Sign that my life is unbalanced: I haven't even heard of the winner for fiction. At least I read the "feature writing" winner because it was faved.

A well-written article comparing six translations of the famous haiku book.

Legal poetry follows

Quoted: Incidentally, I've long been surprised by how little good poetry there is about law -- real poetry (whether serious or not), and not just doggerel. The only material I've found so far in English is Auden's Law Like Love, Auden's The Hidden Law, and Kipling's Law of the Jungle. If you have more suggestions, please post them in the comments.

Quoted: Charles Simic is the new Poet Laureate of the United States - or PLOTUS, to borrow the jolly acronym his predecessor, Donald Hall, liked to employ.

Quoted: Simic is an inspired choice. His poems are cerebral, surreal and uncanny, yet they are defiantly plainspoken. They are not, most of them, beyond the grasp of non-subscribers to Poetry magazine. Read them, if you haven’t.

HISTORY

On a gray evening
Of a gray century,
I ate an apple
While no one was looking.

A small, sour apple
The color of woodfire,
Which I first wiped
On my sleeve.

Then I stretched my legs
As far as they’d go,
Said to myself
Why not close my eyes now

Before the Late
World News and Weather.

Just got a wedding invitation and it reminded me of this poem by Gregory Corso.

Quoted:
Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets...

What is it about May? The whole winter went by without a reading that would lure me down to Elliott Bay, and now I'm looking at the list of May events like a kid in a candy store. Michael Chabon, Chuck Palahniuk, Miranda July, Christopher Buckley, Jumpha Lahiri, William Langewiesche, Russell Simmons.

So, who's coming to what?

An awesome "homemade" website that Miranda July made for her book of short stories.

A list of the hardest novels to film.

This quote in the introduction caught my attention:

Quoted: Most movies these days are based on literary sources. Which is ironic, considering the increasing lack of interest in books these days as opposed to the spoon-fed thoughts offered by Hollywood.

I remember seeing some statistics recently about reading becoming more popular.

This article led me to also find out about Structuralism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralist

and Russian formalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_formalism

It's interesting how many ideas already have names.