John McCrae was born November 30, 1872, in Guelph, Ontario. He began writing poetry while he was still a student at Guelph Collegiate Institute, and continued writing throughout his life. He graduated from Guelph at age 16, and won a scholarship to attend the University of Toronto, the first Guelph student ever to do so. By that time, he'd ...
Arthur Symons was born in 1865, the son of a Cornish preacher in Wales. He moved around a great deal throughout his childhood, prompting him to later write that he had never had the kind of childhood that most children do, staying long enough in one place for it to "become a part of him". Because of the frequent moving, Symons schooling ...
John Heath-Stubbs, British poet famed for his poetry inspired by classical myths and winner of the 1973 Queen"s Gold Medal for Poetry, died this morning at the age of 88. His most famous poems include his long poem on King Arthur, Artorius, in 1972, and a series of poem sequences written for Hearing Eye Publications between 1987 and 1994. Heath-Stubbs was born in 1918, and educated at Worcester College for ...
'Tis the season and all that. When I was growing up, Christmas Eve was the night that my grandmother reserved for telling the very best stories from her Italian repetoire. No matter how we begged and pleaded to hear Leo Bruno or other Italian fairy tales the rest of the year, she always insisted that they were too long to tell any other night ...
I just spent a couple of (wonderful) hours writing a remembrance and review of Sunday night"s Poets Asylum at the Java Hut in Worcester - only to have Firefox eat the post when it didn"t like the picture I tried to upload. I am sad. Not because my words were deathless prose, but because Sunday night was full of lively poetry and ...
There"s been a round of interesting happenings and writings around the poetry world this week. Some of them are fascinating little tidbits to sprinkle into your conversation when you want to sound erudite. A few speak so well for themselves that any commentary from me would be completely superfluous. Check out a few of these links and find out what"s been news in ...
Sometimes things just tickle me. That was the case with what I found this morning when I peeked at topix.net"s poetry news page. Topix.net is one of those sites that conglomerates news from newspapers and websites around the world on various topics. It"s one of my favorite places to pick through for "unusual" news about poetry. Since the feed scans local newspapers all over the world, I"m as likely ...
"Poets don"t just come out of an overwhelming emotional experience. They come out of study and hard work." -Gregory Donovan, co-editor Blackbird magazine A grad student at Virginia Commonwealth University has unearthed a previously unpublished sonnet by Sylvia Plath. The poem was apparently written in Plath"s senior year at Smith College, and was written in reaction to the poet"s reading of F. Scott ...
From my mailbox: Another quickmuse update - sounds like some exciting stuff going on over there while I wasn"t looking. I"ll definitely be taking a look at their new blogs~ Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky gave us a peek at the relentless poetic stream that flows through his head, just waiting for him to open the spigot. Read his poem and find ...
It"s become fashionable to diss Edward Estlin Cummings again. Best know to the world as e. e. cummings, the way he signed his name, his fresh takes on language and wordplaying infused his poetry and made him one of the most recognized and distinctive voices in modern American poetry. You can read all about his honors and the debates about his poetry in dozens of other places. This post ...
