Write a Poem for the Royal Baby, Junot Díaz Advocates for NYPL Funds, and More

by
Staff
5.7.15

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:

U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has declined to write a poem commemorating the birth of the new royal baby, Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, so perhaps you should instead. Submit your royal baby poems of up to sixteen lines to the Spectator’s poetry contest by May 20. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will thank you.

Nigerian Nobel laureate and political activist Wole Soyinka is among the final three candidates for the position of Oxford professor of poetry. The prestigious elected post was first held by Joseph Trapp in 1708, and has since been held by major poets including Matthew Arnold, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. The position will be announced June 19. (Guardian)

At New York Magazine, author, literary critic, and longtime Yale professor Harold Bloom discusses his new book The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Spiegel & Grau).

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz has joined author Judy Blume in advocating for increased funding for the New York Public Library. In a letter to library patrons, Díaz writes, “It kills me that New York City—the home of one of the greatest library systems in the world—has been under-funding libraries for over a decade. This has to stop.” (GalleyCat)

In a report for BBC News, Hephzibah Anderson considers the “mini-trend” of the long novel in the age of iPhones and short attention spans.

“When I write a novel, I place more importance on the subconscious world than the conscious world. The conscious world is the world of logic. What I’m pursuing is the world beneath logic.” The Japan Times interviews bestselling novelist Haruki Murakami.

Acclaimed German film director Werner Herzog’s 1978 creative nonfiction book Of Walking in Ice has recently been reissued. Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin writes that the book is “four decades ahead of its time, since we now live in a diaristic present: Knausgaard, Sarah Manguso and Heidi Julavits come to mind.”

At the Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize–winner and former poet laureate Charles Simic discusses Walt Whitman’s impact on his work, and in particular, Whitman’s poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.”