Dante, the father of the Italian language, fled his native city in 1302 after being sentenced to death for crimes including fraud and extortion. Florence council was to have healed the 700-year rift with the poet by presenting the city's golden florin to Count Pieralvise Serego Alighieri. The count, however, believes the Florentines are not sorry enough.

Last month, a meeting of the council's cultural committee, held to annul the expulsion order, prompted the kind of rancorous divisions that led to Dante's exile. Five councillors voted against the annulment and several others stayed away.

Count Pieralvise said it was "anything but a collective 'mea culpa' and symbolic ending of [Dante's] exile". "I could have wept when I read the comments of some of the councillors," he said. The proposed reconciliation, the initiative of two councillors from Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party, ran into fierce opposition from the radical left. Nicola Rotondaro, the leader of a communist group on the council, said Dante "did not need the council to rehabilitate him".

"If he had been sent to his death, would we perhaps have asked for his resurrection?" he said. The count said it was "as if the people of Stratford-upon-Avon had quarrelled over an event in memory of Shakespeare".

Police have recovered a 400-year-old volume of Shakespeare stolen in England a decade ago and worth millions of dollars (pounds) after a man walked into a library in Washington, D.C., and asked to have it authenticated.

Police in Durham, northeast England, said Friday they had arrested a 51-year-old man over the theft of the First Folio edition of 1623, which scholars consider one of the most important printed books in the English language. It was among seven centuries-old books and manuscripts stolen in December 1998 from a display case at the Durham University library.

*****

he mystery began to unravel two weeks ago when a man brought the First Folio to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library and asked to have it verified as genuine. The man claimed to be an international businessman who had bought the volume in Cuba. "We have people come to us from time to time with questions about books," said Garland Scott, head of external relations at the library, one of the world's leading centers of Shakespearean research. "It's not every day that someone walks in with a First Folio."

Scott said library staff members soon had their suspicions raised. The book was largely intact, but the end boards and some early pages -- which bore marks that would have identified them as the Durham copy -- had been removed.

Boyd was the winner of the $1,000 Lampert award for his book "Making Bones Walk" (Luna Publications), which the judges said was "rich with innovative language and Boyd's very original way of looking at the world."

The Lampert award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. Lampert was an arts administrator who organized authors' tours and took an interest in the work of new writers.

Simpson won the $1,000 Lowther award for "Quick" (McClelland & Stewart). The judges said her poems have "extraordinary range, intelligence and empathy."

For their transgressions, each was found guilty, mostly of trespassing, and sentenced to two sessions of study with the Frost biographer, poet, and professor Jay Parini — a "punishment," notes The New Yorker, for which Middlebury students normally pay a hefty sum. The prosecutor, John Quinn, told the magazine, "I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people's property in the future."

For the first class, Parini reportedly turned to Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken." Parini told the students: "Believe me, if you're a teenager, you're always in the damned woods. Literally ... And metaphorically you're in the woods, in your life. Look at you here, in court diversion! If that isn't 'in the woods,' what the hell is 'in the woods'? You're in the woods!"

"Life is full of surprises, isn't it?" said Blaser as he took the podium. "Vive la poesie. Long live poetry."

The prize was founded in 2000, and is awarded to two books of poetry - including translations - published in English the previous year. The two other finalists on the Canadian shortlist were David W. McFadden for Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. McFadden; Erin Moure and Robert Majzels for translating Nicole Brossard's Notebook of Roses and Civilization. The three other finalists on the International shortlist were Elaine Equi for Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems; David Harsent for Selected Poems 1969-2005; Clayton Eshleman, translator of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo.

This year's jury was comprised of Vanouver writer George Bowering, New York-by-way-of-London writer James Lasdun, and Mexican poet Pura Lopez Colome. The judges read over 500 books from 31 countries before deciding the finalists.

Gary Snyder, a poet known for his verse about nature and spirituality and a former member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," Christian Wiman, chair of the selection committee, said in a statement Tuesday.

