A kind of poetic justice, in which an Ottawa prosecutor’s rhyme helped to convict an impaired driver in court.
Plugged into Google Correlate (a tool which lets you free-draw graph lines and then matches them with the popularity charts of certain search terms over time), Kurt Vonnegut’s famed story shapes find some interesting bedfellows.
Can science fiction really predict the future, or has it already? Maybe, maybe not.
Adam Zagajewski on walking with his father through forcibly-abandoned Ukrainian villages in Poland: “This was one of the strongest impressions I ever had. There were these empty villages with some apple trees going wild. And I saw the villages became prey to nettles; nettles were everywhere. There were these broken houses. It became in my memory this mutilated world, these villages, and at the same time they were beautiful. It was in the summer, beautiful weather. It’s something that I reacted to, this contest between beauty and disaster“ I think that when you write poems you aspire to something whole that’s bigger than simply lament. In poetry I think you try to reconstruct what’s humanity. Humanity is always a mix of crying and laughing.”
Carol Ann Duffy explains how the relationship between text messaging and good poetry is crucial for future generations of writers and readers.
On the evolution of typography.
(Via DerrickT)
Some of the greatest yarns ever spun: now available in t-shirt form.
Why read the classics when you can listen to them recited by volunteers for free online (or maybe even make a few recordings yourself)?
Mark Doty: “I was a little shocked, just a few weeks after 9/11, when calls for contributions to poetry anthologies concerning the event began to circulate. I understand the human need to say something, to give shape to grief, but surely the first response to such a rupture in the fabric of the world ought to be a resonant, enormous silence. To come too quickly to words is, ultimately, a form of arrogance; the easy poem suggests that loss is graspable, that the poet has ready command of speech in the face of anything“ I believe that elegy needs to fumble its way toward what sense it can make, and that meaning wrested out of struggle–with the stubborn refusal of death to mean–is the only kind worth making.”