2011 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France). January 19 – Liz Lochhead becomes the second Scots Makar, the official national poet of Scotland. April 4 – Canadian poet Christian Bök announces a significant break-through in his 9-year project to engineer "a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem". On April 3, Bök said that he "received confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that my poetic cipher, gene X-P13, has in fact caused E. coli to fluoresce red in our test-runs—meaning that, when implanted in the genome of this bacterium, my poem (which begins “any style of life/ is prim...”) does in fact cause the bacterium to write, in response, its own poem (which begins “the faery is rosy/ of glow...”)." June 12 – A poet and student, Ayat al-Ghermezi of Bahrain, is sentenced to a year in prison as part of that kingdom's crackdown on Shiite protesters calling for greater rights. Ayat was arrested on March 30 for reciting a poem critical of the government and cursing the current prime minister, Khalifa ibn Salman Al Khalifa, during the Bahraini uprising in Pearl Square, the main gathering place for demonstrators, in February 2011. August 9 – Announcement that Philip Levine has been named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (United States Poet Laureate). October 6 – Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer wins the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature November 9 – The former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Hass, was participating in an Occupy movement demonstration at UC Berkeley called Occupy Cal, when he was hit in the ribs by a police officer wielding a baton. The incident occurred after his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, was shoved to the ground by a police officer, and Hass had tried to help her. He wrote about their experience in a November 19, 2011, The New York Times opinion piece entitled "Poet-Bashing Police." Also, poet Geoffrey G.