"His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation." Snyder, who turns 78 in May, has published such collections as "Regarding Wave," "No Nature" and "Turtle Island," winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favoured classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive. "I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award. Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a tragic, but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel - "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he told The Associated Press on Monday - and at one point included a section about Dylan.

"Bob Dylan was a problem for me," Diaz, who has also published a story collection, "Drown," said with a laugh. "I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period (1967-69). By the end of it, I wanted to throttle my like of Bob Dylan."

Janice N. Harrington's "Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone," a debut collection, received the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Administered by Claremont Graduate University, based in Claremont, Calif., the awards were established in the early 1990s by Kate Tufts in honor of her late husband, poet Kingsley Tufts. Previous winners include Alan Shapiro, Carl Phillips and Michael Ryan.

Nearly 150 people had gathered outside the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church, but the man known as the "Poe toaster" was, as usual, able to avoid being spotted by the crowd, said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum. The tribute takes place every Jan. 19 - the anniversary of Poe's birth. The visitor did not leave a note, Jerome said, electing not to respond to questions raised in the past year about the history and authenticity of the tribute.

*****

Jerome invites a handful of Poe enthusiasts to join him inside the church every year but withholds details of the tribute in an effort to help the toaster maintain his anonymity. He said the visitor no longer wears the wide-brimmed hat and scarf he donned in the past. In 1993, the visitor left a note reading, "The torch will be passed." A later note said the man, who apparently died in 1998, had handed the tradition on to his two sons.

This year's visitor was the same man who has come to the grave site many times in the past, Jerome said. "We recognize him from his build, the way he walks," he said. "It would be very easy for us, visually, to see if this were a different person."

Homer Noble Farm, a historic landmark in Ripton, Vt., was ransacked Friday night during what police say was a party attended by up to 50 young people. No arrests have been made, but police said Monday that they have tracked down some of the partygoers and believe they are minors. Police Sgt. Lee Hodsden says the intruders broke a window to get into the two-storey wood frame building - a furnished residence open to tourists in the summer.

Once inside, they destroyed tables, pictures, windows, light fixtures and dishes. Wicker furniture and dressers were smashed and thrown into a fireplace and burned, apparently to provide heat. Empty beer bottles and cans, plastic cups and cellophane, apparently used to hold marijuana, were also found. Hodsden said the vandals vomited in the living room and discharged two fire extinguishers inside the building, located on a dead-end road.

Sylvester Stallone is currently busy finishing up work on Rambo IV, and may even end up doing a Rambo V, but the Sly project I'm most interested in is the one he's doing after Rambo, a film about tortured poet Edgar Allan Poe. The movie's traveled a rocky road to get going, but it's starting to look like Poe will actually get made. If the film finally does happen, we may know who Stallone is casting as his Edgar Allan.

*****

Our source says, "Stallone has recently met with Viggo Mortensen and has offered him the role of Edgar Allan Poe in the film. Mortensen is considering the role although he wants some slight revisions in the script."

At one point Robert Downey Jr. was rumored to be up for this part, but that was so long ago he's almost certainly moved on by now. Viggo Mortensen is currently shooting a movie called Appaloosa for Ed Harris, but after that he may be free to squeeze something like Poe in. Of course with the strike on, who knows when they’ll be able to start filming Poe anyway, so scheduling wouldn't be a problem. And if what our source says is true, then it sounds like he's not only been offered it, but he's at least a little interested in it.

Charles Simic, a Pulitzer Prize- winning writer, will receive two major honors today. He will be named the 15th poet laureate of the U.S. by the Librarian of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall, and he will receive a $100,000 award from the American Academy of Poets. The laureate appointment, which can be one year or two, comes with a $35,000 annual stipend. Separately, the American Academy of Poets said it plans to announce that Simic is the winner of its Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery" of the art of poetry. Executive Director Tree Swenson said the announcement was moved up today from Friday because of Simic's laureate appointment.

