Writing lyrics is a very different skill to writing effective poems, and the two disciplines rarely coincide. With this in mind, here’s a look at the best and the worst of musicians in poetry – starting with five whose work really should have stayed in their notebooks.
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The 2011 Frye Festival features new events, returning favourites, evenings filled with words and music, afternoons of book clubs, various workshops and a new Poet flyé! Seven days of discoveries and wonderful encounters for the curious, creative, and imaginative of all ages!
At its most elemental, editing is a craft, but it is really an art, perhaps a dying one. John Cheever defined an editor as someone “who sends me large checks, praises my work, my physical beauty, and my sexual prowess, and who has a stranglehold on the publishers and the bank.”
Time for a reality check. We’ve got a Tory government. The economy is broken. Spike Milligan is still dead. We’re one year closer to the day our sun explodes. Banging on about how much you enjoyed Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom isn’t going to cheer anyone up or change anything. Except maybe making them worry about how much closer they’re going to be to death by the time they’ve waded through its 600-odd pages.
Sam Jordison/The Guardian
The last muse of Charles “Hank” Bukowski, the alcoholic and womanizing American author who used blunt prose to write about society’s downtrodden, still lives in the home she shared with her late husband and hopes to turn it into a museum.
Romain Raynaldy/Agence France-Presse
