2014 in poetry

Events

• January – Five fragments of nine poems, some previously unknown, by Greek poet Sappho are discovered on ancient papyrus, including the Brothers Poem. This news is being reported by multiple news sources by the end of the month.
• January 7 – Michel Pleau is named Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, beginning a two-year mandate to “draw Canadians’ attention to the reading and writing of poetry.”
• January 29 – Hashem Shabani, an Arab–Iranian poet, was executed by hanging in an unidentified Iranian prison after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani approved the sentences.
• March 7 - For the first time ever, all five poets laureate of the United Kingdom are women and for the first time all five perform together at the Women of the World festival in London on the eve of International Women's Day. The poets are: Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, Gillian Clarke, Paula Meehan, and Sinéad Morrissey.
• March 19 - PEN International comes out with an action appeal protesting the two-year prison sentence handed down to Egyptian poet Omar Hazek. PEN states that this poet has been "imprisoned for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression and assembly." Hazek, who has won several poetry awards and is a former employee of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, has been held in custody since early December 2013.
• April 22 - The Writers' Trust of Canada announces the new Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize, a new Canadian literary award to honour the body of work of a Canadian poet who has published at least three volumes of poetry. The award is slated to be presented for the first time in November.
• May 22 - The translation of Beowulf by J. R. R. Tolkien, which he had first completed in 1926, is published in England as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.
• June 12 - The Library of Congress selects Charles Wright as the new United States Poet Laureate, succeeding Natasha Trethewey.
• August 22 - New Zealand celebrates its own National Poetry Day, now in its 17th year, with more than 60 events held around the country. Included among the various readings and contests are events sponsoring the current New Zealand Poet Laureate, Vincent O’Sullivan, who reads poetry in Dunedin, and 2007-2009 Poet Laureate, Michele Leggott, who MCs the annual Auckland Library event.

  Anniversaries

• 28 January – On this day 75 years ago, W. B. Yeats died in Menton, France.
• 21 February – Christopher Marlowe's 450th birthday celebrated.
• 9 March – On this day 20 years ago, Charles Bukowski died.
• 31 March – On this day 100 years ago, Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz was born.
• 23 April – It is assumed that William Shakespeare was born on this day 450 years ago.
• May – The 100th anniversary of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.
• September 4 – On this day 100 years ago, French poet and essayist Charles Péguy, 41 was killed in action near Villeroy, Seine-et-Marne, in the early months of World War I
• October 10 – On this day 100 years ago, German poet Ernst Stadler, 31 was killed in battle at Zandvoorde near Ypres.
• – On this day 200 years ago Mikhail Lermontov was born; he is sometimes referred to as "Russia's second-greatest poet."
• 25 October – On this day 100 years ago, American poet John Berryman was born.
• 27 October – On this day 100 years ago, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea.
• 30 October – On this day 100 years ago, American poet and publisher James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Publishers, was born.
• 3 November – On this day 100 years ago, Austrian poet Georg Trakl, 27, committed suicide.

  Works published in English

Australia

• Benedict Andrews. Lens Flare. Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry
• Louis Armand. Indirect Objects. Sydney: Vagabond Press
• Judith Beveridge. Devadatta's Poems. Artarmon: Giramondo Publishing Company
• a.j. carruthers. AXIS Book 1: Areal. Tokyo: Vagabond Press
• Paul Carter. Ecstacies and Elegies. Perth: UWAP
• Melinda Bufton. Girlery. Hobart: Inken Publisch
• Nandi Chinna. Swamp. Fremantle: Fremantle Press
• Eileen Chong. Peony. Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry
• Dan Disney. Mannequin’s Guide to Utopias. Macau: ASM,
• Benjamin Dodds. Regulator. Glebe: Puncher and Wattmann
• Laurie Duggan. Allotments. Bristol: Shearsman Books
• Anne Elvey. Kin. Parkville: Five Islands Press
• Geoff Goodfellow. Opening the Windows to Catch the Sea Breeze. Kent Town: Wakefield Press
• Libby Hart. Wild. Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry
• Vrasidas Karalis and Helen Nickas, editors. Antigone Kefala: a writer’s journey. Brighton: Owl Publishing
• Jacinta Le Plastrier. The Book of Skins. St Kilda: John Leonard Press
• Alan Loney. eMailing flowers to Mondrian. Malvern East: Hawk Press
• Kent MacCarter. Sputnik’s Cousin. Yarraville: Transit Lounge Publishing
• John Mateer. Emptiness: Asian Poems, 1998 - 2012. Fremantle: Fremantle Press
• Paul Scully. An Existential Grammar. North Hobart: Walleah Press
• Marie Slaight & Terrence Tasker. The Antigone Poems. Potts Point: Altaire Publications
• Maria Takolander. The End of the World. Artarmon: Giramondo Publishing Company
• Tim Thorne. The Unspeak Poems and Other Verses. North Hobart: Walleah Press
• Ann Vickery & John Hawke, editors. Poetry and The Trace. Glebe: Puncher and Wattmann
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe. My Feet Are Hungry. Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry
• Lucy Williams. Internal Weather. North Hobart: Walleah Press