"The fact that he has been appointed just reconfirms the importance of Charles Simic's work in the contemporary poetry landscape," Swenson said in a phone interview. Simic, 69, received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of $500,000 for the period 1984-1989. He won the 1990 Pulitzer for poetry for his collection The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems. His reaction to the brace of honors today was humorous. "Now I just have to break a leg. It's just too much luck," he said in a telephone interview. "I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of good luck, being a superstitious person."

John Heath-Stubbs, a British poet and translator who used classical myth as an inspiration for his verse, died Tuesday. He was 88. The 1973 winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry died at the Athlone House Nursing Home in west London, the facility said. The cause of death was not announced.

Heath-Stubbs' works included poetry, plays, criticism and translations, including The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with Peter Avery in 1979 and his own epic poem, Artorius: A Heroic Poem in Four Books and Eight Episodes published in 1973.

Other works included 1969's Satires and Epigrams and The Immolation of Aleph published in 1985.

A close friend, Guthrie McKie, said Heath-Stubbs, who slowly lost his eyesight and went completely blind in 1978, had been diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year.

A friend rings and tells me that my novel Into the Woods (David Fickling Books) is at 2,993 in the Amazon rankings. This is like offering crack cocaine to a recovering drug addict. I have been trying to wean myself off my obsession with the Amazon rankings. I'm not quite ready to go cold turkey, but I am desperately trying to limit myself to just one hit a day.

Why are we first-time authors so obsessed with the Amazon rankings? Partly because, like pretending to do your tax return or essential research, it offers yet another displacement activity to avoid the real hard business of writing. But it's also because once your book is out there, all alone in the big wide world, you desperately want to know if it's thriving or has got completely lost - and for a considerable period nobody can tell you.

The Amazon rankings are something to cling to, even though you know in your heart and head that they are both meaningless and psychologically damaging - unless you are a consistent bestseller like Jacqueline Wilson or God. (I have taken ridiculous and entirely childish comfort from the fact that that while the King James Bible sits many thousands of places above Into the Woods in the rankings, it only has an average 4.5-star customer review rating, while my novel has five).

In fact an Amazon ranking pretty well tells you nothing at all unless you are an Amazon sales executive or the kind of person who, when logging on with the intention of buying Into the Woods suddenly decides that The Institute of Electrical Engineers On Site Guide (BS7671: 2001 16th Edition Wiring Regulations Including Amendment 2: 2002) might be a far better read because it sits at number 69 in the top 100. I suppose for some readers there is probably a perceived safety in numbers.

The modern poetry site, called iPoems, became available to the public last week, 57 Productions spokesman Philip Abraham said. About 1,000 readings from poetry written in English are available for 95 cents for each audio poem and $1.80 for a video poem.

The company offers a free one-month trial membership. After that, subscriptions are $18 a year. One featured artist is Jean "Binta" Breeze who performs a Caribbean version of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath" tale.

Robert Stilling said he began searching for the poem after reading a 1947 letter by Frost's friend, Frederic Melcher, referring to the work in a copy of the poet's book "North of Boston." He said that when he read the letter, it set off "little scholarly alarm bells." Stilling found the poem among books and manuscripts purchased by the University of Virginia. Melcher, who founded the trade journal Publishers Weekly, once owned the collection.

It took several months to check whether the poem had been published before and to confirm that the handwritting was Frost's. The poem is titled "War Thoughts at Home" and is dated 1918. It is 35-lines long and was apparently inspired by the death of another poet in World War I. The poem will be published next week by The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, told Reuters, "You can tell Frost is troubled by what is going on in Europe at the time." Frost died in 1963 at age 88.

The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, will bestow its 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on Adrienne Rich in recognition of her incomparable influence and achievement as a poet and essayist. For more than fifty years, her eloquent and visionary writings have shaped the world of poetry as well as feminist and political thought. She won the National Book Award in 1974. Poet Mark Doty will present the Medal at the 57th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner in New York City on Wednesday, November 15. The evening will be hosted by writer and humorist Fran Lebowitz.

