Best Of MetaFilter

167th St. Station. James Baldwin Mural. New York, NY. by KTDrasky (cc by)

to bear witness, as long as breath is in him: "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," by James Baldwin

Lying Liars by katmeresin (cc by)

Next you're going to tell me it was actually only a couple of hundred yards to go before he slept? – not_on_display

"the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s cloth" explains how everyone knows Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken" – and how almost everyone gets it wrong (though not everyone: "I wrote a whole commencement speech about this general idea")

Plus a post about Best American Poetry guest editor Sherman Alexie's response re a white male poet who appropriated a Chinese name for submission to the anthology

and in Ask Me, looking for the author who said (something like) "The poet lies ... most especially when writing about himself"