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Ira Glass, Calvin Trillin, and others are featured in this trailer for Rakoff’s posthumous book, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, a novel in verse forthcoming in July from Doubleday. One of the best and funniest essayists of our time, Rakoff died of cancer on August 9, 2012. He was forty-seven years old.
The poet and environmental activist talks about Thoreau's concept of "wildness" in this clip from Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, a documentary-in-progress directed by Stefan Schaefer and produced by Williams Cole.
In honor of the centennial anniversary of the birth of May Swenson, on May 28, read some poems by this award-winning poet (consult the Academy of American Poets website for a bibliography), then write a poem with her work in mind. Remember, this is a poet who, four months before her death on December 28, 1989, wrote, "The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem."
In this Single Sentence Animation from Electric Literature, Suneet Sethi animates the following sentence, from "Angel Lust" by Maggie Shipstead: "Her mascara, running down her smooth, downy cheeks, made her look like a tragic urchin, a child whore, Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver."
Poetry is all around you. Find a public place—a train station, a park bench, a street corner, a coffee shop, a bookstore, the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles—and listen to the people around you. Choose one quote from a stranger and use it as the first and last line of a new poem.
Independent poetry and fiction publisher Lynx House Press has extended the deadline for its seventeenth annual Blue Lynx Prize—which includes a cash award of two thousand dollars and publication for a poetry collection—to June 3.
The Blue Lynx Prize is awarded for a previously unpublished, full-length collection of poems by a U.S. author, including foreign nationals living and writing in the United States and U.S. citizens living abroad. Individual poems may have previously appeared in literary magazines or anthologies, but may not have appeared in a full-length, single-author collection.
Poets may submit a manuscript of at least forty-eight pages with a $25 entry fee by postal mail to Lynx House Press, P.O. Box 940, Spokane, WA 99210, or online via Submittable (with a $27.50 fee) by Monday, June 3.
Lynx House Press was founded in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1972 by Christopher Howell, David Lyon, and Helena Minton, and moved to Spokane in 1996. An independent nonprofit press, Lynx House publishes books by emerging and established poets and fiction writers. The editors look for “literary work that is highly resonant, work that, through the clarity of its vision and craft, results in a change in the emotional and intellectual temperature of whoever reads it.” The press has published books by Yusef Komunyakaa, Ray Amorosi, Margaret Robison, Carlos Reyes, Carolyn Miller, and Anthony Robbins, among many others. Recent prize winners have included Thomas Brush, Carolyne Wright, and Arianne Zwartjes.
The Blue Lynx Prize is typically open to submissions between January 15 and May 15 annually; open submissions are read between June 1 and August 1 each year.
For more information about the prize, contact editor Christopher Howell.
Poet and artist Amanda Deutch blogs about her P&W–supported poetry workshop for young women at the YWCA in Coney Island. She is the author of four chapbooks: Gena Rowlands, Box of Sky: Skeleton Poems, Motel Drift, and The Subway Series. She is also the recipient of a 2007 Footpaths to Creativity Fellowship to write in the Azores Archipelago.
In late February 20
13 I put out a call for poetry books to create a lending library for the YWCA after-school teen empowerment program where Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival leads a weekly creative writing workshop. The invitation to donate books was put on Facebook and sent out to previous Parachute Festival readers. The message soon went viral in the poetry world and was picked up by the Poetry Foundation and Best American Poetry. We have received books from authors as nearby as Coney Island and Park Slope and as far away as Madrid; Ontario; and Amman, Jordan. My intentions were truly modest. I just wanted to get some poetry books for the teenagers in the workshop that I teach and perhaps some extras to donate to the high school’s library. What we have now—a collection of diverse small press contemporary poetry from all over the country—has blown my mind (and renewed my faith in the power of poets).
