Thanks to Michelle Obama, the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and several other organizations, five student poets from high schools around the country will be chosen each year to cultivate public interest in poetry through workshops, readings, and other means.
(It’s interesting to note that the National Student Poets program emerged under a President whose inauguration featured that rare beast, the inaugural poem, written by Elizabeth Alexander—the first since Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” at the ceremony for Bill Clinton in 1993 and, before her, Robert Frost read “Dedication” for John F. Kennedy. The last two lines of the latter poem read: “A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.”)
(image via America’s Library)
And there’s certainly an interesting story about Frost’s poem, too.
Check out some verse written by the 44th President of the United States, which Harold Bloom termed “not bad” and “not wholly unlike Langston Hughes.” It begins:
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me…
From Gwendolyn Brooks to Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath to Wallace Stevens, the Postal Service’s upcoming stamp series of major U. S. poets samples a variety of heavyweights from across the canon.
A group of Bay Area writers and community members, including poet John Olivares Espinoza, have banded together to save the Palo Alto studio of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Wallace Stegner. Keep abreast of the noble, historical effort here.
Where language and animation meet (and get all “meta”): artist Ji Lee uses the letters of a particular word to create a video depiction of its meaning.
Speaking of “meta,” each piece in Amy Newman’s new book of poetry, Dear Editor, begins with “Dear Editor: Please consider the enclosed poems for publication…” and ends with “…Sincerely, Amy Newman.” The art of letter-writing meets po-biz meets poetry.
The question seems easy, but the answer’s difficult—and, not to mention, its subject constitutes a good chunk, if not the majority, of literature. So, what’s human? Maybe it’s not as clear as you thought.