Various poets and poems were all over the news thanks to the Inauguration on the 20th and Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday on the 19th. So here are a smattering of links about the two:

• MSNBC’s video of the reading by Elizabeth Alexander. I would be interested in hearing thoughts on it (I’ll post the transcript in the comments).
• Time has an interview with Elizabeth Alexander about her process and thoughts on inaugural poems.
• And on to Poe. NPR has had a few pieces on him. The first is a remembrance with “Gomez” from The Addams Family (I like that the slug on the website doesn’t even refer to the actor by his real name). The second story I’m linking to covers the efforts of yet another city (Boston) to lay some claim to Poe. (He was born there in 1809 and was taken away shortly thereafter upon being orphaned. Apparently he later claimed he was ashamed to be born in Boston.)

• “In a Haystack” by Andrea Cohen, published in the current Atlantic Monthly
• This is an older link, but one well worth sharing. Here is Joel Priddy’s cartoon story, “Mr. Blake’s Company”. For more information on Blake, his Wikipedia page is a good primer.
• This is not about poetry or about reading poetry, but about writing in the Internet age. Some good advice by Cory Doctorow.
• An interview on NPR from a month ago about Elizabeth Alexander who was chosen to write the Inaugural poem for Barack Obama
• Finally, thinking about inaugural poems (I’m sure I would not enjoy the task of praising someone in verse in such a formal setting) led me to stumble across this story about the inaugural poem Robert Frost wrote for JFK. The Library of Congress has original scans of the text Frost was attempting to read from.