In the weekly workshop I try to bring in poetry that reflects students’ surroundings. When I was a child growing up in New York City, we never read any poetry in school that reflected the world and sounds I saw and heard around me—the buzzing sidewalk, taxicabs, the multiphonic spree of languages that is home to me. It wasn’t until I found poets like Edwin Torres, Tracie Morris, Diane DiPrima, and Alice Notley (among many others) that I saw my words and worlds reflected in the pages of their books. I want teenagers to have that opportunity too. Up until now, for over a year, it has been a girls’ group. We recently opened it up to both genders. A boy, Montague, poked his head in the doorway a few w
eeks ago and said, “Miguel Pinero, he’s the realest.” I said, “Yeah, his poetry changed the course of my life. Before that all I ever saw was poetry about daisies, not that I don’t like daisies. We don’t have any books of his, yet, but why don’t you read Sheila Maldonado? She’s a local poet, born around here.” He checked her book out of our new burgeoning library (and made my day). There are so many interactions like this. Maya is a thirteen-year-old student at the writing workshop. She soaks up information and is very talented. One day she came in asking me about a poem she’d seen that looked like an eye. We had a conversation about the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and for the next week’s class I brought in one of his books. She poured over the pages and held it up saying, “This one is my favorite.” I instantly got chills and realized, here I was in a classroom in Brooklyn, in Coney Island, discussing surrealist French poetry with a thirteen-year-old girl.
The poetry library grew very organically out of an instinct to get the teenagers books they love and to show them that poetry can take all different shapes, sizes, voices, styles, languages. It doesn’t have to rhyme, punctuate, or tell a story. Poetry can speak the way we speak or speak a new language all its own. Poetry can break open language entirely and begin anew.
We now have over a hundred books in our growing library and one of the most unusual, extensive poetry collections in any high school in Brooklyn, maybe the whole country. In Montague’s words—“the realest!”
Photos: (Top) Workshop participant Maya peeking out from behind a poetry book by Jessy Randall. Credit: Amanda Deutch. (Bottom) A donated poetry book sent from Madrid, Spain. Credit: Amanda Deutch.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Abbey K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
P&W–supported writer and presenter Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012–2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Her books are Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), named an American Library Association Notable Book. Flenniken is bringing poetry events to all thirty-nine counties in Washington State, including readings, workshops, and school programs, and publishes Washington State poets on her blog, The Far Field. She teaches through Writers in the Schools, Jack Straw, and other arts agencies, and is an editor for Floating Bridge Press, dedicated to publishing Washington State poets.
For a relatively small city, Seattle has a thriving literary community. What do you attribute this to?
Seattle is a magnet city. Writers find themselves surrounded by other working writers and a strong literary infrastructure—the University of Washington with its MacArthur geniuses (Linda Bierds, Richard Kenney, Heather McHugh, and Charles Johnson) and graduates, who tend to stay; the Richard Hugo House, a wonderful and democratic incubator for new talent; an impressive public library system; a reputation as a reading city; the marvelous poetry-only bookstore Open Books; University Bookstore and Elliott Bay Book Company; a number of excellent small presses and magazines; and a varied lineup of readings on any given night. Not to mention lakes and mountains, a temperate and moody climate, and beer and coffee houses with Wi-fi.
What recent program have you been especially proud of?
I was very proud to bring Spencer Reece to Seattle for the first time with the help of Poets & Writers, Richard Hugo House, and Humanities Washington. Spencer was going to be in Portland for personal reasons. I was brazen enough to invite him, and he was brave enough to accept. The evening combined some of the poems from his first and forthcoming second book, The Road to Emmaus, and a film by James Franco based on Spencer’s poem “The Clerk’s Tale.” The evening began with a teaser for "Our Little Roses Film," a documentary about Reece's Fulbright year at a girls' orphanage in Honduras, where he is teaching his students poetry and creating a book of their poems about home. It was a beautiful evening and touched many people who came.
How does giving a reading inform your writing and vice versa?
Poetry needs to work out loud as a kind of music. Giving readings keeps me (and my music) honest.
