ALLEN GINSBURG's first performance of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 was recently commemorated by events in the United States - including a group reading of Howl in West Lafayette, Indiana, involving hundreds of people reading simultaneously - and in Britain by 'Howl for Now', a performance with specially commissioned music at the University of Leeds, fifty years to the night since Ginsberg's first recitation. City Lights will publish the annotated Howl, a facsimile edition of Ginsberg's original manuscript, along with a collection of materials related to the creation and publication of the work, in April 2006.

To mark its fifth anniversary, Oxford-based initiative Tower Poetry has published an anthology showcasing the work of seven young poets: Anna Lewis, Frances Leviston, Helen Mort, Olivia Cole, Tim Smith-Laing, Caroline Bird and Matthew Sperling. Tower Poets: Five Years of Tower Poetry is available to purchase from Christ Church College, Oxford, OX1 1DP or www.towerpoetry.org.uk. Committed to promoting the writing and study of poetry, other Tower Poets projects include readings, workshops in schools and an annual poetry competition.

The Poetry Trust has announced the short-list for the 2005 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for poetry. The six short listed poets are: Mike Barlow for Living on the Difference (Smith/Doorstop), Katia Kapovich for Gogol in Rome (Salt), Nick Laird for To a Fault (Faber), Richard Price for Lucky Day (Carcanet), Sally Read for The Point of Splitting (Bloodaxe) and Linda Saunders for Ways of Returning (Arrowhead). The £2000 award is one of the largest poetry prizes in the UK. The three judges, actress Imogen Stubbs, poet Michael Laskey and poet and former Faber editor Christopher Reid, selected the short list from over sixty national submissions, the largest entry in the history of the prize. The winner will be announced at the seventeenth Aldeburgh International Poetry Festival on Saturday 5 November. This year's festival features over forty events with twenty poets from Britain, Canada, Israel, Jamaica, New Zealand, Poland and the United States. Events include readings, workshops and debates with writers including Iain Sinclair, Michael Symmons Roberts, Sinéad Morrissey, Lorna Goodison, Roy Fisher, Aharon Shabtai and Donald Hall. Visit www.thepoetrytrust.org or telephone 01728 687110 for a full programme of events.

Ruskin meets TinTin: an unlikely combination... And yet John Ruskin's classic nine-teenth-century treatise Unto This Last is reinvented for a modern audience in a comic-book interpretation called How To Be Rich. Commissioned by the Ruskin Foundation, the series of comic strips attempts to bring Ruskin's revolutionary ideas about social value, citizenship, art, culture and the environment to a new readership. A collaboration between comic artist Hunt Emerson and author and broadcaster Kevin Jackson, the comic strips will be used for discussion among schools, community groups and young offenders' units, as well appealing to a broad range of adult readers. Email lisa.boustead@portfoliocomms.com or telephone 020 7240 6959 to receive a copy of the first in the series.

A newly-founded visual art and literary imprint, Trades kin Press, announces the publication of its first title. Auspices is a collaborative text-image work by artist Elizabeth Hancock and poet Matthew Sperling, whose work previously appeared in the 2005 Tower Poets anthology, edited by Peter McDonald. Copies of Auspices can be ordered from Matthew Sperling at Tradeskin Press, 120 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 7NF. Visit www.trade-skin.co.uk for further information.

The new academic year witnesses the launch of a part-time Creative Writing MA at Oxford University. Taught by practising fiction writers, poets and dramatists, talented students will have the opportunity to specialise in short fiction, the novel, radio or TV drama, screenwriting, stage drama or poetry. The new two-year, part-time Master's Degree is supported by leading literary figures such as Jon Stallworthy, John Carey and the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks. Full course details may be obtained by visiting www.conted.ox. ac.uk/courses/postgradute.asp or by telephoning 01865 270369.

The eminent poet, playwright and librettist ARNOLD WEINSTEIN died on 4 September in Manhattan at the age of 78. Born in 1927 in New York to English parents, Weinstein served in the Navy during the Second World War before studying at Hunter College and Harvard, where he became a Rhodes Scholar. It was during a Fulbright fellowship visit to Florence that his librettos first came to the attention of composers Darius Milhaud and William Bolcom, and a long-term collaboration with the latter ensued. A self-described 'theatre poet', Weinstein was perhaps best-known for his cabaret songs and his operas McTeague, A View from the Bridge (with Arthur Miller) and A Wedding (with Robert Altman).

One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Hebrew literature, DALIA RAVIKOVITCH, died in Tel Aviv on 21 August, aged 69. She is believed to have committed suicide. Born in Tel Aviv to Russian parents, Ravikovitch started publishing poetry whilst completing a period of military conscription. After studying literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she worked variously as a journalist, high school teacher, translator and children's author. Ravikovitch's first poetry collection, Love for the Orange, appeared in 1959 to critical acclaim; of her other collections, Dress of Fire (1978) and The Window (1989) appeared in English. Her writing is noted for its disarming simplicity and vulnerability, and for its fusion of biblical Hebrew and colloquial speech. Ravikovitch became the best-known female poet of the so-called 'State Generation', a group of writers including Natan Zach and Yehuda Amichai who rebelled against the national agenda of the newly independent state of Israel, founded in 1948. She translated the poetry of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats into Hebrew.

