Eric B Disc Jockey Eric B for President 08Nov1965Melanie B Singer Scary Spice 29May1975Notorious B. I. G. Rapper I love it when you call me big poppa. A love story to rival any movie How Daniel DayLewis mother was so besotted with her cheating poet husband she even forgave him for seducing her best friend. The Poet Serial Killer' title='The Poet Serial Killer' />Chicagos first serial killer Chicago Tribune. The man who became infamous as H. Holmes.jpg' alt='The Poet Serial Killer' title='The Poet Serial Killer' />H. Holmes, one of the first serial killers in the United States, preyed mainly on naive and gullible women young women who wouldnt be missed amid the thousands of Worlds Fair tourists streaming into Chicagos fashionable Englewood neighborhood. As Chicago basked in the bright light of the White City, the 1. Columbian Exposition that was making headlines around the world, Holmes was remorselessly collecting people, using them and efficiently discarding them. After arriving in Chicago in the late 1. Murder Castle at 6. Wallace streets and proceeded to murder, swindle, lie, steal and cheat, all under the facade of upper class respectability as the friendly neighborhood druggist and businessman. The Poet Serial Killer' title='The Poet Serial Killer' />Holmes gave Americans one of their first well publicized cases of serial killings. The specter of anonymous victims murdered in the big city runs through our popular culture, kept alive by rare but notorious cases. Among them the discovery this month of seven bodies, and the search for more, in northwest Indiana. Readers today likely know Holmes, whose real name was Herman Mudgett, from Erik Larsons 2. The Devil in the White City. Tribune readers near the turn of the last century met Holmes as the subject of a disturbing story published March 3. Origin of the Series The GilbertChappell Distinguished Poet Series supports the mission of the North Carolina Poetry Society to foster the reading, writing, and. H. H. Holmes, regarded as Americas First Real Serial Killer A few months after he completed his most daring swindle, insuring a corpse for 12,500 and carrying. Worlds Fair was to open. The article detailed how Holmes had failed to pay for hundreds of dollars in furnishings for a hotel he planned to run at the castle to cash in on fair tourists. When angry merchants showed up to demand that he return the goods, they found nothing but empty rooms. Later a hidden room containing much of the furniture was discovered. Other concealed areas held a number of mattresses and box springs. The furnishings were removed Holmes was left behind. And Holmes might well have gotten away with it all had his last nefarious scheme not unraveled faster than he could cut away the loose ends. On Nov. 1. 7, 1. 89. Philadelphia his favorite ploy a life insurance fraud wherein a badly disfigured corpse plays the role of the insured. Though his methods were unsavory, at this point authorities still thought he was a prolific and gifted swindler. But in the following days, the Tribunes headlines revealed the growing, horrifying reality that Holmes wasnt just a con man Murder in the case, Hint of dark deeds and Spins his own web. Officials suspected Holmes didnt bother to bring in a corpse this time, and just killed his partner, Benjamin Pitzel. The man who became infamous as H. H. Holmes, one of the first serial killers in the United States, preyed mainly on naive and gullible women  young women who wouldnt be missed amid the thousands of Worlds Fair tourists streaming into Chicagos fashionable Englewood neighborhood in 1. After arriving in Chicago in the late 1. Murder Castle at 6. Wallace streets and proceeded to murder, swindle, lie, steal and cheat, all under the facade of upper class respectability as the friendly neighborhood druggist and businessman. About a week later, the Tribunes big Sunday paper unspooled a 2. Holmes long history of chicanery, much of it in Chicago. Headlined H. H. HOLMES, CROOK, with secondary headlines such as Bad From His Boyhood and Began to Tread Devious Paths When a College Student, it told how Holmes, while attending the University of Michigan, teamed up with a med student there to pull off the corpse life insurance scheme multiple times. As an all around fraud Holmes had a wonderful success with men, but he preferred women and insurance companies. He said they came easier. Swindler of men, betrayer of women, he has left behind him a wake of ruin and tears that not all the courts of America can wash away, the Tribune reported. The story detailed his goofy swindles, such as his patented water to gas invention and his discovery of an artesian well in his basement that produced water with amazing curative powers. It also revealed his multiple wives, who were sometimes pretty but always wealthy. Case in point Minnie Williams, a singular beauty whose estate was worth at least 7. Both she and her sister were missing. The story also asked Whatever happened to Pitzels three childrenThe answer and horrifying truth would have to wait about eight months. On July 1. 5, 1. 