Newt Gingrich is a political opportunist. His job is to pack as much powerfully charged meaning into every sentence as he can, which makes him a working poet. So he knows full well that calling someone a "food stamp president" brings up the working person's fear, looming reality, and in some cases the actual experience, of unemployment -- while making a shout-out to racism and affixing a stigma to poverty. All the while hiding behind the symbol of a flag.
A Pennsylvania city known for its cheesesteaks, sports fans and Colonial history now has something else it can boast: a poet laureate.
The Badilisha Poetry X-Change in Cape Town looks to spread Africa's spoken word to the world.
It began as an annual festival to host local poets in and around Cape Town but thanks to the power of technology the ancient art of African story-telling is spreading around the world.
The idea that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him didn't surface until 1856, 240 years after he died. Until then no one even suggested he might not have done so.
A new film is set to re-open one of the most persistent questions in literary history - was William Shakespeare a fraud?
Like the stillness of a deep mountain lake under moonlight or the rustle of a breeze through treetops, there is a natural harmony to Mariano Rivera that is so quiet as to be easily missed. What distinguishes the great Rivera is as much the absence of features as it is what he possesses. Absence of effort, absence of ego, absence of extraneous motion, even absence of facial hair and the accoutrements of fending off fear used by the modern, highly-caffeinated, highly-pampered closer.
CNN's Sarah Hoye meets a group of young poets in Philadelphia raising their voices for change.
Gregory Corbin was standing in San Francisco when Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter called his cell phone.
Alana Gooden never thought she would live to see her 18th birthday.
Celebrated and enigmatic American modern artist Cy Twombly died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.
Police in North Miami, Florida, are investigating the weekend slaying of a local poet and cafe owner who was gunned down in front of his business, a police spokesman said Sunday.
People.com: Gil Scott-Heron Diesupdated: Sun May 29 2011 15:09:00
The "Godfather of Rap" was 62 and succumbed Friday in a New York hospital
Gil Scott-Heron, dubbed the "godfather of rap" for his mix of poetry and music, died Friday in New York, his publicist at XL Recordings said. He was 62.
"I'm edging towards being a recluse, but choose daily to fight for release from this crippling prison."
Javier Sicilia says he wrote his last poem after his son's brutal slaying. But words are still pouring out of the well-known Mexican poet's mouth.
Spoken word poet Sarah Kay explains the roots of the genre and how to perform it yourself.
I have always liked coming home and sharing what has happened that day with my loved ones. I like comparing notes. I know other people do, too. I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.
Singer-songwriter Phoebe Snow died in New York Tuesday from complications of a massive hemorrhagic stroke she suffered last year, according to her manager. She was 58.
I can't tell you how much sex has complicated my life -- my writing life, that is.
1. The story that will never be an e-Book "Gadsby" by Ernest Vincent Wright
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, is a poet who digs The Simpsons
Chilean miners and their families tour Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles.
Since the rescue of 33 miners this week in Copiapó, Chile, the world has turned its attention to that distant southern-cone country, one known for its striking topography, its volcanoes and earthquakes -- including one that devastated the city of Concepción this year -- and its poetry.
Look, we know the day is approaching when we'll no longer need to go outside to foster relationships. The day when the cords of technology will replace the cords of birth.
Official tournament poet Matt Harvey sets the scene for the Wimbledon tennis championships.
I can't be sure that John Wooden was reciting poetry at the moment he drew his last breath on June 4, 2010 at the age of 99, but I have good reason to believe he was. In September 2006, when I visited Wooden at his modest apartment in Encino, Calif., he told me that he liked to recite poetry to help him fall asleep. He had a rotation of maybe a half-dozen ditties, including a couple that he had written himself. With an easy smile and a dulcet voice, Wooden recited for me one of the self-written poems he used to hypnotize himself:
What does it feel like to kill a man? James Lenihan of Brooklyn, New York, knew.
Mother's Day poems come in all shapes and sizes.
Esra'a al Shafei is a 23-year-old Bahraini dedicated to providing young people in the region with the opportunity of free expression.
