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Almost immediately after receiving its copy of Catherine Robson's Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem from Princeton University Press, P&PC sent it back across the country to Melissa Girard (pictured here), a longtime P&PC contributor and intern favorite whose reviews of What Poetry Brings to Business and The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry continue to be some of the most popular postings in P&PC history. In what follows, Girard—an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland whose essays and articles have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry , the Journal of Modern Literature , and The Chronicle of Higher Education —uses the publication of Robson's book to wonder, "What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts?" and "What is the heart beat of twenty-first ce...

Earlier this month, P&PC was sent, well, over the moon upon learning that one of the programs in the " Going to Mars " public outreach efforts surrounding NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter mission is a haiku-writing contest. Yep. You, too, earthling, are invited to compose and submit a "message to Mars" in haiku form, and the three most popular entries as determined by online voting will be burned onto a DVD and then shot into space. How popular an initiative has this been? Well, as of the time of this posting—barely three weeks into the contest and well before the deadline of July 1—nearly 11,000 submissions have been received. Starstruck by the thought of so many people doing more than just looking up in perfect silence at the stars , we turned our telescopes on new P&PC hero Stephanie Renfrow (pictured here), the Education and Public Outreach lead for the MAVEN mission and the brains behind the haiku-writing contest. Renfrow, who has an MA in Science Wri...

News items of immediate concern to the P&PC reader: NASA lets poets / send haiku to Red Planet / on a MAVEN's wings "Poets, take note: NASA is looking for a few good haiku to send to the Red Planet aboard its Maven orbiter this fall.... An online public vote will be conducted beginning July 15 to select the top three haiku poems." • New Jersey Mayor Wrote Hilariously Unromantic Poetry to Mistress "During the affair, he would write the assistant, Corletta Hicks, romantic poetry that wonderfully mixes the lofty and mundane." • Johnny Depp is Heard over heels in love again "The actress [Amber Heard] had vowed to stay single after her split from the Hollywood star but crumbled after he sent her a handwritten poem and a bouquet of roses every day through September."

Regular P&PC readers will remember our ongoing interest in the poetry published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in The New Northwest —a weekly suffragist newspaper published out of Portland by Abigail Scott Duniway , a leading voice in the fight for Oregon women's suffrage . Between 2010 and 2012, we did a four part series on this poetry , which oftentimes appeared on the paper's front page, which was frequently written by Willamette Valley writers long before folks like William Stafford put Oregon on the national poetry map, and which was sometimes sourced or cut-and-pasted from other newspapers around the country (a common practice in an age when poets and their publishers didn't seem to care about regulating the circulation of verse via copyright laws). Then, in 2012 and 2013, we collated a set of these poems for use in the development of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon, an original and experiment...