When you raise your glass this week to celebrate the New Year, you'll probably be reciting a poem by the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. Burns wrote (or, some argue, collected) "Auld Lang Syne" in 1788, and it was soon after set to the tune we know today.

Should auld...

Barack Obama has chosen Elizabeth Alexander to read a poem at his inauguration. A well-regarded poet and professor at Yale, Alexander is also a friend of the Obama family. She will be just the fourth "inaugural" poet, joining Robert Frost, who read "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration, Maya...

The Associated Press reported last week on a growing expectation in the poetry community that Obama will follow in the tradition of Kennedy, Carter and Clinton and invite a poet to read at next month's inauguration. Tree Swenson, the executive director of the Academy of American Poets, explained why...

Calvin Trillin, responding to Daily Show host John Stewart's impish description of his new book in verse on the 2008 election Deciding the Next Decider, joked, "You made me feel like one of those guys who's done the Palace of Versaille in beer cans." No, John Milton he isn't.

Trillin...

I once heard a nutrition expert claim that no matter how much you eat, it's impossible to gain a pound during a meal. Well, on one day a year, all of America challenges that theory. It's our most gluttonous day in what Keats deemed a season of gorging in his...

I know a few poets who I think could use some therapy (including myself), but until recently I'd never considered the art as a serious therapeutic tool. Some therapists, it turns out, find poetry to be highly effective in helping patients to cope with and overcome mental illness. In an...

Last year, a Burmese poet named Saw Wai published a Valentine's Day poem in the aptly named Love Journal, a popular Burmese magazine. His poem, entitled "14th February" read, in part,

Millions of those who know how to love
Laugh and clap those gold-gilded hands

It seems innocuous enough,...

Very early Wednesday morning in Grant Park, Barack Obama gave us one last smile and wave before following a gaggle of beaming Bidens and Obamas out of the spotlight. And that was that.

For someone who'd begun to base his daily routine around the tracking polls (Zogby before bed and...

Walt Whitman lived in that tenuous time before flag pins when threshing the patriots from the terrorist-loving socialists was a difficult business. So John McCain and Sarah Palin, no doubt, would have had a hard time deciding if they should accept the great grandfather of American poetry into their ranks....

If you're like me, you've recently found yourself lying awake at night worrying that Reverend Wright might decide it's time to head to Washington to make another speech, that bin Laden might emerge from his cave to announce he has a man-crush on Obama, or that the fate of the...

I loved reading Shel Silverstein as a kid. His poems stirred my imagination more than anything else I remember reading back then. Sure they could be a little creepy:

But this afternoon by the lion's cage
I'm afraid I got too near.
And I'm writing these lines
...

This past Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK, and many British media outlets got into the spirit by asking readers (or viewers) to submit poems on this year's theme of "work." Judging from the submissions, "out of work" would have been more appropriate. The poems made clear just...

When Hayden Carruth's collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award for poetry, it was no great surprise that he chose not to attend the ceremony. He was always something of an outsider. For most of his life, he kept a distance from the literary mainstream, publishing his...

The pending publication of Osama Bin Laden's poetry in the academic journal Language and Communication next month is sparking some debate. While the poems could provide insight into Bin Laden's psyche, many people wonder why the heck you would give the guy another forum.

The poetry is...

British poet laureate Andrew Motion is planning to resign next year. And while he has long professed his desire to leave the lifetime appointment early, he is more anxious than ever to get back to living without the laurels. Motion, it seems, has developed a nasty case of writer's block...

Has poetry officially jumped the shark? I came across an NPR story this past week on a composer who set the "found poetry" of Donald Rumsfeld--pulled from some of Rummy's more quixotic press conferences and poeticized by Slate writer Hart Seely--to music. The composer, Bryant Kong, plays piano while an...

I was wondering what kind of mother, being an avowed evangelical and knowing that her underage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, would choose to accept the vice presidential nomination and thus subject her daughter to a vicious and unrelenting spotlight for, potentially, the next eight years. And I was...

Presidential nomination acceptance speeches surely aim to create great quotes, not to repeat them. So I should have figured that when I went digging around in such speeches this past week looking for lines of poetry, I'd come up empty handed. Well, almost. George McGovern quoted William Butler Yeats in...

When renowned novelist Ahdaf Soueif said that the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was "the last poet who could fill a football stadium," it wasn't hyperbole. A Darwish reading in Beirut earlier this year drew more than 25,000 people. His funeral two weeks ago, which garnered little attention here in the...

Spreading an appreciation for poetry isn't easy in a country that doesn't read as much as it used to and doesn't value the arts as much it should. Let's face it: unless Maya Angelou is on Oprah, we poets don't tend to register on the national consciousness. It's partly our...