Article Archive: News and Trends

Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.

Bennington Band Honors Late Poet

by
A. N. Devers
7.1.09

A group of writing instructors and students who over the years formed a ragtag band during late-night impromptu jam sessions at the Bennington Writing Seminars released their first CD earlier this year. Titled Let's Doghouse: A Tribute to Liam Rector, the compilation serves as a memorial to the founding director of the Writing Seminars, a poet, who passed away two years ago.

Summer Stimulus

by
Kevin Nance
7.1.09

For many writers groups and nonprofit literary organizations battered by the recession, help is on the way. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was signed into law by president Barack Obama in February, included fifty million dollars in arts funding that is being allocated by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?

by
Shell Fischer
7.1.09

Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms.

Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Rachel Levitsky's Neighbor and Stephen D. Gutierrez's Live From Fresno y Los, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Literary MagNet

by
Kevin Larimer
7.1.09

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Wag's Revue, Poet Lore, the Glut, Portrait, Argosy, can we have our ball back?, DoubleTake, Midnight Mind Magazine, Mot Juste, Cue, and Black Clock.

Small Press Points

by
Kevin Larimer
5.1.09

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features New Directions, Burning Deck, Siglio Press, Calyx Books, Fence Books, Hanging Loose Press, Slope Editions, Canarium Books, Octopus Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Clear Cut Press, Featherproof Books, Paper Egg Books, Soft Skull Press, and Tupelo Press.

Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

by
Staff
5.1.09

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Emily Chenoweth's Hello Goodbye and Loree Rackstraw's Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As I Knew Him as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Literary MagNet

by
Kevin Larimer
5.1.09

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Witness, the Massachusetts Review, Calyx, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and Oxford American.

The Written Image: The Beats

Trying to capitalize on the popularity of graphic novels, Hill and Wang, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has begun publishing graphic nonfiction titles. Their latest release, The Beats: A Graphic History, covers all the major writers of the generation.

Poetry Makes Strange Bedfellows

by
Travis Nichols
3.1.09

By presenting seventy-three poets, all of whom the editors believe constitute what Charles Bernstein famously called "official verse culture" as well as its unofficial, avant-garde counterpart, the new anthology American Hybrid strives to showcase the diversity of contemporary American poetry while also revealing the unusual affinities within it.

Literary MagNet

by
Kevin Larimer
3.1.09

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features the Normal School, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Narrative.

Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday and Jane Vandenbergh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Literary MagNet

by
Kevin Larimer
1.1.09

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Farmhouse Magazine, the Atlanta Review, Tin House, theVirginia Quarterly Review, Poems Against War, and Poets Against War.

Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Stephanie Kallos's Sing Them Home and Kyle Beachy's The Slide as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Balancing the Books

by
Kevin Nance
1.1.09

As the crisis on Wall Street trickles down to Main Street, businesses of all kinds are responding to the gloomy economic climate with a variety of belt-tightening measures. Independent literary publishers are among the smaller, more vulnerable operations that are reacting to real and projected downturns in orders, sales, and, in the case of nonprofit houses, philanthropic giving.

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