2771 original poems were published by writers all over the world in our “Action Poetry” section in 2006. To celebrate the end of a great year in poetry, we’re displaying one randomly selected poem at a time on the LitKicks main page through the rest of the year. If this page works correctly (and we hope it will), you will see a new poem with each click.

Technical note: this poetry display represents the first use of AJAX on LitKicks. …

1. Turner Classic Movies (the one cable channel movie I’d keep if I could keep only one) just ran an old chestnut from 1943, The Human Comedy, William Saroyan’s story of a couple of sweet kids named Ulysses and Homer growing up in inland California’s raisin country, starring Mickey Rooney. The movie is corny as hell but I loved every minute.

Here’s an example of the corny: three soldiers on leave pick up two women on a rainy night, and at the …

I was thinking earlier that it may seem a little late to put together a Christmas shopping guide, since Christmas is on Monday, and all, but then I realized that if there’s anything this time of year is about, it’s buying a box of pine-tree-shaped air fresheners in a truck stop on Christmas Eve. No? That’s just me? Okay. Well, there are no air fresheners on this list, and I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to find these things in …

Editor’s Note: I haven’t joined in the “list of books I’ve read this year” meme, maybe because my reading habits are just too erratic, unbalanced and marred with incompletes for public view. But Kevin Kizer, an old friend of LitKicks who truly hails from the legendary town of Peoria, Illinois has sent an impressive list of the 44 books he’s read this year. Here’s Kevin.

I’ve been a writer all my life and feel that to be a good writer you have to be …

The New York Times Book Review is on BookTV this week! This hour-long documentary special gives us a rare glimpse of the secret workings inside the marble palace of 43rd Street where our favorite weekly publication is created.

I’ve been inside the Times Building several times but I’ve never gotten a peek down Book Review alley, so I watched this show with great interest. Bad news first: the Book Review staff seriously lacks charisma. Sam Tanenhaus would certainly be played by

Leslie Harpold, a widely loved blogger and internet artist, died of bronchitis last week. Leslie was known for sites like Smug.com, an early proto-blog, and her other past projects included Hoopla.com and MotherFucker.com (I don’t think she ever did anything with this domain name, but she was very proud to have owned it). In July of 1999 I invited Leslie to read at the Literary Kicks Summer Poetry Happening at the Bitter End in New York City, and I’ve just uploaded …

There’s a terrible irony to the denial-minded Holocaust Conference going on today in Iran — an irony so bitter it feels almost delicious, and certainly forbidden.

You see, for many Jews like myself, the impossible image of a world where the Nazi slaughter never happened is a secret fantasy, a dark dream where we sometimes reside. Feelings of guilt and self-hatred related to the Jewish slaughters of World War II have become an evergreen obsession among Jews of every generation in every …

Last week I published an interview with Susan Winters Smith, a Massachusetts writer and former patient of Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the controversial psychiatrist depicted as a crazed patriarch by Augusten Burroughs in his bestselling memoir Running With Scissors. I had been vaguely following the legal case brought against Burroughs and St. Martin’s Press by the six children of the Turcotte family (most of whom were also rudely depicted in the book). But I’ve always been more interested in the human side of …

Now this is an endpaper. Cynthia Ozick’s A Youthful Intoxication starts like this:

In my late teens and early 20’s I was a mystic. It was Blake and Shelly who induced these grand intoxications, and also Keats and Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Lost in the ecstasy of idealism, she wandered uncritically until she discovered a book called Romantic Religion by a Princeton professor named Leo Baeck.

And reading on and on in a fever of introspection, I was beginning to undergo a curious transformation: not the …

Here’s more good stuff you might enjoy:

• On Conesus is a very attractive poetry chapbook by John Roche of Rochester, New York. Roche’s enthusiastic poems burst forth with nature-infused Transcendentalist fervor and Raymond Carver-esque ironic detail. This impressive volume presents poetry as an ongoing emotional epiphany, immersed with consciousness of past Gods (Roche refers in these pages to everyone from Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg to Don Henley):

I, too, distrust it
the patient poet at work
on his patent lake
volume
(3 for 20 at yr …