Words That Burn, a poetry app, includes audio and video from the late writer Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour at the British Library. Beginning in 2004, Hart devoted an evening each month to a poet or two, “introducing and setting their poems in the context of their life,” and staging readings of the work from actors like Dominic West, Harold Pinter and Elizabeth McGovern.

The idea, Hart said, was that understanding “‘the life and philosophy of the poet illuminates the poetry,” which “readings by some of our finest actors then ignite.” In a video introduction, Hart contends that poetry is “the highest form of language, without a doubt.”

Words That Burn features 15 poets, and many more pairings: Dominic West reads Percy Shelley and Robert Lowell; Juliet Stevenson reads Emily Dickinson; Ralph Fiennes reads W.H. Auden. Harriet Walter reads Sylvia Plath; Charles Dance reads Elizabeth Bishop; Elizabeth McGovern reads Lowell and Marianne Moore; and so on. And the app is free, created by the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation in her memory.

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Especially in a country with so much Jewish blood on its hands, this is – or was – a question that no Good German should ask in public. It was even more verboten when asked by someone who had belatedly admitted that as a teenager he had served, however briefly, in the Nazi paramilitary unit, the Waffen SS. But the 84-year-old Grass dared to break the taboo. He spoke out and said “What Must Be Said.”

Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?

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Rich’s first books, in the 1950s, established her formal skill; W. H. Auden selected her debut, "A Change of World," for the Yale Younger Poets prize when Rich was still an undergraduate, and some of its deftly careful work remains widely taught. She came into her own, however, beginning with "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1963), one of the first collections of poems by anyone to bring to light the contradictions, the challenges and the frustrations of life as a woman, a mother, an intellectual and an American artist in those years: Rich in that poem imagines earlier women writers, among them Emily Dickinson, “knowing themselves too well in one another:/ their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn … iron-beaked and purposed as a bird,/ dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.”

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“What would have happened,” asked one banner, “if Emily Dickinson had been prescribed Prozac?” Idle speculation aside -- one pictures long, glazed-over afternoons spent knitting frocks in New England -- the protesters were implying that Prozac stymies creativity, and that the Poetry Foundation, lavishly funded by a pharmaceutical fortune, does business with the kind of people who might, given the chance, have put Dickinson on antidepressants.

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John was the oldest of four siblings (another died in infancy), but it was his vital bond with George, two years his junior, that sustained him and nurtured the poetic work that began to emerge in his teen years. As Gigante notes, until now George Keats has played a peripheral role in biographies of his famous brother, or he has been portrayed as a cruel, self-absorbed figure who, when John needed him most, abandoned him in pursuit of moneymaking in America. The real story, she writes, has "gone unsung."

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The 2011 winner, Tomas Tranströmer, might be best known to Americans from his appearance on lists of likely winners this time every October. Five years ago, the Guardian called him "Scandinavia's greatest living poet." Now he is the 108th Nobel laureate in literature, in the company of Yeats, Hemingway, Beckett, Faulkner and García Márquez (not to mention the satisfyingly crotchety Doris Lessing).

Tranströmer is the first Swede to win the prize since the early ‘70s, and the first poet to be recognized by the prize committee in 15 years. (Despite the Academy’s avowed intent to achieve a greater "global distribution" in its laureates, his win is also part of a firmly European trend; only two of the last 10 laureates hail from non-European countries.)

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Who is he?

Born in 1928, Levine spent his early years in Detroit, and has since lived and taught in Iowa, California and New York, among other places. Given the poet's highly distinguished career ---a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards and dual Guggenheim fellowships stand out from a lengthy list of prizes -- the post of poet laureate is arguably icing on the cake.

Much of Levine's most famous work describes Detroit, the city where he was born, raised and -- as a young working man -- educated in the rhythms of factory life. "I'm a Detroit-sized poet," he once said, explaining why the city was a perpetual source of inspiration to him. Levine studied at Michigan's Wayne State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop -- where he came in contact with Robert Lowell ("as a teacher, he was a disaster") and John Berryman ("an inspiration") -- and spent much of his own teaching career at California State University, Fresno.

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The project has understandably received attention since it was announced. Christle has already explained some of the background to the Guardian; I called her around lunchtime today for a live poetry experience of my own. Here's a transcript of our conversation, with minor edits for the sake of fluency:

Heather Christle: Hello, this is Heather.

