White poet who wrote as 'Yi-Fen Chou' reportedly took classmate's name
Family of Chou angered that poet Michael Derrick Hudson, who attended the same high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, used the name as a pseudonymA controversy continued to boil in the poetry community...
View ArticleLiterary launches: how crowdfunding is fuelling the avant garde
The White Review, BOMB and Guernica are just some of the magazines turning to the wisdom of the crowd to publish quality literatureFancy a 90-minute walk around London with Will Self, “writer and...
View ArticleGrief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter review – a lyrical study of loss
Inspired by Ted Hughes’s Crow, this remarkable debut is a slippery, beguiling thing, recently longlisted for the Guardian first book awardBookended by death – that of Sylvia Plath in 1963, then Assia...
View ArticleLetter: Lee Harwood’s telling sense of humour
The poet Lee Harwood had a telling sense of humour. We once shared lively gig in a Guildford theatre with our mutual, and often thunderingly verbose, friend Jeff Nuttall, who took a post-reading...
View ArticlePoem of the Week: Dead Love by Elizabeth Siddal
Love is a fickle fashionista in a poem which was praised by Christina Rossetti for its ‘cool, bitter sarcasm’, but it is not without tenderness and hopeOh never weep for love that’s deadSince love is...
View ArticleDark Star by Oliver Langmead – taking noir too far
A science fiction detective story in iambic pentameter transports the reader to an analogue world plunged into darkness – but more illumination is neededDark Star is an SF epic poem heavily influenced...
View Article'Real Asian poets' fight back in Best American Poetry race row
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has been tweeting the names and work of actual Asian poets after white writer Michael Derrick Hudson used a Chinese pseudonym to make it into the Best American...
View ArticleWhy I gave up my copyright: Kirill Medvedev
The Russian poet has been releasing his work free of ownership since 2004, insisting that publishers can only make editions without contracts and without his consent. He explains how opening his poems...
View ArticleGrief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter review – words take flight
Longlisted for the Guardian first book award, this moving story of a widower and his young sons becomes a profound meditation on love, loss and Ted HughesOh, the look of a book! Whether a novel’s...
View ArticleUnpublished Stevie Smith: not waving but drawing
Stevie Smith always wanted her drawings to accompany her poetry, yet most were omitted from posthumous editions. As a new collection brings them together, we present four previously unpublished poems...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: Superannuated Psychiatrist
by UA FanthorpeOld Scallywag scapegoat has skedaddled,Retired at last to bridge and both kinds of bird-watching,No more suspect phone calls from shady acquaintances,Anonymous ladies and flush-faced...
View ArticleThe complicated literary history of 'Yellowface' did not start with Michael...
Michael Derrick Hudson use of a Chinese name when writing was racist and latest case of ‘yellowface’ in literature, but the word has a complex backstoryMy father immigrated to Montreal from China 24...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Tides by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Awash with syntactical and structural fluctuations that embody its central theme, Longfellow’s restless Petrarchan sonnet ranges far beyond technical virtuosityThe TidesI saw the long line of the...
View ArticlePigs in literature – quiz
As pigs hit the political headlines, we follow them through centuries of literature, from Heracles’ hoggish handful to George Orwell’s porcine politburo. Take our swinish quiz to find out if you can...
View ArticleTips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of themAre you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our...
View ArticleCampaigners buy William Blake's cottage – and his vegetable patch
House in Felpham, Sussex, where poet wrote words that became hymn Jerusalem, purchased for £520,000 for public use by the Blake SocietyThe humble thatched cottage in Sussex where William Blake pondered...
View ArticleGhazalaw: Ghazalaw review – easygoing settings for poems from Wales and India
(Marvels of the Universe) Two years on from a remarkable collaboration between Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and African kora exponent Seckou Keita, here is a new fusion project from Wales. This time it’s...
View Article40 Sonnets review – the perfect vehicle for Don Paterson’s craft and lyricism
The poet tugs and stretches a demanding form to its limit in work of vividness and potencyDon Paterson has a thing for sonnets. Back in 1999 he brought out an anthology of 101 of his favourites, and in...
View ArticlePatti Smith: 'It's not so easy writing about nothing'
In this extract from punk poet Patti Smith’s memoir M Train, a letter arrives leading to a bizarre speaking engagement in Berlin – and a night binge-watching Inspector Morse in a Covent Garden...
View ArticlePoem of the Week: The Words Collide by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The Irish poet’s new collection includes the personal – and ultimately political – story of an ‘unletter’d woman’ of some other time dictating a lovely, mysterious and almost unguardedly sexual letter...
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