Also that evening, the National Book Foundation will award Robert Silvers and, posthumously, Barbara Epstein, co-founders of The New York Review of Books, with The Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. This award recognizes the important contributions they have made – through The New York Review – to the serious discussion of books for more than forty years. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, will present the Award.

In making the announcements, Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the Foundation, said, "Adrienne Rich, Robert Silvers, and Barbara Epstein have been major forces in the literary world for decades, mavericks and visionaries who have held all of us who love books and writing to the highest possible standard. They remind us that books have the power to enrich our world. Our Board of Directors is honored that they will accept these awards."

This is the second year that the National Book Foundation has presented the Literarian Award, which was established to recognize individuals whose life’s work has enhanced the literary world as a whole (Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the 2005 recipient). "With The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein raised book reviewing to an art and made the discussion of books a lively, provocative and intellectual activity," said Augenbraum. "From Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson to Gore Vidal and Joan Didion, The New York Review of Books has consistently employed the liveliest minds in America to think about, write about, and debate books and the issues they raise." Robert Silvers will accept the award on behalf of himself and Epstein, who died earlier this year.

The seller was Dr. Williams's Library in London, which said it needed money to survive and preserve its research collections. Five cameras stood on tripods at the back of Sotheby's book room for the sale of the volume, while at least two photographers took up posts nearer the front. For all the publicity, the auctioneer couldn't get the price higher. Sotheby's had valued the folio at as much as 3.5 million pounds, or about $6.1 million, above the record for such an edition.

"It's not a very nice copy," said Peter Grogan, a book dealer with R.A. Gekoski in London. "The title page is not in very good condition, and that's the face that the book shows to the world."

The collection of 36 plays, known as the First Folio, was published after Shakespeare's death in an edition of 750, and probably sold for 20 shillings, said Sotheby's. It includes 18 plays that might otherwise have been lost, experts said. The nearest comparable First Folio sold in New York in 2001 for a hammer price of $5.6 million, said Sotheby's.

*****

Only about 250 copies of the First Folio survive, and this one still has its mid-17th-century calf binding. There may be only one similar copy left in private hands, said Sotheby's, which holds sales of English literature twice a year.

Donald Hall is to be the nation's new poet laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington will announce today. And like many of his recent predecessors, the 77-year-old Hall intends to make his position more than an honorary one. "It's an opportunity to plug poetry," Hall said. "Other laureates have done a good job, and I'm trying to figure out what I should do."

The New Hampshire resident has published 15 books of poetry in his six-decade writing career, most recently "White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006," which includes what Ted Kooser, the current poet laureate, yesterday called "two of my favorite poems" -- "Names of Horses" and "Maple Syrup." Other poets and critics cite a complex, book-length poem called "The One Day" -- published in 1988 but composed over 17 years -- as Hall's greatest achievement.

"In a sense, it is the last masterpiece of American modernism," said National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, noting that as such, it is unlike the bulk of Hall's generally more accessible work. David Lehman, reviewing "The One Day" in The Washington Post, called it "loud, sweeping, multitudinous, an act of the imperial imagination," and cited a climactic line suggestive of the poet's fundamental take on life: "Work, love, build a house and die. But build a house."

But Hall is perhaps best known for the edgy, anguished poetry and nonfiction he has written about death and love -- specifically, the early death from leukemia, in 1995, of his beloved wife and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon. This work includes "Without," a book of poems, published in 1998, and "The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon," a memoir that came out last year.

The year-long Complete Works festival, which begins on the anniversary of the bard's death, will stage his sonnets, poems and all 37 Shakespeare plays. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen are among the performers taking part. RSC artistic director Michael Boyd told the BBC that the event would be a "national knees-up". "Our ambition is to stage one of the most significant cultural festivals of the year in Stratford-upon-Avon," said Mr Boyd. Shakespeare is traditionally said to have been born on 23 April 1564, and to have died on the same day 52 years later, in 1616. Hailed as the biggest theatrical celebration in the company's history, the RSC claims the festival marks the first time all the plays have been staged in one continuous season.

