Sainsbury's teamed up with Naked Chef Jamie Oliver and Asda went with Sharon Osbourne, but in an attempt to brand itself as the literary punters' supermarket of choice, Morrisons has employed the services of three British poets to help get the people of Britain cooking. The unlikely collaboration, which the supermarket chain has dubbed the "food laureate", will see poets Ian McMillan, John Mole and Peter Sansom writing a series of poems about how to prepare different recipes. McMillan, a former poet in residence at Barnsley Football Club, has tackled the crumble. Mole, winner of an Eric Gregory award, has taken on batter – "What you're going to need for a dish that can't fail / Are a bowl, a deep fryer, flour and ale" – while Sansom has dreamed up verse about making a roast.

"Poets have always accepted shillings from patrons," said McMillan. "A lot of courtly poets were given financial backing by the king, and there's been a rise of poets in residence since the 80s. It's fine, as long as you don't write anything you're not happy with."

Keats House in Hampstead has been restored to reflect its appearance during the poet's life and will display items such as the gold engagement ring he gave to his neighbour Fanny Brawne in 1820. Keats lived in the semi-detached house for two years before his tuberculosis drove him to the warmer climate of Rome, where he died aged 25 in 1821.

He composed the famous poem Ode to a Nightingale under a plum tree in the front garden. The Grade I listed property was deemed too "fusty" to serve as the set for a new film about Keats's romance with Miss Brawne, Bright Star, which was instead filmed at Hyde House in Luton. But producers visited Keats House to gain inspiration for props and took a copy of Miss Brawne's gold and almandine engagement ring.

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Analysis of traces of paint and scraps of wallpaper allowed staff to recreate the original appearance of each room in the house, with Keats's bedroom painted in pale pink. Staff have also reproduced the unappealing pattern of the curtains around the poet's four-poster bed which tormented him as he lay suffering from tuberculosis before leaving for Rome. His death mask is displayed in the corner of the bedroom.

Two portraits of Keats painted by his friend Joseph Severn and a gilt bust produced after his death by sculptor Patrick MacDowell are among an expanded collection of dozens of prints, drawings and objects that have never been seen by the public before.

Duffy had already made clear that she "didn't want to take on what basically is an honour on behalf of other poets and complicate it with money". "I thought it was better to give it back to poetry," she said in May, when she was chosen as laureate.

The prize, worth £5,000, will go to a UK poet working in any form – including poetry collections for adults and children, individual poems, radio poems, translations and verse dramas – who has made the "most exciting contribution" to poetry that year. "I'm delighted, with the assistance of Buckingham Palace and the Poetry Society, to be founding this new award for poetry. With the permission of Carol Hughes, the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, poet laureate, and one of the greatest 20th-century poets for both children and adults," said Duffy in a statement announcing the new prize.

Padel resigned on Monday after holding the Oxford post - the most important academic role in poetry in the UK - for just nine days, after it emerged that she had alerted journalists to Walcott's past. Walcott had withdrawn from the race earlier this month after some 200 Oxford academics were anonymously sent a package containing photocopied pages from the book detailing the allegations made against him, criticising the "low tactics", and the "low and degrading attempt at character assassination" the election had become.

Padel gave a press conference at the Guardian Hay festival yesterday, where she apologised to Walcott for what she described as "a grave error of judgement". "It was naive and silly of me – a bad error of judgement. I can of course see that people can misconstrue these two isolated emails of mine as part of a larger campaign I had nothing to do with," she said yesterday. "I do think I was very silly to send those emails but I was trying in a misguided way to address student concerns."

"I should like to thank the university and the people who voted for me," Ms. Padel said. "I feel honored and humbled to be given this responsibility and shall try to carry it out as well as I can. My backers based their support for me on what they felt I could offer poetry and students. Now I shall do my best to fulfill their trust." Ms. Padel's selection follows close on the heels of Carol Ann Duffy's appointment as Britain's poet laureate; that post had been held by male writers for 341 years.

The race for the 300-year-old post of Oxford poetry professor, the most important academic poetry position in the UK, is expected to be decided late this afternoon despite calls from a growing group of Oxford students and graduates, headed by the secretary of the Oxford University Poetry Society, for it to be suspended.

Oxford University graduates, who vote for their choice of professor, have been left with just two candidates to choose between – British poet Ruth Padel, the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and Indian poet and critic Arvind Mehrotra – following the withdrawal of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott at the start of this week.

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Oxford Poetry Society secretary Eloise Stonborough said that responses from students, graduates and fellows backing her call for the current candidates to withdraw and allow nominations to be reopened had been pouring in on Friday. She believes that unless the election is suspended, the "importance and dignity" of the professorship, held in the past by Matthew Arnold, Seamus Heaney and WH Auden, will be damaged.

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Even one of Padel's own nominators, philosophy professor AC Grayling, believes the election should be postponed, and wrote to his candidate asking her to withdraw in protest. "To win because anonymous and malicious persons witch-hunted Walcott out of the race would be a hollow and tainted thing," he wrote in a blog for the Guardian. "The election for professor of poetry at Oxford is about poetry, not morals. Plenty of poets in the past have behaved very badly in all sorts of ways, and far worse than Walcott is said to have done. Do we refuse to read them therefore? That is, do we silence their voices, exclude them, bar them, on the grounds that they did those things? No, we do not."

