Poetry

The rancher's wife takes the stage in a white cowboy hat, a brown fringed shawl and an oversized silver belt buckle. A spotlight illuminates her hazel eyes and sly grin. Yvonne Hollenbeck, who has spent 63 years on the plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, clutches a microphone at the Elko Convention Center and shares her poem's title with hundreds of ranchers and their kids: "The Bail-Out Plan." The audience titters.

August Kleinzahler gets into fights at poetry readings. Once, in Ireland, he traded insults with a host he found verbose. At a reading in a New York bar, he told a noisy drunk to shut his trap. Fists flew after the guy made a crack about Kleinzahler's coat, a sentimental hand-me-down from his father. Kleinzahler goes to readings because he is a poet. He just doesn't act like one. He is, at 58, the bad boy of American poetry, whose public outbursts make academics cringe.

During A late night in Krakow, nonagenarian Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was tipping back the vodka with Jerzy Illg, editor in chief at his Polish publishing house, Znak. Late in the evening, a touchy topic dropped on the table: Where would Milosz like to be buried? Should his final resting place be with his mother, in a city near Gdansk? Illg dismissed the notion outright. "Who will light a candle for you there?" he asked.

Iman Bakry has a fortuneteller's voice, husky and cracked. It coaxes you into her colloquial poems, which once were about romance, but have since shifted to a cutting critique of President Hosni Mubarak's government and an Egypt plagued by self-doubt, repression, corruption and a dangerous divide between rich and poor. "I see a storm coming," begins a stanza in one of her poems.

The British Library has put on display the notebook in which William Blake wrote one of his most famous poems, "The Tyger," to mark the 250th anniversary year of the English poet and artist's birth. The British Library also has posted online a digital version of Blake's manuscript notebook, in which he made sketches and drafted his poems for more than 30 years.

Poetry is not literally in the air as you drive through the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, but as the temperature cools and your cellphone loses its signal, a certain space does open up in your mind, a swell of rhythms from an older and calmer time. Cummington, a small town once home to 19th century poet William Cullen Bryant, is the primary residence of one of today's most celebrated poets and translators, Richard Wilbur. The 85-year-old is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S.

Rodney Jones, a professor of English at Southern Illinois University, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. Jones was honored for his book "Salvation Blues," published by Houghton Mifflin last year. Claremont selected Seattle-based Eric McHenry, author of "Potscrubber Lullabies," for the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The awards will be presented April 24 in a ceremony at the Herbert Zipper Concert Hall in L.A. that is open to the public.

AT 6 foot 7, Charles Olson (1910-70) was literally and figuratively a behemoth of American poetry. Although he was deeply rooted in the land and sea around Gloucester, Mass., his work went on to influence writers all over the country, most obviously the Beats, the avant-garde poets of North Carolina's Black Mountain College, the aesthetes of the New York School and the Language poets of 1970s San Francisco.

Administrators at a Los Angeles charter school forbade students from reciting a poem about civil rights icon Emmett Till during a Black History Month program recently, saying his story was unsuitable for an assembly of young children.