Seventeen overseas theatre companies and 14 UK theatre companies will perform at the festival, as well as the 23 productions being staged by the RSC. Ten of the productions will be in languages other than English, at least in part. "It shows how fantastically universal the plays are, and seeing people's different approach," said Dame Judi, who will play Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones called the project "a gamble", but said ticket sales were already up by a 25 per cent on the equivalent period last year. "If the festival is a success it could help revitalise a company which has been criticised by some for losing its way," said Jones. A new outdoor theatre - The Dell - will be built in the riverside gardens beside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and a temporary 100-seat studio will be erected inside the auditorium for a month. Actors will also perform in the 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre, which is scheduled to open in July 2006, and Holy Trinity Church, the burial place of Shakespeare.

The complete first folio of the playwright's work had a print run of approximately 750 in 1623. However, only a third of these survive and most of them are incomplete. The book is being sold by Dr Williams's Theological Library in London, which hopes the proceeds - expected to be more than £3m - will secure its future. No collected edition of Shakespeare's plays was published during his lifetime.

In 1623, seven years after his death, some of his friends put together a folio comprising 36 plays. It was the first time that 18 of them - including Twelfth Night and Macbeth - had been printed. Many of the plays have extensive annotations by readers. It is likely that they survive only because they were included in the book and would otherwise have been lost. This edition is bound in brown leather and is full of annotations, marking interesting parts of the text. Its 17th Century readers did not make notes beside passages now considered to be Shakespeare's most famous - Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, for instance.

Instead, they highlighted other sections such as those from Midsummer Night's Dream and Coriolanus. One reader even corrected an error in the text in the second part of Henry VI, changing by hand three times the name Elinor to Margaret.

As the National Portrait Gallery planned to reveal that only one of half a dozen claimed portraits of William Shakespeare can now be considered genuine, Prof Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove that there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright.

Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare's left eye, which she says are clear in several of the contested portraits, are evidence that he had lymph cancer. By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it. Little is certain in Shakespeare studies - nothing is known about his death in 1616 and much of his life is a mystery - but if Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel's claims win backing they will throw the National Portrait Gallery's three-year research project into the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits into serious doubt.

*****

Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who teaches English literature and culture at Marburg and Mainz University, took the unusual step of using forensic tests used by German detectives to study the morphology of paintings and sculptures that are claimed to be of Shakespeare. Measuring facial features - nose, eyes, lips, chin etc - and the relationships between them she claims that two paintings, a bust and a contested death mask of the playwright show identical characteristics. The features are so similar, she claims, that they must be the result of sittings with Shakespeare himself.

The four images with the morphological similarities are, she reveals in a book to be published in Britain in April, the Flower Shakespeare, named after the brewery family that gave the picture to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1895, the Chandos Shakespeare, presented to the nation by Lord Ellesmere in 1856, the terracotta Davenant Bust, which stands in the Garrick Club in London, and the Darmstadt Death Mask.

So-called because it resides in Darmstadt Castle in Germany, the mask is dismissed by many as a 19th century fake but Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel says that the features, and most notably the impression of a swelling above the left-eye make it certain that it was taken within days of Shakespeare's death. She said: "The cancerous growths grow bigger as the dates progress. "Everybody else has missed them but how else would an artist know they were there unless they had seen Shakespeare." Research for the book has taken 10 years and she says pathologists, doctors, ophthalmologists, dermatologists and imaging engineers have helped her build 3D images to demonstrate the similarities.

Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon,
Call Parnell just to see how he's doin.
Hello? What up Parn? Yo, Samberg what's crackin?
You thinkin what I'm thinkin? NARNIA, man it's happ'nin.
But first my hunger pangs I'll stick it like duct tape.
Lets hit up Magnolia and mac on some cupcakes.
No doubt that bakery's got all the bomb frostings.
I love those cupcakes like McAdams loves Gosling.

