Genre: Poetry

Innovator of American Verse Wins Bollingen Prize

G&A: The Contest Blog
2.25.11

The Yale University Library announced yesterday the winner of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar Bollingen Prize for a poet's lifetime contributions to the art.

The award goes to "fierce elegist" Susan Howe, author of works of poetry and lyric prose that weave together "history and mysticism, Puritan New England devotional writing and the Irish folk Ballad, visual lyricism and dramatic narrative, scholarship and memoir."

According to judges Peter Gizzi, Marjorie Perloff, and Claudia Rankine, Howe's most recent book, That This, published by New Directions in December, "makes manifest the raw edges of elegy through the collision of verse and prose, visionary lyricism and mundane incident, ekphrasis, visual patterning, and the reclamation of historical documents." Howe wrote the book after the sudden death of her husband, scholar Peter H. Hare, in 2008.

Howe's oeuvre also includes the poetry collections Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), The Midnight (2003), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), all published by New Directions, and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is author of the prose volumes The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

The Bollingen Prize has been given biennially since 1948 to honor American poets. Past winners include John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Adrienne Rich.

Poetic Filibuster in Madison, Wisconsin

Caption: 

On the fifth day of protests at the Wisconsin state capital in Madison, poet Kai Carlson-Wee, a student in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin, participated in the public filibuster opposing legislation introduced by the state's governor, Scott Walker, that could strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights. On Friday the state Assembly passed the controversial bill; it still has to pass the state Senate.

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Poetry
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Poetic Filibuster

Astraea Foundation's Grant Deadline Falls in March

G&A: The Contest Blog
2.23.11

The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice will once again award ten-thousand-dollar grants to a poet and a fiction writer, but with a deadline falling a few months earlier than last year's. Entries for the 2011 awards, given to lesbian writers for work with lesbian content, will be due by the end of the business day on March 22.

Two finalists in each genre will receive one thousand dollars each and six honorable mentions will be awarded one hundred dollars each, with at least one of the grants given to a writer west of the Mississippi. A panel of distinguished lesbian writers, which has in the past been populated by writers such as Sharon Bridgforth, Staceyanne Chin, Kristen Hogan, Achy Obejas, and Pamela Sneed, will select the grantees.

For guidelines on what to submit and access to Astraea's online submission system (their preferred mode of entry), visit the foundation's Web site.

In the video below, 2010 poetry winner Lenelle Moïse reads a poem inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat over a montage of his paintings.

White Collar Poet

Caption: 

This clip is the prologue of an original Web series, produced by Awkward Moment Productions, about Richard Scribe, the CEO of an insurance company who reads poetry on the streets of Vancouver's financial district. The mockumentary is written and directed by Michael Grand and stars David Lewis, John Shaw, and Leo Wilson.

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Poetry
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White Collar Poet

February 21

The Time Is Now
2.21.11

Write a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem made up, typically, of three stanzas of four lines, and a fourth of two lines, or a couplet. Use the following rhyme scheme: In each of the first three stanzas, rhyme the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines (a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f); and rhyme the lines of the couplet (g, g). For a traditional example, see Shakespeare's "From you have I been absent in the spring...." For a contemporary example, see Denis Johnson's "Heat."

NBF Looks Inside Award-Winning American Poetry Books

G&A: The Contest Blog
2.18.11

The National Book Foundation (NBF) has begun to roll out its series of conversations about the poetry volumes that have won the National Book Award in the genre over the past sixty-one years. Fifty-one books (the prize was not awarded from 1984 to 1990, which accounts for the discrepancy), from William Carlos Williams's Paterson: Book Three and Selected Poems (New Directions, 1950) to Terrance Hayes's Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), will be covered in short essays by contemporary emerging poets such as Ross Gay, John Murillo, and Evie Shockley.

The project is part of the NBF's Lineage program, celebrating the poetry prize's all-stars since 1950 (two years ago, the NBF published a similar series of essays highlighting its fiction winners). The retrospective, says NBF director of programs Leslie Shipman, is designed "to generate a discussion [about] how American poetry has evolved over the past sixty years and it's current vitality in the cultural landscape."

The foundation is also holding a related panel and poetry reading next Thursday and Friday in New York City. Later this spring the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis will host a Lineage presentation, and one additional event in another city is also in the works.

To read the daily poetry book posts, which include biographical information, excerpts of poems, links, and contextual nuggets, visit the NBF's Web site.

In the video below, Kathy Bates reads 1952 winner Marianne Moore's "Poetry." The NBF essay on Moore's Collected Poems was written by poet Lee Felice Pinkas.

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