The third Wellington International Poetry Festival will take place from 3 to 7 November 2005. The themes of this year's festival, which has become a major event in New Zealand's cultural calendar, are peace and disarmament. Writers appearing include Hinemoana Baker (New Zealand), Prabal Basu (India), Grant Caldwell (Australia), Jim Christy (Canada), John F. Deane (Ireland), Ban'ya Natsuishi (Japan), Carmen Tafolla (Mexico-USA) and Ahmed Zaoui (Algeria). Visit www.poetry festival.org.nz for more information.

Academia Rossica, an organisation founded in London in 2000 to promote Russian literary culture in the English-speaking world, has established a new literary prize. The Rossica Translation Prize will recognise excellence in Russian translation across a broad range of authors, genres and periods, and help to make Russian art available to a broader western audience. Short-listed translators for the 2005 prize include Hugh Aplin for Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs (Hesperus Press, 2003), Andrew Bromfield for Kononov's The Naked Pioneer Girl (Serpent's Tail, 2004) and Robert Maguire for Gogol's Dead Souls (Penguin, 2004). Judged by three distinguished specialists in Russian literature - Professors John Elsworth (University of Manchester), Angela Livingstone (Essex University) and Gerald Smith (University of Oxford) - the Rossica Translation Prize will be presented at the Translators' Association award ceremony at the Bloomsbury Theatre, University College London. Visit www. academia-rossica.org for further information.

A Scottish Writing Exhibition will take place at the international Modern Language Association convention in Washington DC this December. Organised by the Association of Scottish Literary Studies with funding from the Scottish Arts Council, the exhibition aims to encourage and support Scottish Studies in North America. Attracting an audience of ten thousand US academics and course directors, the MLA convention offers an excellent opportunity to introduce the North American colleges and universities to developments in Scottish writing and publishing, and to raise awareness of the broad range of classic and modern texts that make up Scotland's literary culture. Gwen Enstam, editor of the Scottish Language Dictionaries and organiser of the event, observed: 'There has been a huge increase in interest in Scottish writing in the US in the past few years. This exhibition is ideally placed to gain a foothold in the American university curriculum, and create a lifelong fan base for Scottish authors.' Participating publishers include Canongate, Mercat Press, Bloodaxe, Edinburgh University Press, Carcanet and Penguin. Visit www.scottishwriting.org.uk for more information on publishers and featured Scottish titles.

The First Annual Conference in Modern Book History will take place at the University of Oxford on Saturday 26 November 2005. Keynote speakers include Peter McDonald and Helen Small. The panel has issued a call for papers on the subject of post-1850 book history; possible topics include reading and publishing practices, the technologies of text production and the history of cultural censorship. Proposals should be sent to Kate Longworth at Magdalen College, Oxford OX1 4AU, or by email to kate.longworth @magd.ox.ac.uk.

China is witnessing a poetry renaissance, according to SUN YIQING, president of the China Poets Society. At a recent seminar, Yiqing estimated that there are 'at least one million poets across China'. More than 500 new poetry titles are published in China every year and the China Poets Society boasts a membership of more than 10,000. Yiqing attributes this to a revival of traditional Chinese culture accompanied by a rapid improvement in the quality and spread of education across the country. The impressive increase in poetic output may also be a result of the wonderfully titled Chinese Poetry Rejuvenation Programme, launched in 2004 in Zigui, the hometown of Chinese ancient poet laureate Qu Yuan, in central China's Hubei Province. Administered by the China Poets Society in partnership with local governments, the programme aims to establish ten poetry-writing bases and a thousand county-level poetry institutes nationwide over the next four to eight years.

Liverpool-based literary magazine The Reader will host a Reader's Day on Saturday 26 November at various venues around the city. Speakers include Dinah Birch on Ruskin and Turner in conjunction with Tate Liverpool's 'Turner and the Sea' exhibition, David Constantine on Hardy's poems and Matthew H. Clough on Liverpool University's art collections. Elaine Feinstein, John Carey and E.A. Markham will also be participating in work-shops and debates. In a more populist key, Pauline Fleming, aka Coronation Street's Penny King, will lead a drama workshop for budding thespians. Contact The Reader Office, University of Liverpool, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG or email readers@liv.ac.uk to book a place.

A solemn error must be acknowledged in PNR 165's editorial. PNR rearranged a few headstones in the Protestant Cemetery in Florence, as Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, gently pointed out. Arthur Hugh Clough's gravestone sadly lacks an inscription by his friend Matthew Arnold; furthermore, Swinburne's epitaph for Arnold Savage Landor was wrongly attributed to the grave of his estranged father, Walter.