Two no six no twelve — baker's dozen!
I told you that I'm crazy for these cupcakes cousin.
Yo where's the movie playing? Upper West Side dude.
Well let's hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route.
I prefer Mapquest. That's a good one too!
Google maps is the best. True dat, double true!
68th and broadway, step on it sucka!
What ya wanna do Chris? Snack attack, mutha-f**ka!

The chronic-what-cles of Narnia!
Yes, the chronic-what-cles of Narnia!
We love the chronic-what-cles of Narnia!
Pass the chronic-what-cles of Narnia!


Yo stop at the deli, the theater's over-priced.
You got the backpack, gonna pack it up nice.
Don't want security to get suspicious.
Mr. Pibb and Red Vines equals crazy delicious!
I reach in my pocket, pull out some dough.
Girl acted like she never seen a 10 befo'
It's all about the Hamilton's baby!
Throw the snacks in a bag, and I'm ghost like Swayze.

Roll up to the theater, ticket-buyin what we're handling,
You can call us Aaron Burr, from the way we're droppin Hamiltons.
Now parked in our seats Movie trivias the illest.
What friends alum starred in films with Bruce Willis?
We answer so fast it was scary.
Everyone stared in awe when we screamed Matthew Perry!
Now quiet in the theatre or it's gonna get tragic.
We bout to get taken to a dream world of magic.

The chronic-what-cles of Narnia!
Yes, the chronic-what-cles of Narnia!
We love the chronic-what-cles of Narnia!
Pass the chronic-what-cles of Narnia!

In late 2002, the radio host Garrison Keillor committed an act of inadvertent but undeniable depravity: he published a poetry anthology for average readers that sold pretty well. Anthologies are often troubling for poets (who likes being left out?), and many serious writers are ambivalent about popular success, but the combination of these concerns - a popular anthology - can create a near perfect storm of psychic distress.

In the case of Keillor's collection, modestly titled "Good Poems," the trouble came to a head in a rare double review in the April 2004 issue of Poetry magazine. The first review, by Dana Gioia, the poet who is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was a reasonable and amiable appraisal that said, in essence, "This book is surprisingly O.K." The second, by the poet August Kleinzahler, was a different story - or as they might say in Lake Wobegon, a whole 'nother pan of casserole. Kleinzahler began by suggesting Keillor be locked in a Quonset hut and tortured to persuade him never again to stray from "Lutheran bake sales" into the Realm of Art. After that, Kleinzahler got mean. He claimed that Keillor "makes no demands on his audiences, none whatsoever." He accused him of "appalling taste," of hosting an "execrable" show, of compiling a "rotten collection," and of having a weird speaking voice ("that treacly baritone, which occasionally releases into a high-pitched, breathless tremolo"). Not content simply to wallop Keillor, Kleinzahler then turned his megaphone on every target within soapbox range, accusing the M.F.A. system of being filled with "dispirited, compromised" mediocrities and asserting that "American poetry is now an international joke." Finally, he said your mama is fat.

*****

When Keillor writes that poetry "is entirely created by peasants" and that "the intensity of poetry . . . is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam - you and me," he's assuming that poetry is a tool to be used, rather than a force capable of doing a little using of its own, not all of it wholesome. And he's assuming, along the same lines, that "you and me" are bound to like a certain kind of thing; that "we" won't turn out to be as strange and unknowable as all those "lit'ry" poems out there.

Against what the New York Daily News' Lowdown column calls "a crude beat," Federline – the father of three, including his son with Spears, Sean Preston Federline, born in September – says during the chorus of the song: "Back then they called me K-Fed/ But you can call me Daddy instead."

