Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
At the Virginia Quarterly Review, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove discusses the themes in her body of work, her approach to historical representation, and how she navigates her identities as a public poetry advocate and a private writer.
This month, Faber & Faber will publish a new volume of personal correspondence by T. S. Eliot that complicates the accusation that Eliot was unjustly cruel to his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, during her mental suffering. In the letters, composed between 1932 and 1933, Eliot resolves to end his eighteen-year marriage with Haigh-Wood and move back to America, expressing both desperation and concern over his wife’s condition. The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 6 will be released on February 18. (Guardian)
Rereading a book you loved when you were younger can be a surprising experience, in that you may discover how much you have misremembered from the first read. For writer and critic Vivian Gornick, rereading E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End decades later proves to be such an experience. “[I] have reread it only to find myself dismayed not only by how much I got wrong but by how much in the book is wrong—the sexual naïveté, the rhetorical posturing, the hand from the grave all read like hokum today—and yet how absorbing this novel of novels still is!” (New York Times)
The St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City may close for good in a few days. The beloved independent bookstore, which opened in the East Village in 1977, has struggled with declining sales and rising rent for the past several years, its owners having been unable to pay off taxes and back rent. (Bedford and Bowery)
Valentine’s Day is approaching, so why not test your knowledge of classic literary love? (New York Times)
Award-winning British novelist Margaret Forster has died at age seventy-seven. Best known for her 1965 novel Georgy Girl, Forster composed more than twenty works of fiction during her lifetime. (ABC News)
At the Huffington Post, twenty young writers of color to share their favorite poems. Curator Tabia Alexine compiled the list in response to a New York Times list of public figures’ favorite poems, which she felt was compelling, “but not as diverse and intersectionally colorful as I’d hoped.”
