Terri Windling has an essay with the subtlety I was missing on the different forms of the Snow White story, and in it quotes the great Marina Warner about the Grimm Brothers approach to fairy tales.

"Wilhelm in particular infusing the new editions with his Christian fervor, emboldening the moral strokes of the plot, meting out penalties to the wicked and rewards to the just to conform with prevailing Christian and social values. They also softened the harshness — especially in family dramas. They could not make it disappear altogether, but in Hansel and Gretel, for instance, they added the father's miserable reluctance to an earlier version in which both parents had proposed the abandonment of their children, and turned the mother into a wicked stepmother. On the whole, they tended toward sparing the father's villainy, and substituting another wife for the natural mother, who had figured as the villain in versions they were told. . . .For them, the bad mother had to disappear in order for the ideal to survive and allow Mother to flourish as symbol of the eternal feminine, the motherland, and the family itself as the highest social desideratum."

Getting around Hitler is a nice thought, but it might be a bit late for that.

(And the Irish poetry anthology showed up today, sadly not in the pervy delivery man's hands. I hope he hasn't been taken off my route.)

The new issue of NOÖ Journal, which also launches a new feature, NOÖ Weekly, which is a guest-edited collection of new poems and stories.

Elisa Gabbert considers whether "plainspoken" poetry ever is: So there's two opposing viewpoints here: 1) Poems should be plainspoken and 2) Poems are never truly plainspoken. I fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum.

In the PennSound podcast, Al Filreis and Steven Evans discuss recorded poetry, especially as a tool for teaching.

The first woman has made it to the finals of the "Millions Poet" competition in Abu Dhabi.

The poet laureateship of England is a demanding job: Carol Ann Duffy has written a poem, "Achilles," commemorating . . . Beckham's recent injury: The most tragic image was him being unable to walk and crying on the side of the pitch. You just thought how all the money in the world and private planes can't sort this. It was a very moving moment."

If it's good enough for Tupac, it's good enough for Shel Silverstein: Despite being dead for more than a decade, Silverstein has a new book coming out in Fall 2011.

But today he brought me Ecco's Anthology of International Poetry, and hopefully soon he'll be bringing me Harvard University Press's An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. I do love giant anthologies for some reason. You can listen to editor Wade Davis talk about the Irish book, why modern poets are still wrestling with Yeats, who looms large, and why there are actually women in this anthology, something missing from previous "comprehensive" collections. (Kavanagh, I am totally looking at you.)

Although the formal bits [of Gray's biography] are full of useful information, they contain no scenes as vivid as the one when Gray collapses in the street and his biographer breaks his fall, only to watch him rise chirpily to his feet again and observe, apropos of nothing: "You know Rodger, sometimes I think that women's bottoms are the only thing in the world that matters."

The 2010 longlist is 'muscular and pleasurable' according to judge Daisy Goodwin, and I'll let you have one "that's what she said", as long as you behave yourself for the rest of the day. Seven first time novelists join some of Orange's go-to girls (Mantel, Levy, Waters) and at least one kickass literary blogger in the list. The award will be announced on June the ninth.

Those uppity bitches perpetuating the matriarchal agenda in full:

There's a lot of talk about the fakers in the memoir industry, and Yagoda takes a particular interest in them. The Holocaust survivors who turn out to not even be Jewish, the faux Native Americans, the white suburban girls who pretend they are inner city hardasses. We swallow their tales whole, even the bit about being raised by wolves in the European countryside while the rest of the continent tore itself into pieces, and then become indignant when they're revealed as frauds. It doesn't even take the James Frey-level deceit to raise the audience's ire. Judy Blunt exaggerated a scene in her memoir Breaking Clean, saying her father-in-law smashed her typewriter with a sledgehammer when all he did was unplug it. Called on it by the New York Times, Blunt said the machine's bludgeoning was "symbolic," not to be taken literally. And so we're outraged, and we engage in online debates about what the definition of "truth" is, and then someone else comes along claiming he was a teenage male prostitute, and we say, "Oh you poor thing, aren't you brave, aren't your books powerful," never mind the fact that the books were never that good to begin with.