As the rap's refrain goes: "Go ahead and say whatcha wanna/I'm gonna sell about 2 mil, oh, then I'm a goner ... I know you all wish you was in my position/Cause I keep gettin' in situations that you wish you was in, cousin ... Steppin' in this game and y'all ain't got a clue ... Getting anxious? Go take a peep/ I'm starrin' in your magazines now every day and week ... But maybe baby you can wait and see/ Until then all these Pavarottis followin' me."

The Daily News suggests that Federline means to say "paparazzi" instead of "Pavarotti," who is a famed opera singer. (Other Web sites say it's not a mistake, but Federline's nickname for the ever-present photographers.)

Still, claims the Post, the beats of the song stick in the ear – even if they're not terribly original – and the sound effects may remind you of a pinball machine, albeit one submerged in water.

A poet is to be appointed in a drive to reduce the number of people taking their own lives in the Highlands. The poetry will be read at workshops and schools in a bid to encourage young men to talk about their emotions.

The arts organisation for the Highlands and Islands, HI-Arts, which is running the £4,000 project, has been accused of "insensitivity" by one politician. But suicidal behaviour expert Rory O'Connor said anything that encouraged people to talk should be applauded. "It's progressive to try to get a poet to engage with young people and their emotional issues, that can only be a positive thing," he said.

In recent years the suicide level in the Highlands and Islands has been above the national average, with 39 people taking their lives in the Highland Council area last year. HI-Arts co-ordinator Peter Urpeth said suicide rates were among the biggest challenges facing the area's communities. "I think writing and arts should be close to the heart of our understanding of these issues," he said. "The poet who will work with us on this project will be an exceptional writer who can bring insight and, I hope, new understanding to this issue."

*****

Joyce MacRae, whose husband Stephen committed suicide, said the main problem in the Highlands was the "macho attitude of men". She said: "Scottish Highland men aren't very good at talking to other men about things. They keep themselves to themselves. It's a macho thing."

The documentary is the realized dream of Irish independent filmmaker Bill Hughes, who has the same birthday (Oct. 16) as Wilde. The project began last year when U2's Bono agreed to participate and Amnesty International became its beneficiary, part of its Art for Amnesty program.

Hughes then scoured London, New York and Los Angeles and received an overwhelming response from the celebrities he asked to take part. "Martin Sheen got so excited and asked if he could bring along some of the cast of West Wing," he says, including Lily Tomlin and Richard Schiff.

For the film, Wilde scholars Frank McGuinness and Noreen Doody pored through the author's original text and lifted 150 lines for the celebrities to speak. A shorter version of Happy Birthday, Oscar Wilde was shown in Britain and Ireland this year. Hughes says PBS will run it in time for Wilde's 151st birthday.

Hughes says she is receiving financial support from the publishing, business and film communities and that her magazine will be funded through "private donors, grants, subscription revenue and advertising." She declines to offer a specific goal for her subscriber base, but aims for a higher number than at The Paris Review. An annual subscription will cost $30 US, for four issues, while individual copies will likely cost $10-12, compared to $40 a year for a subscription at The Paris Review and $12 for a single issue.

"I think there's a healthy rivalry among literary magazines," says Hughes, who adds that she does not see herself in competition with her former employer. "It keeps us on our toes, and creates an energy and momentum that's valuable to everyone."

• Autographed Advance Reading Copy of Creepers (CD Books), the spine-tingling upcoming thriller from multiple New York Times bestselling author David Morrell.
  
  
• Autographed copy of Forced Mate by Rowena Cherry (Dorchester), the steamy futuristic romance novel which was a finalist for Best Futuristic Romance at the PEARL Awards.
  
  
• Set of two books: Sandstorm by James Rollins (Avon) with the new lenticular special edition cover and Map of Bones by James Rollins (William Morrow). These two exciting thrillers from the New York Times bestselling author are the perfect summer reading for fans of Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.
  
  
• Advance Reading Copy of the upcoming mystery Relics by Mary Anna Evans (Poisoned Pen Press), in which an archeologist finds more than she bargained for while investigating a centuries-old ethnic group which seems to have strange immunity to most modern diseases, including AIDS.