On Poetry

Dangerous Poetry - video of a stand-up routine.

Poetry, life full of surprises for Billy Collins (an interview with Richard Anderson)
Excerpt:

All children, I think, write something that, for lack of a better word, is poetry … It’s really impossible to get out of the emotional turmoil of high school without, for better or worse, recording something that, again, by default if for no other reason, you might call a poem. …
Someone said you don’t need to have an uphappy childhood to be a writer, you just need to have gone through adolescence … . But most people stop, just as most people stop drawing and stop playing music and stop dancing and doing a lot of things that they did as children. I think poets are just people who never wanted to stop playing with language.

To save America - Fifty years ago this week, a bookshop assistant was arrested for 'peddling' obscene literature - the banned work was Allen Ginsberg's Howl. James Campbell on the poem that defined a generation.

A set of photos and an essay by Gordon Ball, about Ginsberg and friends.