The recently (and controversially) appointed poet laureate of North Carolina has resigned from the post, but the upset generated by her short-lived laureateship can be interpreted as a sign of just how important poet laureates are. If you’re unconvinced, or simply confused about what exactly poet laureates do, we have just the links for you.
Poet Laureate Sans Laurels
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead
"If you remember the sixties, then you weren't really there." We've all heard the saying, but in case you actually forgot what the sixties were like, I have good news for you. The complete archive of Oz Magazine, sometimes called the most controversial magazine of the sixties, is available for download over at Open Culture. Oz regularly featured work by such artists as R. Crumb, Germaine Greer, and many more.
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Ben Stiller’s Daydreams
Ben Stiller has taken on the fashion and film worlds before, but his next directorial effort is literary. The new trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on the 1939 James Thurber short story, is more Michel Gondry than Derek Zoolander.
Poetry and Ouija
On life, love, poetry and Ouija: the New Yorker profiles the life and work of James Merrill.
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“Simultaneously less explicit and more explicit”
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the upcoming Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, the novel that Slate writer Tammy Oler called “a rite of passage for teenage girls in the ‘80s.” Now, Willa Paskin reviews the new film, lamenting that it “acts as if it is just another life-affirming Lifetime movie about surviving terrible situations.”
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Rooted
The term “regionalism” doesn’t have quite the lustre for poets that it does for fiction writers, yet poets undeniably reflect their roots in their work. In an essay, Sandra Beasley makes the case for embracing regionalism in the poetry world, citing Claudia Emerson as a model for profitably committing yourself to one place.