Alison Flood, writing in The Guardian implores her fellow citizens to vote in the BBC’s poll for the nation’s favorite poet. She’s worried that there will be a rehash of 1995, when Britain chose Rudyard Kipling’s “If” as its favorite poem. Her personal choice of Gerard Manley Hopkins isn’t bad, in my opinion. I feel her pain–a similar poll in the US would almost certainly be a close race between “The Raven” and “There once was a man from Nantucket…”

Lots of people in the poetry world hate Seth Abramson, in part because he’s taken a pretty business-like approach to poetry and to MFA Programs in particular. But Abramson gets a good (and at first glance unlikely) defender in Ron Silliman.

Remember that Rachel Loden reading I mentioned a couple of weeks ago? Steven Fama gives us a report.

I’ve mentioned them before, but a good place to find links to online poems is Swindle, an aggregator run by the folks at Linebreak (who publish some pretty good poems themselves).

Brian Spears