Great Regulars: If only Fabio Capello had engaged the services

of an official laureate for the team, England's disastrous exit from the World Cup at the weekend could have produced another Paradise Lost. From hedge funders congregating in Monaco, to center court at Wimbledon, it seems you're nowhere if you haven't got a poet on hand to distil the experience into literature, preferably in a form, say the haiku, brief enough to be tweeted.

You cannot be serious? Well, in fact, you can.

from Olivia Cole: The Daily Beast: Wimbledon's Poet Laureate

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From the first year, when the festival attracted an audience of 300 or so, its founders have been determined that it shouldn't be either, as [Colin] Channer puts it, "a tourist attraction, or an excursion for the upper middle classes from Kingston." Instead, [Kwame] Dawes and Channer wanted to create not just a festival but a literary culture for Jamaica, "translating the spirit of reggae into a literary festival." Just as reggae developed as a tradition taught and passed on to younger musicians apprenticed to masters of their art, Calabash, with its program of workshops and seminars, has created a culture and a context for emerging voices, in a country with none of the MFA culture of the U.S. or the U.K.

from Olivia Cole: The Daily Beast: Jamaica's Big Book Party

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