Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
A café in State College, Pennsylvania, has installed a Telepoem Booth, a renovated 1970s telephone booth that people can use to make a “call” and listen to one of 167 poems. Created by artist Elizabeth Hellstern, the booth includes poetry from local poets as well as from poets across the country. (Statecollege.com)
At the Atlantic, poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke examines the legacy of poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, and how their differing approaches to emotional revelation and confession influences poetry today.
The finalists for the Best Translated Book Awards were announced yesterday. The winners of the $10,000 awards, given annually for the best books of poetry and fiction in translation published in the previous year, will be announced May 4. (Millions)
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram offers a close reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s epic poem “The Annaid,” and explores how the poem’s departure from Virgil’s classic The Aeneid marks Brooks’s effort to “highlight and respond to the specific racialized struggles of midcentury African American women.” (Harriet)
Speaking of classics, writer and classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn tells the story of how his octogenarian father took his college seminar on Homer’s The Odyssey and then embarked with him on a cruise through the Aegean to retrace Odysseus’s journey. (New Yorker)
Bustle rounds up some particularly egregious typos in literature, including a novel that used “wonton” instead of “wanton,” and Shakespeare’s play, Cymbeline, whose character Imogen was originally named Innogen.
The Boston Globe tracks the success of Instagram poets, whose books now top the poetry best-seller list on Amazon.
“What Radtke ultimately finds, by way of her exploration of disintegration, is an antidote to her restlessness—cold, physical evidence that human ambition, indeed, may be futile.”Arnav Adhikari reviews Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, out yesterday from Pantheon. (Atlantic)
