Poetry Daily features the 1992 Foreword from The State of the Art by David Lehman. I remember when the Carter administration invited several hundred poets to the White House for a celebration of American poetry. There was a reception, handshakes with the president, the pop of flashbulbs. Concurrent poetry readings in various White House rooms capped off the festivities. In each room a few poets had been asked to read. The rest of the poets, the ones who hadn’t been asked to read, could attend the reading of their choice. A year later, Jimmy Carter lost the presidency. I used…

The Double Truth Chard deNiord “Sunday Calls,” from Chard deNiord’s collection The Double Truth, will be set to music by Jacob Cooper and featured during a May 15 concert by the chamber ensemble of the Albany Symphony. Cooper explained that the new song will be performed by vocalist Theo Bleckmann and the symphony’s chamber group “Dogs of Desire.” This concert is part of their annual American Music Festival, and part of Cooper’s two-year residency with the Albany Symphony. “For this concert, we’re each arranging songs and writing new ones,” he said. “The song I’m arranging is Kate Bush’s ‘Under Ice,’…

According to Sarah Galo at BuzzFeed Books, Pitt Poetry Series has published some poets that you must read. Two of our poets made the list: Paisley Rekdal and Rickey Laurentiis. Paisley Rekdal’s The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed…

The New York Times features Power on the Hudson by Robert Lifset in its article about a landmark case of ecology vs. energy production at Storm King Mountain. How a Hudson Highlands Mountain Shaped Tussles Over Energy and the Environment By Andrew C. Revkin |  April 14, 2015 Remembering Storm King | Lecture by Robert D. Lifset In the time that I have I want to think about three questions. First, why are we here? What precisely happened in the Hudson River valley in the 1960s and ‘70s? What was the nature of this environmental struggle? Second, why did it happen?…