If I know I don’t want to share a poem at a reading, and keep shying away from the opportunity, there may be a problem with the poem. It might be too raw, too personal, or lack nuance. Maybe there’s not enough good stuff going on—it’s boring and I don’t want to admit it. I have to face facts when I face an audience.
I think my perennial pursuit of the “funny poem,” successful or mostly not, is motivated in part by giving readings. It’s a powerful invitation to a new audience.
Reading and hearing the poems out loud sometimes calls attention to certain strategies I’ve used, maybe to excess. I might organize a reading around a subject and notice as I read before an audience: Oh, these three poems all rely on a surprising turn of phrase in the last line…hmm. Is that becoming a crutch?
What are your reading dos?
Remember it’s about poetry and the audience. Be respectful of both. Choose poems you can communicate effectively. Practice. Time yourself. Set up the poems that need it as simply as you can. Try to include a variety of tones. Give every poem its full due—reading slowly, with natural inflections. Learn to use the microphone.
Since I became poet laureate I’ve included poems by other Washington State poets. I’m their representative. When my appointment is over, I’ll continue that practice. It feels like good luck invoking another poet’s voice, and reminds me I’m part of a tradition and a community.
And your reading don’ts?
Don’t go on too long! Never, ever exceed your allotted time. Readings shouldn’t go longer than an hour, generally shorter if it’s one reader. Twenty readers? Three minutes each, and no meandering introductions!
Readings can be humbling. Don’t fall into despair after a reading that falls flat or feels, for whatever reason, embarrassing. Don’t forget, it’s about poetry. One for the cause.
As Washington State’s poet laureate, what do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?
Stories and poems remind us what it might be to stand in someone else’s shoes, and what our lives can mean. Literary programs make that experience communal. They bring people together to share matters of deep importance. I was part of a recent program sponsored by P&W at the Sammamish King County Library (on the outskirts of Seattle). Our readers were ages fifteen and up, and included me and poet Michael Dylan Welch, a master of the Haiku form, local students, a software guy, a veteran, a professional in a suit and tie. Our readers brought poems they’d written and wanted to share, and a number of other community members—families, seniors, singles—came simply to listen. If you looked out at the crowd, it was a real mix, but we were sharing an important conversation.
Photo: Kathleen Flenniken. Credit: Rosanne Olson.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
The Academy of American Poets asked Randall Mann, Marilyn Hacker, D. Nurkse, Matt Rasmussen, Patricia Smith, and Brenda Hillman to talk about the most important letters they've received.
Katherine Noble, a senior in the English Department at the University of Texas in Austin, has received the Keene Prize for Literature for her collection of poems, “Like Electrical Fire Across the Silence.” She will receive $50,000.
Noble is the first undergraduate to win or even place in the Keene competition, one of the world’s largest student literary prizes, which has been given annually to University of Texas students since 2006. Graduate students in the university’s Michener Center MFA program typically take home the award.
“The judges were impressed by her audacious combination of spirituality with sexuality, by her wide range of literary reference, and her bold experimentation with the form of the prose poem,” said Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, chair of the Department of English and the award selection committee, of Nobel’s poems.
“I have been affected by images from biblical myths since I was a young girl,” Noble said in a press release, “and the narrators in my poems often wrestle to understand how God interacts with the physical world.”
In addition to Noble, three finalists will each receive $17,000. They are Corey Miller, a current Michener Center graduate student, for his collection of poems “The New Concentration”; Karan Mahajan, also a Michener Center graduate student, for an excerpt from his novel “Notes on a Small Bomb”; and Jenn Shapland, an English Department graduate student, for her essay collection “Finders Keepers.”
Fiction writer Fiona McFarlane, a Michener Center graduate, whose stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere, received the 2012 prize.
Established by the the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, the Keene Prize is given in honor of E. L. Keene, a 1942 graduate of the university who “envisioned an award that would enhance and enrich the university’s prestige and support the work of young writers,” which would be given for “the most vivid and vital portrayal of the American experience in microcosm.” The award is given to enrolled undergraduate or graduate students for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or plays.
