When the kathak maestro Uma Sharma, writer-diplomat Pavan K Varma, heritage activist Firoz Bakht Ahmed, poet Gulzar Dehlvi, bureaucrat Abid Hussain and the couplets of Ghalib go together.

The churning produces Yadgar-e-Ghalib - a two-day commemoration of Mirza Ghalib Dec 26-27 on the occasion of the inimitable poet's 212th birth anniversary.

Ghalib was born Dec 27, 1797. Coming in the wake of reports of the misuse and vandalisation of Ghalib's haveli by holding of wedding receptions.

The cultural programme will seek to give new life and meaning to his ancestral property in the old city, according to Firoz Bakht Ahmed, heritage activist and secretary, Ghalib Memorial Movement.

Danseuse Uma Sharma will begin the first day of the event (Dec 26) with a candle light procession from Town Hall, Chandni Chowk, to the Gali Qasimjan haveli of Mirza Ghalib.

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The spotlight focuses on center stage as a poet prepares to expose his soul to a crowd of expectant listeners. He has no script in hand or cue cards in his pocket. Instead, everything is etched into his mind and spoken at a moment’s notice.

This is what Walter Blackmon experiences every time he steps on stage to recite spoken word. While this form of expression is a popular activity, many like Blackmon say poetry also works well to relieve stress. Blackmon said his definition of poetry embodies life itself.

“Poetry is life,” Blackmon said. “There’s so much going on in the living of it that inspiration is all out there and a lot of things you can not help but speak on.” Blackmon finds this inspiration in everyday life. “I practice or write pretty much every day,” Blackmon said. “When I perform it, I do it from memory. A poem kind of just comes out of you; you have to let it out.”

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Leading poets including Roger McGough and poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy are taking part in a live poetry event in Westminster tonight to raise money for the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. Poetry Live for Haiti will be held at Central Hall, Westminster, from 2.30pm. Welsh poet laureate Gillian Clarke and poet Elaine Feinstein read their poems for the Haiti aid appeal.

The very name Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to reverberate like some mysterious timpani. Those magical titles of his vibrate and echo over an infinite distance: Kubla Khan.

The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Frost at Midnight … Or for that matter the notorious Person on Business from Porlock.

Almost unnecessary, one might think, to turn back to the poems themselves at all (do they still do so in schools?). Those proverbial titles seem to hold all the poetry.

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For Jeffrey Plumbline, emcee and one of the organisers of ‘Chill and Relax’, Sunday, January 10, was a day to ensure that upcoming poets and art lovers enjoy some good poetry. The event, held in the quiet ambience of Bambuddha Bar, Victoria Island, Lagos, was initially devoid of music as the organisers declared their intention to maintain ‘Chill and Relax’ as a pure poetry event.

Poetry and wine

Ola Opesan opened the night with an uncompleted poem titled ‘Struggle.’ “The full title is actually ‘Street Trader Struggle’, this is a part of it,” Opesan explained before he read the poem which celebrates the average Nigerian for whom every day is a day to ‘hustle, bustle and struggle.’

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A very good war poem for ya, by a Hampstead resident. The dryness, tension, danger in Afghanistan captured in a few lines, through a soldier’s eyes.It starts with sand-
Rock, mud
saturate dry air.

Glass cracks and webs.
Steel snaps.
Shards fire into reeds.

Fingers drop to
triggers.
rifles scan as

The pulse penetrates
armor,
Funneling past parched lips

Through stiff chests,
further
Deep into stomachs

Flooding muscle
marrow.
Discharging to legs, toes.

Running in the veins,
always with the blood.

Byron was first and foremost a poet. His output, in every conceivable metre, iambs and anapaests, blank verse, hudibrastics and heroic couplets, terzains, quatrains, sixains, rime royal, spenserians and ottava rima, was enormous. His last poem is written in Sapphics, one of the most difficult forms of all.

That his body of work should be so little read, when every year sees the publication of ever more prurient versions of his life, is absurd and disgraceful.

Readers who lap up egregious hypotheses about Byron and fail to familiarise themselves with his works are short-changing themselves. Don Juan is by far the greatest comic poem in English. It should be as well-known in England as the Orlando Furioso is in Italy. That it isn't is partly the fault of Matthew Arnold, who sent us all off in a wild goose chase after high seriousness. We labour still under a delusion that comedy is a lower form than tragedy, and can never arrive at greatness or profundity.

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In Dot-to-Dot, Oregon, Sid Miller writes about his journey along seven routes through different areas of Oregon. This book of poems encompasses a poem for each small town or urban city that the author visits. From expectations and atmosphere to personal experiences and his love for his wife, Miller’s book is a refreshing collection that varies from page to page.

Miller has been an Oregon resident for the last seven years and is the founder and current editor of the Burnside Review, a literary journal here in Portland. He attended Portland State from 2000 to 2002, and majored in English. He's had three poem collections published, and has submitted work to other predominate publications.

In the forward of the book, Miller explains his thinking process, and how he made the revelation to write a book of poems like this one. After living in Oregon for nearly seven years, he felt he really hadn't experienced many places and monuments in the state he now called home.

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Leonardo Da Vinci's portrait of La Gioconda, more familiarly known as the Mona Lisa has fascinated many writers, her famously inscrutable half-smile a powerful stimulus for imaginative interpretation, ranging from the lyrical to the licentious.

Almost as well-known as the mischievous re-touchings of the surrealist painters, the heady prose description by Walter Pater was considered by WB Yeats to be so original and poetic that he lineated it himself so as to form the opening "poem" of his 1936 anthology, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits;/ Like the Vampire/ She has been dead many times …"

"Only by printing it in vers libre can one show its revolutionary importance," Yeats claimed, rather suggesting that Pater's splendid phrase-making was better poetry than art criticism: better, perhaps, though possibly not quite good enough.

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Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, above; John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.

Writer Jennifer Michael Hecht, who teaches at the New School, knew Wetzsteon; her death got her thinking about artists grappling with suicide. "I’m issuing a rule," she writes. "You are not allowed to kill yourself." Where we once had religious proscriptions against suicide, Hecht's is a secular injunction. She cites community, creativity and gratitude. And, while this is too late for her friend, she offers a lifeline:

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