  Canada

• Joanne Arnott - Halfling Spring
• John Barton - Polari
• Shane Book - Congotronic
• Christopher Levenson - Night Vision
• Garth Martens - Prologue for the Age of Consequence
• Arleen Paré - Lake of Two Mountains

  Anthologies in Canada

• Why Poetry Sucks: Humorous Avant-Garde and Post-Avant English Canadian Poetry, Jonathan Ball & Ryan Fitzpatrick, editors.
• Under the Mulberry Tree: poems for & about Raymond Souster, James Deahl, editor.

  New Zealand

• Airini Beautrais, Dear Neil Roberts, Victoria University Press
• Kay McKenzie Cooke, Born to a Red-Headed Woman, Otago University Press

  Poets in ''Best New Zealand Poems''

• Fleur Adcock
• Hinemoana Baker
• Sarah Broom
• Amy Brown
• Kate Camp
• Mary-Jane Duffy
• Murray Edmond
• Johanna Emeney
• Cliff Fell
• Bernadette Hall
• Dinah Hawken
• Caoilinn Hughes
• Anna Jackson
• Anne Kennedy
• Michele Leggott
• Therese Lloyd
• Selina Tusitala Marsh
• John Newton
• Gregory O'Brien
• Rachel O'Neill
• Vincent O'Sullivan
• Elizabeth Smither
• Chris Tse
• Ian Wedde
• Ashleigh Young

  United Kingdom

England

• Liz Berry, Black Country
• Colette Bryce, The Whole & Rain-domed Universe
• John Burnside, All One Breath
• Yrsa Daley-Ward, Bone
• Lavinia Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde
• Selima Hill, The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism
• Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
• Joss Sheldon,
• Hugo Williams, I Knew the Bride

  Ireland

• Harry Clifton, The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004

  Scotland

• Stewart Conn, The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems

  Wales

• Jonathan Edwards, My Family and Other Superheroes

  Anthologies in the United Kingdom

• Ten: the new wave, edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf - new poetry voices in Britain including Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Inua Ellams, Sarah Howe, Adam Lowe, Eileen Pun and Warsan Shire

  Criticism, scholarship and biography in the United Kingdom

• Laura Jansen - The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers.

  United States

• James Baldwin, Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems
• Jared Carter, Darkened Rooms of Summer,
• Kendra DeColo, Thieves in the Afterlife
• Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Endarkment: Selected Poems, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, translated by Lyn Hejinian, Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmund & Elena Balashova
• Tarfia Faizullah, Seam
• Lizzie Harris, STOP WANTING
• Matthea Harvey, If The Tabloids Are True, What Are You?
• Chloe Honum, The Tulip-Flame
• Fanny Howe, Second Childhood
• Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise
• Keetje Kuipers, The Keys to the Jail
• Cathy Linh Che, Split
• Sally Wen Mao, Mad Honey Symposium
• Michael Mlekoday, The Dead Eat Everything
• Eugenia Leigh, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows
• D. A. Powell, Repast
• George Quasha, Speaking Animate
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
• Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus
• Nicholas Samaras, "American Psalm, World Psalm"
• Danez Smith, Boy
• Ron Silliman - Northern Soul,
• R. A. Villanueva,
• Caki Wilkinson, The Wynona Stone Poems
• Jake Adam York, Abide
• Kevin Young - Book of Hours,

  Anthologies in the United States

• David Biespiel, editor. Poems of the American South
• Carolyn Forché & Duncan Wu, editors. Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001

  Criticism, scholarship and biography in the United States

• John Drury - Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert.
• Tom Hawkins - Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire
• Ron Silliman - Against Conceptual Poetry

  Poets in ''The Best American Poetry 2014''

