Reading Lucian this morning*, I came across this:

"She said that Stratonice the wife of Seleucus had done something much more ridiculous....She set up a poetry contest with a prize of one talent. The theme was 'an encomium of Stratonice's hair'....

Are you excited for tonight's GOSSIP GIRL?

(OK, catch your breath.)

Now tell me: Does the show reflect poetry's diminishing cultural capital?

The new feature on the site, "Diversity Then!," by the novelist Paul La Farge, looks at the sensational faits divers penned by Félix Fénéon in the early 20th century. La Farge mentions that such swift, lurid accounts—poems in small—inspired everyone from Stendhal to Duras to the Surrealists, but modestly leaves out his own book, The Facts of Winter (2005).

R. Kikuo Johnson's graphic cover version of "Recitative" (by Harriet's own A.E. Stallings) appeared recently as part of this site's "Poem as Comic Strip" series. One of the commenters, Mahendra Singh, included a link...

I'd love to hear comments from our Harriet bloggers and readers on Ben Ehrenreich's "The Long Goodbye," his epic, beautifully written piece on the work and life of the late Frank Stanford, up now on the Foundation site.

Pulp fiction fans—check it out!

Levi Stahl's recent PF piece, "Baseball and verse," dug up some new and old poems inspired by our national sport. He paid specific attention to this mournful lament for the 1910 New York Giants:

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.�
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double—
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance."

How popular was that refrain?

Ange asks: "Could it be that there is a profound cultural connection between the poet and the detective?" The answer is...

At the PEN America blog, David Haglund digs up a curious George Plimpton anecdote involving John Steinbeck, Marianne Moore...and Jean Seberg.

Brandon Stosuy sends along this quote from a new song by Okkervil River: "From a bridge on Washington Avenue, the year of 1972, broke my bones and skull and it was memorable."

Q: Who is the speaker?

On April 10, Patricia wrote: "Phebus Etienne is dead. That won't mean anything to most of you...Phebus was a reverent Haitian lyric, a deft conjurer of language and light, a Cave Canem sister, an insistent glow...She was only 41."

I e-mailed Patricia that, oddly enough, it did mean something to me...

At Paper Thin Walls, Poetry Foundation writer Brandon Stosuy on Lexie Mountain Boys:

"The act skirts a line between spastic theater and avant-savant sound poetry slam (dancing)—sometimes it works, other times it's just loud."

Stephen Colbert challenges Sean Penn to a Meta-free-phor-all, with Robert Pinsky presiding.

(Via Betsy and Jimmy)

This is from the item about William McGonagall—by some lights, the world's "worst" poet—in today's PoFo News:

"I'm sure there will be a lot of interest in the paintings because they are presented almost in a comic book format with lots of buried jokes and illusions."

Illusions!

A famous author's blog has a 5-day hurrah for an Oulipian without rival, a facial hair champion, a wordsman so grand no long intro shall dim my post. I will just show you his initials: GP. (My brain's jumping with GP anyway, having taught my class all about Oulipo on Monday.)

This blog has lots of cool stuff to absorb, including GP's lipogrammish "translation" of Rimbaud's "Vocalisations" (as GP has it), four stanzas that avoid our fifth orthographic symbol and *also* any original Rimbaudian discussion of said symbol...just as I am trying to do right now...

Let’s make a Venn Diagram. Circle one consists of Einstürzende Neubauten fans; circle two, Dante aficionados. If you’re in the overlapping region, it’s time to check out Radio Inferno (posted at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog), a 1993 collaboration between E.N., Andreas Ammer, and the late great new-music DJ John Peel. (Thanks to Kosiya Shalita for the link.)

Remember Brandon Stosuy's awesome PoFo piece on the Hold Steady/John Berryman connection? (You know, "How a Resurrection Really Feels"—the article with the passages that you tattooed across your back and upper thighs?)

For no good reason, I’ve been reading the liner notes to Direction Reaction Creation, the Jam boxed set (boxed set of Jam sounds delicious) from—I was going to say “a few years back,� but this thing came out in ‘99! (Or ‘97, if you’re a vinylist.) The booklet, which is rather massive, keeps falling open to this passage—a sure sign that I should transcribe it for you:

The strident ‘Here Comes The Weekend’, with its enigmatic reference to human rights abuses in Zaire, was followed by ‘Tonight At Noon’ which once again saw Weller turn to poetry for inspiration—this time that of Liverpudlian beatnik Adrian Henri, whose verse had been anthologized in a 1967 Penguin paperback and British beat poet bible The Mersey Sound. Weller lifted two whole stanzas from Henri’s In the Midnight Hour, suggesting that he was running short of lyrics himself.

Jeffrey’s post about Lorca reminded me of when FGL appeared on my radar—I was reading “Astral Weeks,� Lester Bangs’s essay on the Van Morrison album of the same name, a gorgeous piece of writing that was knocking me out, paragraph by paragraph. And then . . . well, I won't ruin it for you. The piece (included in the first Bangs collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) can be found online (though you should definitely find and buy the book as well). I promise it’ll be the best thing you read today.

[Solzhenitsyn] must have vividly remembered how in 1958, a few years before he himself was embraced by the Soviet literary establishment, a crowd of 14,000 was bused by the authorities to Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow to denounce Pasternak as an enemy of the people after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One could describe this event as a paranoid manifestation of totalitarianism; but it also demonstrated how important the role of the writer was in the eyes of the ruling elite at that time. In the same year 14,000 had gathered (this time voluntarily) at a New England stadium to listen to T.S. Eliot. Poets ruled the world.
          â€”Zinovy Zinik, “The Old Days,â€? TLS (March 9, 2007)

Thursday night, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominees were announced . . . in New York. The poetry finalists are:

• Erin Belieu for Black Box (Copper Canyon Press)
• Adrian C. Louis for Logorrhea (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
• Thom Satterlee for Burning Wyclif (Texas Tech University Press)
• Frederick Seidel for Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Waters for Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions)

I was happy to read this after a day of grim weather here in Atlanta: For a
mere four quid (plus airfare to Dorset), you can hear Thomas Hardy's poems
read by someone...who was cast in a Hardy play...by Thomas Hardy himself!

Norrie Woodhall, a spry 101-year-old, "met Thomas Hardy in 1924, while the original Hardy Players were staging Tess at the Corn Exchange in Dorchester," according to the Daily Echo. "He cast her as Liza Lu, and even added extra lines to give her a more substantial role in the play."

(Thanks to Jessica W. and Jenny D.)