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We're happy to turn from novels and memoirs,
and welcome this coming week three unbelievable poets:
John Ashbery, Lynn Emanuel, and Charles Bernstein,
in an event jointly sponsored by
Poetry Magazine and McSweeney's,
in honor of poetry at its best, but also to celebrate the publication of
The McSweeney's Book of POETS PICKING POETS,
edited by Dominic Luxford.



The first McSweeney's foray into contemporary poetry brings together
one hundred poems by fifty poets in ten poet-chains,
and makes us wonder why we waited so long to try this. How it works:
Ten poets choose a poem of their own and a poem by another poet,
who then does the same, and so on unto the fifth generation.
Thus DC Berman leads to Charles Simic by way of James Tate,
and other chains run through Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C.D. Wright,
Michael Ondaatje, John Ashbery, Mark Doty, C.K. Wright, Dean Young,
Yusef Komunyakaa, and dozens more.

Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry Magazine is the
oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world.
Harriet Monroe's "Open Door" policy, set forth in volume 1 of the magazine,
remains the most succinct statement of Poetry's mission:
to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach.
The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first
important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore,
Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg,
and other now-classic authors.
In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works
by virtually every significant poet of the twentieth century.

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