Awards and honors by country

International

• Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Laureate: to Ko Un

  Australia awards and honors

• C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry: Jennifer Maiden, Liquid Nitrogen
• Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: Fiona Hile, Novelties
• Prime Minister's Literary Awards: Melinda Smith, Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call

  Canada awards and honors

• Archibald Lampman Award: David O'Meara, A Pretty Sight
• Atlantic Poetry Prize: Don Domanski, Bite Down Little Whisper
• 2014 Governor General's Awards: Arleen Paré, Lake of Two Mountains ; José Acquelin, Anarchie de la lumière
• Griffin Poetry Prize:
• *Canada: Anne Carson, Red Doc>
• *International: Brenda Hillman, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire
• *Lifetime Recognition Award to Adelia Prado
• Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize: Ken Babstock
• Gerald Lampert Award: Murray Reiss, The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild
• Pat Lowther Award: Alexandra Oliver, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway
• Prix Alain-Grandbois: Michaël Trahan, Nœud coulant
• Raymond Souster Award: Anne Compton, Alongside
• Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps
• Prix Émile-Nelligan: Roxanne Desjardins, Ciseaux

  France awards and honors

• Prix Goncourt de la Poésie: William Cliff

  New Zealand awards and honors

• Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement:
• New Zealand Post Book Awards:
• * Poetry Award winner: Vincent O'Sullivan, Us, then. Victoria University Press
• * NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry: Marty Smith, Horse with Hat. Victoria University Press

  United Kingdom awards and honors

• Cholmondeley Award: W. N. Herbert, Jeremy Hooker, John James, Glyn Maxwell, Denise Riley
• Costa Book Awards poetry award: Jonathan Edwards, My Family and Other Superheroes
• * Shortlist: Colette Bryce, The Whole & Rain-domed Universe; Lavinia Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde; Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
• English Association's Fellows' Poetry Prizes:
• Eric Gregory Award :
• Forward Prizes for Poetry:
• *Best Collection: Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
• **Shortlist: Colette Bryce, The Whole & Rain-domed Universe; John Burnside, All One Breath; Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night; Hugo Williams, I Knew the Bride
• *Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection: Liz Berry, Black Country
• **Shortlist:
• *Best Poem: Stephen Santus, "In a Restaurant"
• **Shortlist:
• Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for poetry:
• *Shortlist:
• Manchester Poetry Prize:
• National Poet of Wales: Gillian Clarke
• National Poetry Competition 2014:
• T. S. Eliot Prize : David Harsent, Fire Songs
• *Shortlist : 2014 Short List
• The Times/Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation:

  United States awards and honors

• Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize: Nate Marshall for Wild Hundreds
• AML Award for Poetry awarded to Kristen Eliason for Picture Dictionary
• *Finalists: Kimberly Johnson, Uncommon Prayer and Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England; Laura Stott, In the Museum of Coming and Going
• Arab American Book Award : Philip Metres, A Concordance of Leaves
• *Honorable mentions: Farid Matuk, My Daughter La Chola; Fady Joudah, Alight
• Best Translated Book Award :
• Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books: Richie Hofmann, Second Empire
• Bollingen Prize:
• Jackson Poetry Prize: Claudia Rankine.
• *Judges: Tracy K. Smith, David St. John, and Mark Strand
• Lambda Literary Award:
• * Gay Poetry: Rigoberto González, Unpeopled Eden
• * Lesbian Poetry: Ana Božičević, Rise in the Fall
• Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize:
• Los Angeles Times Book Prize:
• *Finalists: Joshua Beckman, The Inside of an Apple ; Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses ; Ron Padgett, Collected Poems ; Elizabeth Robinson On Ghosts ; Lynn Xu, Debts & Lessons
• National Book Award for Poetry :
• *NBA Finalists:
• **Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night
• **Fanny Howe, Second Childhood
• **Maureen N. McLane, This Blue
• **Fred Moten, The Feel Trio
• **Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
• *NBA Longlist:
• **Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion
• **Brian Blanchfield, A Several World
• ** Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem
• **Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus
• **Mark Strand, Collected Poems
• National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry:
• The New Criterion Poetry Prize: Fix Quiet by John Poch
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry : Vijay Seshadri, 3 Sections
• *Finalists: Morri Creech, The Sleep of Reason and Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke
• Wallace Stevens Award:
• Whiting Writers' Award :
• PEN Award for Poetry in Translation: – Judge:
• PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry: Frank Bidart
• Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award:
• Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize: Nathaniel Mackey
• Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award:
• Walt Whitman Prize – Hannah Sanghee Park for The Same-Different. - Judge: Rae Armantrout
• Yale Younger Series:

