The Week We Made Discoveries

This week, as part of our ongoing quest to stay youthful, your intrepid poetry reporters endeavored to think like scientists, move beyond our comfort zones, and get to the bottom of things.

We discovered a previously unreleased bonus Sylvia Plath poem. While Plath has not yet established the posthumous prolificacy of a Hubbard or a Shakur, it’s good to hear from her.

Wallace Stevens has not produced much since his death, either, but that doesn’t stop Michelle Dean from speculating on his likely sympathies in Election 2012.

We were looking at some stuff on the internet this week, and we realized that, while we retain the capacity for shock, we don’t get as much enjoyment out of being shocked as we did in the ‘90s. Why might that be? Maggie Nelson has some ideas.

If you have a least-favorite font, it’s probably Comic Sans. But why do so many detest it so much? Why does it get so much hate while Impact, Futura, and Papyrus take relatively little abuse? The go-to tech blog Mashable investigates.

We caught up with Flying Object, a community space that’s not as old as us but is about 1/33rd of the way there. We discovered that it’s holding a raffle to help keep itself vigorous.

We found some cool and unusual continuing-education opportunities in Chicago and New York.

We found a cool thing to do in Nevada.

We encountered Pentametron, which sounds ominous but is in fact the Deep Blue of sonnet composition.

Poets and law enforcement officials may have more in common than previously thought, but a poem is not a police report. Mary Biddinger challenges the conventional foolishness that all poetry must be autobiographical.

The Independent hepped us to the hap: “a growing consensus that poetry is cool.” You gush; we blush.