Archie Manning: Super Bowl XLIV is Sunday in Miami, Florida. The New Orleans Saints will face the Indianapolis Colts, and it's the first time the Saints have been in the Super Bowl in the team's four-decade history.
In a blog post, the rapper shows he's emerged from the Taylor Swift debacle with self-confidence intact
"O, The Oprah Magazine," asked some of our favorite authors which books they plan to give this season, and which they'd most love to get.
In 2008, superstar rapper Lil' Wayne allowed a film crew full access to his hectic life.
Actor Henry Gibson, who played roles ranging from loopy poets to vengeful Illinois Nazis and cranky judges during a 40-year film and television career, has died at age 73, his representatives said Wednesday.
ENCINO, Calif. -- When I last visited John Wooden three years ago, he needed a cane to help him walk, but he moved so briskly I had to hurry to keep up. He told me he still drove once in a while, and throughout our conversation he was energetic and sharp. He was happy, he was funny, and his memory was so good, it was easy to forget he was 96 years old.
Poet, dramatist and novelist, Wole Soyinka's work has left a large imprint on the literary landscape of Africa.
Nigerian writer and political activist Wole Soyinka shares his thoughts on his work and wining a Nobel Prize.
The first woman elected to one of poetry's most prestigious titles has stepped down amid controversy about her Nobel-prize winning rival.
A private team looking for a U.S. professor who disappeared on a volcanic island in Japan 11 days ago will descend Friday into a ravine the searchers believe he entered, a team representative said.
Japanese authorities will continue searching for a missing U.S. university professor on Wednesday, but they will reduce the size of search team, a police official said Tuesday.
Japanese police and U.S. Air Force helicopters were searching Friday for an American university professor who disappeared on a tiny volcanic island in Japan.
Japanese authorities have agreed to continue searching for an American university professor through at least Tuesday, more than a week after he disappeared on a volcanic Japanese island, colleagues and relatives said.
Whoever she was, Carol Ann Duffy is now Britain's poet laureate -- and the first woman ever to hold the prestigious literary post in its nearly 400-year history.
Teams in southern Japan are searching for an award-winning U.S. poet and college professor who failed to return from a hike to a volcano, his university said Thursday.
The family history of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath took another tragic turn Monday when it was revealed that their son had committed suicide after battling depression.
Sam Young wants to work. Standing in his sparsely decorated bedroom on a rainy afternoon in early January, Young, a 6-foot-6 senior forward for top-ranked Pittsburgh, is explaining how he composes poetry, his second love after basketball. "Flick off the lights, turn on some music, sit right there and just let it flow," he said, pointing to the computer on his desk. "I tell people, 'Just give me a topic and I'll write a poem for you.'"
An 11-year old girl is using her pen to fight Taliban swords and wants Pres. Obama to help. CNN's Stan Grant reports.
Tuba Sahaab looks nothing like a warrior. She is a slight girl of 11, living in a simple home in a suburb of Islamabad. But in Tuba's case, looks are deceiving.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) ---- Mahmoud Darwish, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died on Saturday in Houston. He was 67.
In a small independently owned coffee shop on the corner of one of Atlanta's urban pockets, a group of would-be poets come together at open mic night for an evening of poetry and rhymes.
Black in America's spoken word poet, Jon Goode, tells it like it is.
Kay Ryan is the latest pick as the nation's top poet. If her predecessors are any guide, she'll have an exhausting year
"We send little poems to each other," says his Marley & Me costar Alan Arkin
A mother develops a unique program to help her autistic son become a published poet. CNN's Colleen McEdwards reports.
It's 8 p.m. on a Friday, and a fashionable group of men and women is sitting around the pewter bar at Proof on Washington, D.C.'s G Street. "Do you cook?" asks a 30-something lawyer with shaggy black hair as she tilts a glass of red wine toward the guy next to her. "If my apartment had come without a kitchen," he replies with a grin, "I wouldn't have noticed." Everyone laughs knowingly.
Art Hotels
updated: Wed Mar 19 2008 11:38:00
Budget Travel's Erik Torkels shows us hotels across the world that are thinking outside the box when it comes to design.
Artists and other creative types are having their way with hotel rooms -- and they're thinking way outside the box.
