
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Add Poems to Your Curriculum
Are you familiar with "Teach This Poem"? If not you should be. This organization just won the National Book Foundation's 2018 Innovations in Reading Prize. Their literary social impact mission? Help teachers add poetry to their curriculum; "Each week, The Academy of American Poets emails out a poem along with interdisciplinary information — classroom discussion questions and multimedia offerings like maps, videos, photography, and related reading suggestions. Everything is curated to help teachers incorporate poetry into the classroom experience." Find out more about the prize and the org here.
The Island of Last Chances
Have you ever had a script rejected? Did you reassure yourself it had to do with just about anything other than the quality of your writing? Well now's the chance to put your money where your mouth is - a new Hollywood startup called Adaptive Studios is "rummaging through the trash" and breathing new life into dead movie scripts.
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Risk-Taker, Miracle-Maker
"Maybe the optimists are right; maybe poetry does help you live your life. And maybe they are more right than they know, and it rounds you out for death." Andrew O'Hagan writes for The Guardian about falling in love with poetry and coming to see the poet as "a risk-taker, a miracle-maker, a moral panjandrum and a convict of the senses."
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New Michael Robbins Poetry
The latest issue of Poetry magazine features four of Michael Robbins’s first “post-Alien vs. Predator” poems: “Big Country,” “Be Myself,” “The Second Sex,” and “That’s Incredible!” Robbins was also a recent participant in our Year In Reading series.
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The Deepest Feeling
“Love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.” Mary-Kay Wilmers for the London Review of Books reviews Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. In the book, Moore’s slightly-bizarre domestic life is examined with fairness and honesty alongside her impressive body of work. If poetry is your thing, check out our On Poetry column for more.
Big, Bent Ears
This week the Paris Review launched a new online series, Big, Bent Ears, a "Serial in Documentary Uncertainty" masterminded by Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss. Each installation features "a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in various arrangements and states of completion," and the first chapter overlaps Joseph Mitchell and the Big Ears Music Festival even though "the two projects seem to share little: one concerns a wordsmith, a chronicler, and preserver of fading traditions; the other, musicians challenging tradition and musical forms on a sometimes radical basis."
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