Three days after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama was spotted in Chicago carrying the 500-page volume of Derek Walcott's collected poems. You wonder if he would let himself be seen holding that book now. Earlier this week, Walcott felt compelled to withdraw from the race to replace Christopher Ricks as the £6,901-a-year Oxford Professor of Poetry, after what one of his backers described as an "insulting smear campaign".

Some 200 academics recently received a dossier detailing sexual harassment claims made against Walcott. The dossier included pages from a 1984 book, The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus by Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, which details the sexual harassment claim made by a Harvard student against Walcott (upon which he has never commented). It also included a 1996 allegation made by Nicole Niemi, a Boston University student and member of Walcott's creative writing class. Niemi, now a writer using the name NM Kelby, sued Walcott for alleged sexual harassment and "offensive sexual physical contact", demanding $500,000. The case was reportedly settled out of court.

Gregg's books include All of It Singing (2008), In the Middle Distance (2006), Things and Flesh (1999), Chosen by the Lion (1994), The Sacraments of Desire (1991), Alma (1985), Eight Poems (1982) and Too Bright to See (1981), all published by Graywolf Press. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Gregg has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She currently lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University.

The poems can be listened to online or downloaded for later. Often the poets read their own work — as is the case for Rita Dove and Todd Boss, above. But former poet laureate Robert Pinsky reads Anne Bradstreet and the poem "Of Money" by Barnabe Googe — the latter, written more than 400 years ago, is still painfully true.

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The site was inspired by Pinsky's "Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Out Loud," published by W.W. Norton. All the poets featured on the site are with the publishing house, which has a pretty significant poetry roster. They caught up with many of them at a writers conference earlier this year and asked them "What is poetry for?" The answers include a lot of blank stares and some inspired off-the-cuff responses: "for tresspassing and feeling at home at the same time" and "change ... witness ... celebration."

For the princely sum of $4,000, the poet appointed to the newly created post will be expected to "elevate poetry in the consciousness" of the area's residents, who include the hundreds of thousands of employees of some of the world's major high-tech companies.

The lucky incumbent will also be asked to "create, over time, a body of work that commemorates the rich and varied culture" of the county. A local wag raised a note of cynicism at the prospect, proposing the lines: "I think that I shall never see / A county lovely as a tree. / Indeed with all these shopping malls / trees are barely seen at all."

Unfortunately for the likes of Andrew Motion, who steps down from his position as the UK's poet laureate later this year, the role is only open to poets who have lived in sunny Santa Clara county for five years. For all those poets who do inhabit the area, applications, which are now open, must be received by 17 February, with the term of office to last from April 2009 to April 2011.

Robert Hass, former US poet laureate, welcomed the news. "Having poets around who are thinking about language, especially in places that have to do with communication and also with invention is a terrific idea," he told the Associated Press. "Poets are always trying to invent in all forms of language."

The poet laureate Andrew Motion, who chaired this year's judges, said he was delighted that Hadfield was the winner. "Nigh-No-Place shows that she is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career." The other judges were poets Lavinia Greenlaw and Tobias Hill.

Hadfield may have to pinch herself when she looks at the company she joins. Previous winners of the prize, created in 1993 by the Poetry Book Society, include Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson and Ted Hughes.

Auction director David Britton said it received "exceptional interest". He said it appealed to enthusiasts both of Yeats and of Ireland's independence struggle from Britain.

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The other two copies are in the National Library in Dublin and the British Library in London. The Dublin public initially condemned the rebels for bringing ruin to the capital, but many turned anti-British when the rebellion's commanders were executed within days. The poem reflects Yeats' own ambivalence to his countrymen's willingness to resort to violence, and insight into the greater bloodshed that lay ahead. One of the greatest poets of the 20th century, in 1923 Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Islam Samhan's recent collection, Grace Like A Shadow, includes phrases from the Koran, viewed as sacrosanct by Muslims as the literal word of God. One of Jordan's leading religious figures, the grand mufti, has accused Mr Samhan of blaspheming against "God, the angels and Prophet Muhammad". Jordanian law bans publication of any material seen as harmful to Islam.

The head of the Jordanian writers association, Saoud Qubeilat, told the daily al-Ghad that poetry relied on figures of speech which could sound blasphemous if read superficially. He added that the arrest of Mr Samhan would stifle creativity and freedom of expression. Writers and artists have sent a petition to the government calling the arrest a "retreat in the freedom of expression", and urging an end to "oppression of freedom and intimidation practised against intellectuals".

Drafts and notes reveal he worked on the collection for more than 25 years. Jamie Andrews from the British Library said the archive "would change Hughes scholarship in a substantial way". "Anyone compiling a complete collection of his poems will need to examine this collection," added Andrews, who is the library's head of modern literature manuscripts.

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His dense scrawls clutter the pages like brambles, as scraps of ideas and abandoned verses reveal his ongoing struggle to come to terms with Plath's death. Many of the unpublished works were apparently too personal to have been aired during Hughes' lifetime, with one poem starkly stating:

You were the tailor of your own murder
Which imprisoned you
And since I was your nurse and protector
That sentence was mine, too

"The rawness of the poems certainly makes them a lot less guarded than what became Birthday Letters, which he very carefully ordered to create the idea of a narrative," notes Andrews.