2009 in Poetry - Events

Events

• January 5 – The Turkish government announces it will posthumously restore the citizenship it had stripped from influential poet Nâzım Hikmet, a Marxist who died in 1963 as an exile in the Soviet Union.
• January 20 – Poet Elizabeth Alexander reads "Praise Song for the Day" at presidential inauguration of President Barack Obama
• March 16 – Nicholas Hughes, 47, the son of the poets Ted Hughes (who later became the British poet laureate) and Sylvia Plath, who famously committed suicide in 1963 when her son was a year old, hanged himself in his home in Alaska. He had suffered from depression.
• May 1 – Carol Ann Duffy is appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, the first woman appointed to the position in its 341-year history, a position that has been held by, among others, John Dryden ( whom Charles II named the first official poet laureate ), Tennyson, Wordsworth, Cecil Day-Lewis and Ted Hughes. Duffy is also the first Scot and the first openly gay occupant of the post
• May 16 & May 25 – Ruth Padel became the first female ever elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford but resigned nine days later after she was alleged to have been involved in what some sources referred to as a smear campaign against Derek Walcott, her leading rival for the post.
• July 30 – Last Post, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, was read on the BBC Radio 4 programme Today. Commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, two of the last three surviving British veterans of the World War I, it was read on the date of Allingham's funeral.
• September 18 – The film Bright Star, about John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, is released in the United States, and on November 6 in the United Kingdom. The film's title is a reference to a sonnet by Keats, Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, written at the time of the love affair. Jane Campion directed the movie.
• A Room and a Half, a Russian film directed by Andrey Khrzhanovsky and based on the life of Russian–American poet Joseph Brodsky, is released. It is distributed in the United States in 2010.