89. Pitzels two daughters, Alice and Nellie, were discovered buried in a cellar in Toronto. Little Howard was believed dead, but his body was still missing. The swindler was revealed to be a serial killer. It was front page news across the country. And the search for other bodies began. In Chicago, authorities looking for clues turned to Holmes house. The Tribune described it in a 1. O, what a queer house it wasIn all America there was none other like it. Its chimneys stuck out where chimneys should never stick out. Its stairways ended nowhere in particular. Winding passages brought the uninitiated with a frightful jerk back to where they had started from. There were rooms that had no doors. There were doors that had no rooms. A mysterious house it was indeed a crooked house, a reflex of the builders own distorted mind. In that house occurred dark and eerie deeds. Police found a house of horrors. Holmes had created a murder factory. Rooms could be locked from the outside. A third floor room was a veritable bank vault, padded to muffle sound and fitted with a gas pipe to asphyxiate victims. A hidden shaft to the cellar made for easy disposal of bodies. And it was the cellar of the murder factory where Holmes undoubtedly worked, the Tribune reported. Behind a fake wall, police found a butchers table, quicklime vats, bones, bloody clothing and a crematory. In the oven, They found a womans watch chain. They found the buckle of a womans garter, the Tribune reported. The watch chain was Minnies. The garter buckle was her sisters. Through the summer, Tribune readers learned of Holmes other victims, including the Conner family. Ned and Julia Conner and their 1. Pearl, had moved to Chicago from Davenport, Iowa. Holmes hired Ned Conner to handle the jewelry counter in his corner store, installed Julia as a bookkeeper and leased the family rooms in his hotel. He then seduced Julia, breaking up her marriage and sending the mild, inoffensive Ned packing. Julia and Pearl went missing in 1. A former secretary named Emeline Cigrand and her fiance also went missing. Her remains were reported found in a story headlined Bones in a trunk. As the bodies piled up, Holmes, still jailed in Philadelphia, remained cool, admitting only to insurance fraud and denying killing anyone. But when a jury convicted him of Benjamin Pitzels death, his facade began to crack. The Tribune reported, Once in a reckless, or more likely cynical moment, Holmes announced, O, sure, Ive killed twenty seven people Authorities doubted that, having identified just 1. Jeff Mudgett, who says he is Holmes great great grandson, claims in a book that his ancestor was Jack the Ripper, who supposedly killed five prostitutes in London in 1. Holmes was sentenced on March 9, 1. A month later, the North American newspaper in Philadelphia printed what it said was Holmes confession, running three whole newspaper pages, in which Holmes wrote of his blood curdling atrocities with an abandon that simply appalls one, the Tribune said. Claiming again that he killed 2. I was born with the very devil in me. John Ashbery, celebrated and challenging poet, dead at 9. Poet John Ashbery, widely regarded as one of the worlds greatest poets, died Sunday at age 9. AP Photo. John Ashbery, an enigmatic giant of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 9. Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes. Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1. 97. 5 collection, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the rare winner of the book worlds unofficial triple crown the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2. 01. 1, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing how we read poetry. Among a generation of poets that included Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions. No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 5. John Ashbery, Langdon Hammer wrote in The New York Times in 2. Ashberys phrases always feel newly minted his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. But to love Ashbery it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as You are freedincluding barrelsheads of the swanforestrythe night and stars fork not to worry about their meaning. Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan ORourke advised readers not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about. I dont find any direct statements in life, Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I dont think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2. Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, to Ashbery, it would mean to confuse the hell out of people. Download Software Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal 5.0. Ashbery also was a well regarded translator and critic. Xbmc 13 Gotham Beta 2. At various times, he was the art critic for The New York Herald Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers. He was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard University and Bard College. Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1. Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to inspire his first poem, The Battle, written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He was so satisfied with the poem that he didnt write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper. Meanwhile, he took painting lessons and found new meaning in life, or Life. An article in Life magazine about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. His mind broadened further at Harvard University, reading W. H. Auden and meeting fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank OHara and Robert Creeley. He would be grouped with OHara and Koch as part of the avant garde New York Poets movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York. His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. How to Continue was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1. AIDS, a gale that came and saidit is time to take all of you away.