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Video clips, the most common add-on, can obviously add value to cookbooks or to more substantive nonfiction, such as Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" or Sebastian Junger's "War" -- enhanced, respectively, with CBS news reports and clips from "Restrepo," the companion film Junger made with the late documentarian Tim Hetherington. Literature, however, is another matter. Most of the stuff appended to the digital versions of new novels, for example, consists of author interviews and background material, most of which can already be easily found online in one form or another. That's especially true if the author has been dutifully following the industry-wide directive to maintain a website, produce a book trailer, blog, engage with fans via social media and so on.

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Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," died Friday at age 62.

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke's Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.

"We're all sort of shattered," she said.

Scott-Heron's influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then."

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As some liberals have noted, "Let America Be America Again" is the title of a poem by Langston Hughes, an avowed leftist who was probably gay. And the poem does not really reflect the Santorum agenda.

Because Santorum is not a very good politician, he allowed himself to be "tripped up" by a student who asked him about how his campaign slogan was written by a gay, black, pro-union leftist poet:

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Changing the public's mind about that is beyond the scope of a 1,000-word review in the Sunday newspaper, and so Orr has written "Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry." Almost as slim as some of the volumes Orr writes about, it's an introduction to a land with odd customs and gorgeous scenery.

Orr suggests that the curious novice venture into modern poetry the way you'd approach visiting a foreign country (specifically, Belgium): "You might try to learn a few phrases, or read a little Belgian history, or thumb through a guidebook," but "the important thing is that you'd know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at a loss, and you'd accept that confusion as part of the process. What you wouldn't do, however, is become paralyzed with anxiety because you don't speak fluent Flemish, or convinced that to really 'get' Belgium, you need to memorize the Brussels phone book."

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I've heard various complaints about the casting, and of course it runs the risk of glamorizing a person who was devoted to celebrating the fleshly delights of earthly creation. Yes, Franco is a remarkably handsome man and -- at least to many people's tastes -- Ginsberg wasn't. But when I reviewed "Howl" at Sundance in January, one commenter observed that Franco looks exactly the way Ginsberg wanted to look, and looks a lot like the hetero hipster dudes Ginsberg tended to fall in love with. Whether that's the reason or not, Franco pulls it off; he's wonderfully awkward, vulnerable, even animalistic at times. It's a beautiful and nearly perfect performance, even if the physical resemblance is not strong.

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"Young Romantics" focuses on two complicated households, one lastingly notorious, the other now nearly forgotten. The first is the family group surrounding the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which included his wife, Mary Shelley (author of "Frankenstein"), and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The second belonged to a journalist, critic and poet named Leigh Hunt, whose two-year incarceration in the Surrey County Jail for the crime of criticizing the Prince Regent kicks off Hay's narrative. The two other major poets of this circle, Lord Byron and John Keats, come into the story as well, of course, though Byron played a larger part than Keats -- who had the sense to stay out of most of the bigger messes his cohorts got into.

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In a post yesterday, I made a first attempt at teasing out some themes in Apichatpong's film and the cinephile fervor surrounding it, but I definitely need to see "Uncle Boonmee" again before I render a verdict. On Sunday night there were two sets of reactions to the prize. On one hand, this may be one of those rare occasions when the Palme d'Or actually has a commercial impact. Apichatpong's infinitesimal audience -- limited so far to the most hardcore of art-film fans -- can only get bigger, and the global headlines resulting from this prize will certainly motivate some curious viewers.

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I am a young, female graduate student with the usual disclaimer: fantastic relationship, material necessities covered, living in a lovely city, great family, plenty of friends, happy and content, etc.

Here is my problem: I am occasionally (about once per week) gripped by an intense emotion that, as far as I can tell, does not have a name yet. The emotion is partly like nostalgia, partly like loneliness, and partly like excitement. I think it is what one would feel if she were about to leave everything she knows and embark on a great adventure of the epic and medieval sort. It usually lasts for about an hour.

This feeling is very unpleasant to me, like a powerful longing for someone who is gone. At first I thought that it was a longing for someone who wasn't there, but I have tried visiting everyone I know and going everywhere I can go, and it never resolves it -- I just have to wait an hour and then it is gone.

My other clue is that I only feel this way when the sun's rays are particularly yellow and glancing, as on summer evenings.

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Duffy first got attention in 1999 with the collection "The World's Wife," which views literature and history through the eyes of women behind myth-making men (poems include "Mrs. Faust" and "Pilate's Wife"). According to a story in the Guardian, she was widely regarded as runner-up in 1999, when then-Prime Minister Tony Blair chose outgoing laureate Andrew Motion. Rumor had it Blair believed England wasn't ready for Duffy: She's not just a woman, but she's also a lesbian. 

Duffy told BBC Radio 4 she had some hesitation about the position. 

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