  From the Poetry Society of America

• Frost Medal:
• Shelley Memorial Award: Bernadette Mayer
• Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award: Tom Thompson
• Lyric Poetry Award: Meghan Kemp-Gee
• Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award: Timothy Donnelly
• Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award: Helen Ross
• George Bogin Memorial Award: Gary Young
• Robert H. Winner Memorial Award: Dore Kiesselbach
• Cecil Hemley Memorial Award: Ari Banias – Judge:
• Norma Farber First Book Award: r. erica doyle
• Lucille Medwick Memorial Award: David Welch
• William Carlos Williams Award: Ron Padgett, Collected Poems
• *Finalists for WCW Award:

  Deaths

• January 7 – Alvin Aubert, African-American poet and scholar
• January 8 – Madeline Gins, 72, American poet, architect, and long-time collaborator with artist Arakawa
• January 9 – Amiri Baraka, 79, Controversial African-American poet and writer of drama, fiction, essays and music criticism, and former Poet Laureate of New Jersey
• January 14 – Juan Gelman, 83, Argentine poet and the recipient of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2007
• February 1 – René Ricard, 67, American poet, art critic, painter, and actor in Andy Warhol's films
• February 6 – Maxine Kumin, 88, U. S. American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, and wrote some seventeen books of poetry, novels, story collections, and memoirs
• March 12 – Bill Knott, 74,, U. S. American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry between his first book in 1968 and his death
• March 30 – Colleen Lookingbill, 63 , U. S. American who edited, with Elizabeth Robinson, the EtherDome Chapbook series for 12 years, which published emerging women poets. She also co-edited Instance Press
• April 2 – Vern Rutsala, 80, U.S. author and poet
• April 14 – Nina Cassian, 89, Romanian poet, journalist, film critic, and translator. She translated works of William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Christian Morgenstern, Yiannis Ritsos, and Paul Celan into Romanian. She published more than fifty books of her own poetry
• April 24 - Tadeusz Różewicz, 92, Polish poet and playwright, recipient of the Austrian State Prize for European Literature
• April 28 - Gerard Benson, 83, English poet.
• April 29 - Russell Edson, ?, American poet, novelist, writer and illustrator
• May 10 - Hillary Gravendyk, 35, American poet and twice winner of the Eisner Prize in Poetry Author of Harm She lived with Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and had a double lung transplant five years before her death
• May 21 - Ruth Guimarães, 93, Afro-Brazilian classicist, fiction writer and poet
• May 28 - Maya Angelou, 86, American author, poet and civil rights activist
• June 22 - Felix Dennis, 67, English publisher and poet
• June 27 - Allen Grossman, 82, American poet, critic and professor, winner of the Bollingen Prize in 2009
• June 29 - Dermot Healy, 66, Irish poet, playwright, short story writer, memoirist and novelist
• August 5 – Diann Blakely, 57 , American poet, who won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award among many other honors
• August 19 – Samih al-Qasim, 75, Palestinian Druze poet and journalist
• *Simin Behbahani, 87, Iranian writer and poet
• *Richard Dauenhauer, 72, American poet and translator
• August 27 – Zaccheus Jackson, 36, Vancouver based Canadian Spoken word and Slam poet who was the 2013 Vancouver Grand Slam Champ
• September 21 – Alastair Reid, 88, Scottish poet, essayist, and scholar
• September 28 – Dannie Abse, 91, Welsh poet and doctor
• October 9 – Carolyn Kizer, 89, American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1985
• October 14 – Ron Loewinsohn, 76, American poet and university professor Since his inclusion in Donald Allen's 1960 poetry anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960, numerous volumes of his poetry were published
• October 28 – Galway Kinnell, 87, American poet, Pulitzer Prize winner, a MacArthur Fellow and a former State Poet of Vermont; also served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
• November 5 – Abdelwahab Meddeb, 68, Tunisian-born poet, Islamic scholar, essayist, novelist; lung cancer
• November 13 – Manoel de Barros, 97, Brazilian poet who, before his death, considered by many authors, critics and readers to be Brazil's greatest living poet
• November 19 – Jon Stallworthy, 79, English academic, poet and literary critic. Biographer of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice
• November 29 – Mark Strand, 80, Canadian-born American poet and writer, United States Poet Laureate
• December 4 – Claudia Emerson, 57, American poet
• December 27 – Tomaž Šalamun, 73, Slovenian poet