The Library of Congress appointed W.S. Merwin the new poet laureate. I voted for Nas.

Say Queensbridge! It’s the melange.

Short biography of Merwin: He won the National Book Award and a pair of Pulitzers for poetry, the most recent of which was in 2009.

Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 but moved to Hawaii in 1976 to study Zen Buddhism. (That will be my excuse to move to a tropical clime, also.) Now, he lives on a former pineapple plantation on Maui.

He gave the best writing advice ever in his poem, “Berryman:”

you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

If you want a longer biography or more poems from Merwin, click the link.

Want to watch a free Shakespeare performance? Of course, you want do. You’re reading a book blog.

The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival is offering free performances of Titus Andronicus and The Merry Wives of Windsor Saturday and Sunday, respectively, at James A. Garfield’s home, Lawnfield, in Mentor. The performances start at 6 p.m.

If you can’t make the performances this weekend, don’t fret. The CSF will be performing throughout the Cleveland area all summer.

Just so you know, Titus Andronicus is the wrong play to bring children to. I’m serious. One character gets raped. Then, the rapists cut off her hands and tongue, so she can’t tell anyone.

Seriously, let the kids watch fireworks, instead.

Speaking of Shakespeare, the blog Everyday Shakespeare hypothesizes how some of the bard’s characters would explain childbirth to their children.

One more thing, Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus.

In 2008. Hitchens released God is Not Great, which criticized many major religions. God has since denied that this was a retaliatory strike.

In all seriousness, we hope Hitchens gets better. Hell may be other people, but it is also esophageal cancer.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Finally, this is not about books, but it’s about basketball and Cleveland. Close enough for me.

Thomas Sowell said there were only two ways to tell the truth, anonymously or posthumously.

Never one for anonymity, Mark Twain chose the latter.

When Twain died he left behind a 5,000-page, unedited autobiography and a note saying it was not to be published for at least a century after his death.

Twain died in 1910. That means the seventh seal will be cracking soon. The first volume of an eventual trilogy will be released by the University of California, Berkeley, where the grail is vaulted.

I will be reading this autobiography, all of it. My self-inflicted limit on book length be damned.

Twain was known for his candor in life. Can you imagine what thoughts he needed to let stew for a century before they could be served?

While the salacious details of his relationship with former secretary Isabel Van Kleek Lyon may interest others, I just want to read about Twain being Twain. I want to know what quips, tidbits and quotable blog fodder he ensconced in this autobiography.

On an unrelated note, Stephen Fry will judge the Guardian Hay festival’s Twitter competition.

While I still have some misgivings toward Twitter (how it’s used, not the platform itself), I think a Twitter competition is positively democratic.

In the words of festival director Peter Florence, “It’s a little jolly and a leveller. We can all write tweets but not all of us can write poems or novels.”

Nominations for the most beautiful tweet must be posted @hayfestival. The winner will be announced June 6.

I will be nominating something from @FEMINISTHULK.

Finally, Christopher Hitchens answers the Proust Questionnaire.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com