Word: poets
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...have a new Poet Laureate, and we should all be proud. Robert Pinsky, translator of Dante's Inferno and poetry editor of Internet magazine Slate, was named United States Poet Laureate on Friday. Pinsky, a 56-year-old native of Long Branch, New Jersey, teaches creative writing at the graduate center of Boston University. He has taught at Stanford and Wellesley in the past and is off to Northwestern to be writer-in-residence...
...Being Poet Laureate is not too stressful. The Librarian of Congress, currently James H. Billington, appoints the two-year post after asking around a bit. The Laureate is responsible for a poetry reading of his own work in the fall and offering official advice as "poetry consultant." For these duties, the laureate receives a $35,000 stipend, an office in the library's attic and tons of publicity...
...first official U.S. Poet Laureate was Robert Penn Warren, appointed on February 26, 1986. Since then we have had: Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Mona Van Duyn, Rita Dove and Robert Hass. The Laureates usually seize on some civic issue to chat up, whether it be education, literacy or city poetry...
Such insight is worth the fraction of a cent it costs each of us. There should be some incentive for poets to think and write about America, and we should each be proud to contribute our tax money to the cause. Too often, we do not have the time, or the ability, to think and write for ourselves. We should be proud that our country has chosen to reward those who do have the ability. Moreover, we should be especially proud of the brave Robert Pinsky, our newest Poet Laureate...
...concentrated form, the qualities that make Stone?s novels so harrowing, exhilarating and impossible to forget. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. ?The way,? the poet is told once the trip has begun, ?is to go up the mountain and make it all complete.? In Helping, a man sober for 18 months starts drinking again. He tells his distraught wife that...