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:
On his ninety-sixth birthday this past Tuesday, San Francisco poetry icon and founder of City Lights bookstore Lawrence Ferlinghetti spoke with PBS Newshour about San Francisco’s cultural changes over the decades, and how the city’s tech boom has left him lamenting “The Poetic City That Was.”
“We’re intent on bringing something new to the table, on providing new avenues and exploring intersections that in the past have been overlooked — and hope that with new work and new approaches, we will be able to find new audiences.” At the Washington Post, book critic Ron Charles talks to the editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books’ recently launched literary journal the Offing.
The space where one writes is personal and crucial to the creative process. At the New York Times, seven major authors including Rachel Kushner, Peter Carey, and Paul Muldoon offer glimpses of their writing spaces. “It’s a little bit like hanging out in a high-end coffin,” Muldoon says of his writing room.
“Chinese poetry has 2,000 years of tradition at its back….But the thing is, most Chinese believe poetry peaked in the Tang Dynasty. That ended more than 1,100 years ago. So for today’s poets, their chosen art form’s exalted status can feel like a double-edged sword.” At Public Radio International, Alina Simone reports on China’s contemporary poetry scene.
Over at the New York Review of Books blog, Christopher Benfry examines the cultural history of the Tarot and how the occult influenced the poetry of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and other famous writers. “It is not surprising that the images on Tarot cards, so vivid and mysterious, appeal to poets as a means of providing metaphors.”
Ferguson Public Library director Scott Bonner has received the American Library Association’s Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. Bonner kept the Ferguson, Missouri, library open during the traumatic week in September following a grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown. (Melville House)
After significant criticism from major authors including Joanne Harris and Margaret Atwood, the Clean Reader app, which allows its users to edit out profanity in e-books, and also sold books through Inktera's online platform, announced it would remove all titles from its online catalogue. (Guardian)
