Poetry Daily Feature

Poetry Daily's recently posted prose feature is a reprint of Mark Halliday's contribution to our Fall 2010 Symposium on Writing and the Midwest. The piece is titled "Kenneth Koch of Cincinnati" and can be read in the current issue or online in full at Poetry Daily.

New Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin

Today W.S. Merwin takes over the duties of US Poet Laureate.  (Read more about Merwin.)

On July 1, 2010, the Library of Congress announced the appointment of Merwin as the Library's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. (Read NYTimes article and interview from this summer.)

Merwin was previously interviewed by Anne Moore Odell and Pablo Peschiera for issue seven of Third Coast, Fall 1998. Back copies of the issue are available for $6.  Contact the managing editor for details or click here.

What is your process of creating a poem?

Big Think has a series of videos available online from an interview with Edward Hirsch, Poet and President Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The one above discusses the process of creating a poem. Other videos discuss the space and survival of poetry, whether the MFA hurts of helps poetry, if we are generating more poets than the system can absorb, as well as Hirsch's emphatic belief that what you really need to be a poet is to read poetry and read deeply. That you need not read everything but that you find that which you care about.