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:
“My role is to remind the American people that they have the most worthy, significant, beautiful, brilliant voice. And without it what would our lives be? We need it. Silence erodes our lives.” Juan Felipe Herrera talks about his role as U.S. poet laureate, being a worrywart, and how he wants the whole country to read Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” (Washington Post)
Speaking of that iconic American poem, filmmaker Jennifer Crandall has spent the past two years traveling throughout Alabama asking strangers to read stanzas from “Song of Myself” aloud. Crandall made short videos of each reading and is compiling them into a fifty-two-part documentary, “Whitman, Alabama.” (WBUR)
Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, talks about her management style and where she wants to take the organization. (TIME)
“It is impossible to stop running away from something, or toward something—to be less or more lonely.” At the Letras Latinas blog, poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo writes love letters to the Mexican singer Jenni Rivera and to himself about poetry and immigrating to the United States. This is the first in a series of posts put together by Letras Latinas and CantoMundo as part of the Poetry Coalition’s month-long initiative, “Because We Come From Everything: Poetry and Migration.”
Real-estate developers have started constructing luxury condominiums on the site of James Baldwin’s former villa in Saint-Paul de Vence in the south of France. His Place in Provence, an artist collective, is attempting to fundraise enough money to buy back the property.
“Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more—love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.” George Saunders close-reads the late Grace Paley. (New Yorker)
Dan Noskowitz considers what “may be the most versatile phrase on the planet”: the Hawaiian phrase “da kine.” (Atlas Obscura)
In preparation for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’s twenty-ninth annual “Stay Home and Read a Book Ball” this Sunday—“attendees” stay at home and read a book—the Los Angeles Times rounds up some “shut-in-chic” outfit options, including pajamas, bathrobes, and slippers.
