2006 in Poetry - Events

Events

• French public notary Patrick Huet unveils Pieces of Hope to the Echo of the World in Lyon. It is reportedly the longest modern hand-written poem in the world.
• In January, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu Cultural Foundation, founded by the Kyoto, Japan, Chamber of Commerce and Industry, opened the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu Hall of Fame, dedicated to the anthology of 100 poems by 100 poets compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in c. 1235. The popularity of the anthology has endured, and a Japanese card game, Uta-garuta, uses cards with the poems printed on it.
• March 29 – Grolier Poetry Bookstore is sold.
• BLATT, an English-language literary magazine and publishing imprint is started in Prague, Czech Republic.
• May – The Poetry Out Loud recitation contest is created this year by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation to increase awareness in the art of performing poetry, with a top prize a $20,000 scholarship. State finalists performed in Washington D.C. during the second week of May.
• August – The existence of two early poems by Ted Hughes, written into a school exercise book, were announced; one an early version of 'Song' which appeared in his first collection.
• Pakistani poet Ahmed Faraz, who wrote in Urdu, returns one of his country's highest civilian honors, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, out of disgust with President Pervez Musharraf's government. The prize had been awarded to the poet in 2004 for his literary achievements. "My conscience will not forgive me if I remained a silent spectator of the sad happenings around us", he said. "The least I can do is to let the dictatorship know where it stands in the eyes of the concerned citizens, whose fundamental rights have been usurped."
• November 1 – A Sylvia Plath sonnet from her college years was discovered and first published by Blackbird, an online literary journal run by the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
• November – The most influential American poets of all time are Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, according to Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry Magazine. Wiman named the poets in a sidebar article to a December The Atlantic Monthly cover story about the "100 Most Influential Americans" — no poet made it on that larger list.
• November 14 – Times Literary Supplement, reports on the discovery of a missing manuscript of Shelley's "Poetical Essay", a 172-line poem originally published in a 1811 pamphlet which criticizes war, politics and religion; although published anonymously, the poem is thought to have contributed to the rebel poet's expulsion from the University of Oxford.
• November 10 – A new series, "The Best of Irish Poetry" was launched by Southword Editions in Ireland with the 80-page The Best of Irish Poetry 2007 The project is under the direction of Patrick Cotter, with Colm Breathnach as Irish-language editor and Maurice Riordan as English-language (or Hiberno-English) editor. "Quite often readers abroad are presented with a selection of Irish poets restricted to those who are first published in the USA or the UK," Cotter wrote. "This annual series will present a more general selection generated by more informed pundits."