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Speculation fueled more speculation this week about whether or not pop singer Beyonce lip-synced the U.S. national anthem at the  swearing-in ceremonies for President Barack Obama this past Monday. Now that same speculation is leading some to wonder about the performances of the event's other speakers as well—including the poet Richard Blanco , pictured here, who delivered the well-received inaugural poem " One Today ." "Did Blanco lip-sync?" wondered one critic aloud. "If he did, I certainly couldn't tell, as he did an admirable job of looking down at his poem so that it looked like he was reading. But after the whole Robert Frost ordeal in 1961, who could blame him if he did?" In 1961, eighty-six year-old Frost had prepared the poem "Dedication" to deliver at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. When buffeting winds and the sunlight's glare off the paper and snow made it impossible for him to read, however, the four-time Pulitze...

For years now, P&PC has desperately wanted to find a modernist-era little magazine to call its own. You know, something like Others , Blast , The Egoist , or Seven Arts except not devoted to the avant garde or Ezra Pound. Something that might help put the world of popular poetry on the radar screens of modernist studies scholars who do so looooove their little magazines. Something—and why not?—that might even get digitized by and included in the awesome Modernist Journals Project , which has as its slightly overstated tagline "modernism began in the magazines." Well, it's possible that we've finally found it. After lo these many years of searching, we recently came across this single, solitary issue (Volume 1, Number 8) of Popular Poetry , issued out of Cincinnati, Ohio, in March of 1931 by the people who were at that time already bringing Writer's Digest to the world. We don't know much about Popular Poetry yet; an initial query to Writer's Diges...