Earlier this year, after urgings by Seamus Heaney, it was announced that Ted Hughes will be honored with a memorial alongside those of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley and Blake in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner:

from The Guardian (UK):
“Ted Hughes joins literary greats at Poets' Corner,” by Charlotte Higgins
“Ted Hughes, poet laureate and author of such celebrated collections as Crow and Birthday Letters, is to be honoured by a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Although his ashes will not be re-interred in the abbey, his life and achievements will be marked by a plaque to be installed early next year.... The decision to erect memorials in the abbey is made by the Dean of Westminster, John Hall.... Poets’ Corner has become, in Hall’s words, the ‘national shrine’ to Britain’s most celebrated writers.”

from The Independent (UK):
“Ted Hughes to join literary elite with Poets’ Corner memorial,” by Arifa Akbar
“It is only 12 years since his death but Ted Hughes is to be recognised as one of Britain’s greatest artists as a memorial is erected to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. The memorial for Hughes, who was Poet Laureate from 1984 until he died from cancer in 1998, will lie in the south transept, alongside monuments for William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Blake and T S Eliot. He is the first poet to be so commemorated since Sir John Betjeman’s memorial was erected in 1984.”

Now the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City has announced that its newest addition will be a memorial to Hughes’ American wife, Sylvia Plath:

from the Sylvia Plath Info blog, posted by Peter K. Steinberg:
“Sylvia Plath to be inducted in Poets’ Corner,”
“The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine’s Poet in Residence and Electors have chosen Sylvia Plath as the 2010 inductee to their Poets’ Corner. Plath will join such poets as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Tennessee Williams, last year’s inductee. The Poet’s Corner was established in 1983, and each poet has a stone engraved with a line from her or his work. The Cathedral will present a program celebrating Sylvia Plath on Thursday November 4th at 7:30 p.m.; the formal induction will take place on Sunday the 7th at the 4 p.m. Evensong.”

And back in England, where Plath is buried, there are calls for a grander memorial that would accommodate the many visitors to her grave in a northern village cemetery:

from The Guardian (UK):
“Sylvia Plath fans call for a fitting memorial to the poet,” by Vanessa Thorpe
“A small stone in a cemetery in the Yorkshire village of Heptonstall marks the unassuming grave of Sylvia Plath, the American poet and novelist whose fame has grown each year since her suicide in 1963. And growing every year, too, are the numbers of foreign visitors who make a pilgrimage to the grave. Frequently they find it looking untended and unkempt, and this has prompted strong calls for a proper memorial to her life and work.... Demands for a more appropriate memorial to Plath have been prompted by the discovery of a touching poem written by the poet’s old friend Elizabeth Sigmund.” [Note from Guide Margy Snyder: You can read that poem, “Shep-en-Mut,” in the paper entitled “A Poem, A Friend,” a collaboration between Gail Crowther of Lancaster University and Elizabeth Sigmund that was published in Plath Profiles, the three-year-old Plath journal at Indiana University.]

More on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes:
Our biographical profile of Plath, with links to buy her books
Sylvia Plath Speaks in Her Own Voice (April 2010)
A Star Chart for Sylvia Plath’s Birthday (November 2008)
Thinking About Sylvia Plath as the Winter Darkness Comes On (November 2007)
The Poet’s Name Inscribed on a Hidden Slab (August 2003)

Five years is a long time... long enough to arrive at an emotional perspective on disaster? Or perhaps in the case of a catastrophe that changes everything, no time period is “long enough” and your view of the event just keeps evolving year after year, forever. This week, however, the five-year span has come up in the case of two important disasters of our time:

August 29 marks five years since Hurricane Katrina washed over New Orleans and thanks to Jim Finnegan’s posting to the NewPoetry list, we can direct you to the best online reading for commemorating that awful anniversary: NPR’s selection of poems excerpted from Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith’s 2008 book of Katrina poems (Coffeehouse Press, ). This is essential reading, both contemporaneous and timeless.

It’s been nearly nine years since the terrible events of September 11, 2001, but former Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column last week distributed a poem by Tony Gloeggler called “Five Years Later,” pondering the lingering effects of the September 11 attack on a survivor. This is more essential reading, and its concise evocation of perspective and the intersection of large events in individual lives has prompted us to open our own contemporaneous September 11 anthology to additional submissions—we’re seeking poems looking back on the events of September 11, 2001 from years later, and invite your submissions.

More on Poetry and Hurricane Katrina:
Poets for Hurricane Katrina relief (2005)
Stormy Words: Poets on Hurricane Katrina (2006)
Three Years After — Katrina-inspired Poems (2008)

More on Poetry and September 11:
“Poems After the Attack,” our September 11 anthology
Submit Your Poem for our anthology

There’s been a lot of rancorous hullaballoo lately in the InterBoard Poetry Community—the sort of thing that occasionally happens in groups linked only by email, where misunderstandings meet severe judgment, the emails flare back and forth and the arguments harden, so that an email exchange escalates into a war fueled by wounded egos. I won’t comment on the merits of any of the arguments—to do so would only fan the flames. I will simply report the end results:

• It has been reiterated that, in keeping with the IBPC’s protocols assuring that poems are judged anonymously, no member of a participating forum should directly contact a sitting IBPC judge during his/her term as judge.
• Any poet who fears that his/her poem entered in the competition may suffer from a judge’s misreading may prevent misunderstanding by attaching an explanatory footnote to the poem, and if the poem is chosen as a winner, the poet may then decide whether or not the footnote will be published with the poem.
• The Poets’ Graves Workshop has resigned from participation in the IBPC.

Winning July Poems
In her first month as IBPC judge, Ruth Ellen Kocher selected three winners from the July entries—none of them from our Forum:

• In first place, she chose “Dreams: mobile” by Petra Klein, a long poem “tackled by a poet who works in a minimalist style” that she admired “for its razor edge handling of lyric, innovation, and tradition.”
• Second place went to “Pantone 1665 C.” by Ben Johnson, which she cited as “a sort of imagistic causal chain that exists primarily as a series of isolated utterances.”
• Her third place choice was “Bone-Song” by Laurie Byro, whose “lyric subtlety” “draw[s] the reader into an ending that arrives through implication rather than assertion.”

Winning August Poems
IRuth Ellen Kocher also chose three winners and no honorable mentions from the August entries—once again skipping over our Forum’s entries:

• In first place, “The Catch” by C.J. Costello, a short poem that “wastes no language#8221; in “ushering the reader through the poem, quietly, yet assuredly.”
• In second place, “A Quieting” by Michael Harty, in which “the marriage of disparate objects and references serves the magical feeling of the poem and allows it to hover between a moment of true recollection and a moment of dream.”
• In third place, “Natural Selections” by Mary Beth Cronk, a poem whose “slowly building and subtle dynamic... transcend[s] into an resolute, definitive quietude.”

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information page on July-September 2010 judge Ruth Ellen Kocher

It’s difficult to believe, but it’s been nearly nine years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America. Remembering that day and contemplating the echoing horror of attacks since then around the world, we are invoking the commemorative function of poems by republishing our “contemporaneous” 9.11 anthology: Poems After the Attack. This collection comes to you now, nearly a decade later, accompanied by the same wish it has carried since we first put it together: In grief, anger, consternation, confusion or resolve, we hope these poems offer you comfort, clarity or grace.