The former Punky Brewster star and husband Jason Goldberg now have two daughters
If you're having trouble coming up with original expressions of love for your sweetheart, why not lift a line or two from the Internet?
Scottish people the world over celebrate the life of Robert Burns in an annual gathering full of whisky, poetry and haggis
The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to hear an appeal from poet Amiri Baraka, whose controversial poem about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to the elimination of an honorary post he held as New Jersey's poet laureate.
Last week I found myself overwhelmed by phone calls, text messages and e-mails, all asking me the same question: Is Etan going to be all right?
A new initiative revives one of the great literary controversies: that the Bard was not who we think he was
Poet and short story writer Grace Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," has died. She was 84.
Most people remember Soleil Moon Frye as little Punky Brewster - but she's all grown up and has a little one of her own: daughter Poet Sienna Rose, whom she and husband Jason Goldberg welcomed in 2005.
SI.com: The Riddleupdated: Tue Mar 20 2007 08:59:00
The cherubic face of Daisuke Matsuzaka bears a mysterious contentment, the calm self-assuredness of a kid who knows something you don't, who knows the questions before the exam is given. It's as if the pitching gods have let him in on a great secret, and it's safe with the chosen one.
In 1990, things were coming together for John Barr. He'd left Morgan Stanley to launch Barr Devlin, an investment bank specializing in utility mergers. Around the same time, he recalls, "a voice ca...
When adults review children's books, they often focus on the simplicity of the language. Or the beauty of the artwork. Or the appropriateness of the subject matter.
An advertising executive once noted, "People forget how fast you did a job -- but they remember how well you did it." Columbia University professor James Shapiro is reminding us how quickly a certain job was done.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed," wrote the English poet, painter and mystic William Blake, "everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." And two of the nominated works in the Grammys' best choral performance category -- one of them a setting of Blake's visionary writings -- give voice to that concept.
The Scene talks to Polish film director Pawel Pawlikowski about growing up in communist Warsaw and returning to the city for inspiration.
The election that made him famous, he didn't win; Lyndon Johnson did, 49 percent to 42 percent, in New Hampshire's 1968 Democratic presidential primary. But Eugene McCarthy, who died last week at 89 in Washington, had scared the sitting President by articulating a principled opposition to the Vietnam War and corralling enough idealists to turn vexation into votes.
As a child at the White House, Caroline Kennedy got early lessons in the power of words.
Admit it: you feel guilty about the lightweight stuff you read in summer.
Hightone records has been serving up a rich gumbo of blues, country, gospel, and Texas swing for the past two decades. The Oakland-based label hit the national scene in 1986 with Robert Cray's cros...
Saul Williams isn't out to save hip-hop, but he is out to elevate the art form. The actor, activist and leader of the self-described "industrial punk-hop" movement, is effectively breaking boundaries while blurring the lines between poetry and rap.
Putting off dashing to the mall while grumbling all the way? Worried about soaring bills?
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein spends his time in solitary confinement writing poems, tending a garden, reading the Koran and eating American muffins and cookies, a British newspaper has reported.
A senior al Qaeda leader -- described as the group's "chief of operations in the Arabian Peninsula" -- was killed in a shootout in Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials have told CNN.
Until last year, when they published an enormous bestselling hit by an unknown child poet, Cheryl and Peter Barnes were best known for producing children's books like Nat, Nat, The Nantucket Cat. H...
In a luxuriant private courtyard garden on the east side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood known long ago for its turtle population and known now for its celebrity inhabitants, writer E.B. White had ...
S.W. Erdnase was the pseudonym of Milton Franklin Andrews, a card cheat, confidence man, and murderer. He shot himself and his girlfriend in 1905 in San Francisco when police busted into his apartm...
The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks Oxford University Press, 690 pages
IN THE DAYS of misty towers, distressed maidens, and stalwart knights, a young man, walking down a road, came upon a laborer fiercely pounding away at a stone with hammer and chisel. The lad asked ...
BUSINESS POETRY? Isn't that a contradiction in terms -- the literary analogue of military music? Isn't business by its very nature too prosaic to beget poems? After all, when Walt Whitman sang, he ...
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