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John Lundberg
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John Lundberg has been writing and teaching poetry for the last ten years. He is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University who holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. His awards include a Henry Hoynes Fellowship and a Breadloaf Writer's Conference work-study award for 2003 and 2004. His publications include Poetry, VQR, Southern Review, New England Review, and ThreePenny Review. He currently resides in Washington DC where he is finishing his first book of poetry.

Blog Entries by John Lundberg

Kolkata Broadcasts Poetry in the Streets

1 Comments | Posted September 4, 2011 | 02:01 PM (EST)

The Indian city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) has hatched an odd, but perhaps ingenious, new plan to curb traffic, one that has the added benefit of incorporating poetry into the daily lives of the city's commuters.

Kolkata is a city that knows a thing or two about traffic management....

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The Still Resonant World Of Samuel Menashe

2 Comments | Posted August 28, 2011 | 10:17 AM (EST)

Samuel Menashe died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 85 on Monday. For most of his life, he was a solitary figure in the poetry world, living in the same Greenwich Village apartment for more than half a century. Then, in 2004, he was given the Poetry Foundation's...

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Celebrating National Bad Poetry Day

10 Comments | Posted August 21, 2011 | 12:47 PM (EST)

August 18 was National Bad Poetry Day, an event that received very little attention. Ok, so the holiday isn't officially acknowledged by the U.S. Government, but it did get a mention in the government news website Politico. It is also noted in this hard-to-read website full of little...

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A Poet Fights for Change in Mexico

3 Comments | Posted August 12, 2011 | 01:03 PM (EST)

When prominent Mexican poet Javier Sicilia lost his 24-year-old son to drug-related violence this past March, he took to his pen, writing the following poem only hours after hearing of the murder:

The world is not worthy of words
they have been suffocated from the inside
as they...

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Boston Hosts This Year's National Poetry Slam

5 Comments | Posted August 7, 2011 | 02:06 PM (EST)

If you're in Beantown this week and don't want to spring for Red Sox tickets, you should check out this year's National Poetry Slam, which starts Tuesday in nearby Cambridge. The so-called "Olympics of slam poetry" will bring in more than 76 teams from around the country, along with teams...

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Finding Relief in Poetry's Icebox

6 Comments | Posted July 31, 2011 | 10:30 AM (EST)

After suffering through the brutal heat wave that sat intractably on New York last weekend, these 90-degree days are a relief. Still, I've had enough of the rattle of air conditioning and of nights sleeping on top of the sheets. I find myself lying awake yearning for some of the...

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Can Bradley Cooper Handle Satan?

24 Comments | Posted July 24, 2011 | 10:27 AM (EST)

When Bradley Cooper signed on to play Satan in the forthcoming big screen adaptation of John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost," he took on a far more nuanced role than you might expect.

Hollywood has portrayed Satan as everything from a bright red, cartoonish beast to a very human-seeming...

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Bahrain's Young "Freedom Poet" Released From Prison

1 Comments | Posted July 17, 2011 | 03:07 PM (EST)

When twenty-year-old Ayat al-Qurmezi emerged from her vehicle on Thursday surrounded by throngs of cheering supporters, she was more than a little stunned. It was understandable, given that she'd been whisked from prison straight into the international spotlight. She explained to Euronews:

I honestly didn't expect things to...
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Plums and Wheelbarrows: When Poets Disagree

4 Comments | Posted July 10, 2011 | 02:01 PM (EST)

Poet Anna Robinson rolled a red wheelbarrow to the headquarters of the UK's Poetry Society on Wednesday to deliver a rare demand for a society-wide meeting. The move was a nod to American poet William Carlos Williams' famous statement that "so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow." In case...

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Poetry Magazine Nears 100

3 Comments | Posted July 1, 2011 | 04:51 PM (EST)

Poetry magazine has had a major influence on American poetry for a long time now. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, it discovered or furthered the careers of many of the great American poets of the last century, including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore,...

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Poems That Celebrate the Summer

1 Comments | Posted June 24, 2011 | 05:48 PM (EST)

Spring officially left us this past Tuesday, and this last week in New York reminded me that summer has its trials, particularly for those of us without central air conditioning. So to help us get off on the right foot with the season, I've collected some great poems that celebrate...

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James Franco Brings Another Poet to the Big Screen

1 Comments | Posted June 19, 2011 | 02:55 PM (EST)

Although relatively new to the movie business, James Franco has established himself a leading ambassador for great literature on the big screen. Last year, he earned good reviews for his performance as Allen Ginsberg in Howl, and he's now taking on the role of American poet Hart Crane in The...

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Raising the Bar for Digital Poetry

7 Comments | Posted June 10, 2011 | 10:37 AM (EST)

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," one of the truly revolutionary poems in the English language, is now breaking new ground for poetry on the iPad. Faber and Touch Press have teamed up to create a new "The Waste Land" app, an ambitious effort to, as they...

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Was Pablo Neruda Murdered?

11 Comments | Posted June 3, 2011 | 04:33 PM (EST)

Pablo Neruda once wrote, "We all arrive by different streets, by unequal languages, at Silence." But just how the great poet arrived at his ultimate silence is the subject of heated debate in his home country of Chile.

It has long been accepted that Neruda died...

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The Apocalypse in Verse

5 Comments | Posted May 29, 2011 | 01:29 PM (EST)

As Harold Camping's judgment hour approached last Saturday, a very small part of me worried that the old man was right. I glanced up at the sky over Union Square, fearing a scene such as Whitman described in his poem "Whispers of Heavenly Death,"

I see, just see...

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The Republican Primary Gets Poetic

2 Comments | Posted May 20, 2011 | 03:47 PM (EST)

Fox News called it "epic" and "blindingly colorful," and exulted that it brought to mind the writing of Hunter S. Thompson and the thunderous tones of voiceover artist Don LaFontaine. No, they weren't referring to the coming blockbuster big screen adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost, they were talking...

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Lost in the Common Controversy: The White House Celebrates Poetry

15 Comments | Posted May 15, 2011 | 03:32 AM (EST)

If you heard about the White House poetry event this past Wednesday, you probably heard about it for the wrong reasons. The decision to invite hip-hop artist and actor Common to read poetry drew a surprising amount of furor from the right. Former Bush senior advisor Karl Rove and Fox...

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Abbottabad Is Also a Bad, Bad Poem

12 Comments | Posted May 8, 2011 | 01:09 PM (EST)

Most of us would probably feel a bit awkward living in a town named after ourselves. "I'm John Lundberg from Lundberg town just up the road. It's awesome." And I would feel even more awkward writing a poem about how much I loved Lundberg town.

But such is the legacy...

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The Royal Wedding Poem Is a Winner

Posted May 1, 2011 | 01:10 PM (EST)

Britain's poet laureate is expected to commemorate the royal family's significant occasions, banging out verse for birthdays and funerals, among other, rather arduous assignments. It went without saying that the royal wedding deserved a royal poem. Thus, current laureate Carol Ann Duffy caused a kerfuffle in November when her agent...

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'O Miami': When a City Writes a Poem

Posted April 24, 2011 | 12:22 PM (EST)

Jordan Melnick, editor of the popular blog BeachedMiami, has devised a way for his hometown to write a poem. Melnick is using his blog as a high-profile platform for an open-source poem, meaning anyone can add a line to an ever-growing chorus of voices.

Melnick dreamed up...

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