After months puzzling over the literal meaning and possible implications of Fat Joe’s “I make it rain,” mtvU fans are moving on to even more challenging artists. John Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship and numerous other prizes, has finally gained the prestigious title of “mtvU Poet Laureate.” Selections of his poems appear in commercials as well as the online site. According to the New York Times, mtvU worked with Ashbery’s business manager to pick the most “catchy” lines. Apparently, the verses that resonated most with the youth were ones with “sort of raunchy references,” Kermani said.

Elizabeth, at Charlottesville Words, provides perhaps the strangest rejection letter that has ever been sent. We’ve been a little sensitive about our own rejection letters ever since David Keeling awarded us a C+, but now I see that, relatively speaking, we’re real sweethearts.

Civil rights pioneer Oliver W. Hill Sr. has died in Richmond at 100 years old and will lie in state at the Executive Mansion on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. Governor Kaine has ordered the state flag to be flown at half-staff statewide until sunset Sunday.

Hill was the lead attorney on Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Va., one of the five cases that the Supreme Court combined into Brown v. Board of Education. That case, of course, ended segregation in public schools, but it also opened the door to the Civil Rights Movement—and Hill remained a central figure in that effort in Virginia. There is an excellent survey of Hill’s full career in the Richmond Times–Dispatch.

For my first issue as editor of VQR, I chose to focus on the 50th anniversary of the Brown case. Julian Bond interviewed Hill for that issue. We also recommend Roger Wilkins’s “Doing the Work: Why We Need Affirmative Action” and Susan E. Eaton’s “Brown’s Faint Revival,” from that same issue, as well as an article by R. C. Smith revisiting Prince Edward County in 1997.

Long-time VQR contributor Charles Simic was named the United States poet laureate yesterday. Simic’s work in VQR has included “Memories of the Future,” “Meditation in the Gutter” and “Ghost Ship.” Subscribers to the magazine can also read “Death of a Worthless Man,” his summer 2006 reflection on Miloševic’s death in The Hague during his lengthy trial. Simic succeeds Donald Hall, also a regular contributor to VQR in the past thirty years and a winner of our Emily Clark Balch Prize.