It's banned books week, & that includes Poetry

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An awful lot of people don't want us to read books that they don't like or that they feel have have objectionable contents.

Banned books week is an annual event that calls attention to the books that are routinely challenged and often removed from the shelves of libraries and schools.

We're calling attention to banned and challenged books on Absolute Write.

Books you likely know, and probably, quite a few you love. William Haskins has posted before about Stupid reasons Stupid People Try to Ban Books.

Those reasons are increasingly reducing to people want to ban books that include characters that are not white, not rich, not able-bodied, not straight.

They also include books that say true things that some people don't want to hear—something that lies at the hear of poetry.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales banned for sexual content and bawdy language.

Milton's Paradise Lost banned for alleged heresy. (Milton's books were and are banned frequently).

Allen Ginzberg's Howl banned for obscenity and sexual content (even though the court found Howl to have "literary merit"

Shakespeare regularly comes under attack, particularly Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice

Read a banned book. Read several. Read banned poetry.

And take part in AW's own celebration of the banned and challenged, including our own contest.
 

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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Challenged, Censored and Banned

Just for the amusement value; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has been banned, challenged and censored (sometimes to the point of making tales absolutely impossible to follow) since the fifteenth century.

If you're curious to about reading this hilarious, bawdy, controversial work in Middle English yourself, I recommend the Norton Critical Edition of the Canterbury Tales; it's not all of the tales, but it is the more famous of them, in a standardized and glossed Middle English with lots of notes. [SUP]*[/SUP]

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