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One of a writer’s most powerful tools is sensory perception. As an exercise, deprive yourself of stimulation. Sit quietly in a dark room, turn off and hide your electronics, and avoid becoming distracted. Try this for an entire day, or whatever time span you can manage. After leaving yourself alone with your thoughts for some time, write a story inspired by your musings. Try starting with a single sentence that may have risen to the surface during your day.
The shortlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious annual awards for literary fiction, was announced today.
The finalists include: Tan Twan Eng for The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books), Deborah Levy for Swimming Home (And Other Stories), Hilary Mantel for Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate), Alison Moore for The Lighthouse (Salt), Will Self for Umbrella (Bloomsbury), and Jeet Thayil for Narcopolis (Faber & Faber).
The six short-listed titles were culled from the original longlist of twelve, which were announced in July.
On the Man Booker website, Chair of Judges Peter Stothard said: “After re-reading an extraordinary longlist of twelve, it was the pure power of prose that settled most debates. We loved the shock of language shown in so many different ways and were exhilarated by the vigour and vividly defined values in the six books that we chose—and in the visible confidence of the novel's place in forming our words and ideas.”
The Man Booker Prize is given annually for a work of fiction published in the previous year by a writer from the United Kingdom, British Commonwealth, or Republic of Ireland. The winner of the 2012 prize will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on October 16. Each of the six short-listed writers is awarded £2,500. The winner receives an additional £50,000.
Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies is the follow-up to Wolf Hall, the first in a trilogy, which took the prize in 2009. Ladbrokes, the British betting firm who has recently set its sights on literary awards, projects Mantel to win the prize again this year.
In the video below, Mantel introduces Bring up the Bodies, which was published this past May.
Read up on a famous figure (living or dead) whose personality is completely different from your own. Write a poem from that person's perspective about an important event or series of events that shaped who he or she was.
Brendan Constantine, September’s Writer in Residence, was born in 1967 and named after Irish playwright Brendan Behan. An ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities, he is one of the region’s most recognized authors. He is currently poet-in-residence at the Windward School and regularly conducts workshops in hospitals, foster homes, and with the Art of Elysium. His latest collections of poetry are Birthday Girl With Possum (2011 Write Bloody Publishing) and Calamity Joe (2012 Red Hen Press). He lives in Hollywood, California, at Bela Lugosi’s last address.
Hello again. My name is Brendan Constantine and welcome to my second post as guest “blogger.” I’ve been sitting here quite a while contemplating what to write, and I may’ve drifted into Overscrupulosity: over-thinking against under-whelming, editing before actually writing.
If only I could embrace the maxim I use in the classroom: Writer’s Block is almost never a deficit of magic but a surplus of judgment. I believe this, I do, but I'm still stuck. This is particularly ironic because what I want to talk about is Speechlessness; a speechless woman and a speechless universe. Maybe I can get this rolling if I work backwards and start with the universe.
Did you know we may’ve been contacted by beings from another world? Thirty-five years ago, an astronomer named Jerry Ehman was working with a SETI project (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) at the Perkins Observatory in Ohio. The radio telescope there is called “The Big Ear” and sits alone in a vast field. Every few days, Ehman would drive out to examine coded print-outs of any signals detected in a given piece of sky.
He was looking for a particular set of digits that would ensure the signal originated from outside our system. No one in his profession had ever seen them. But on August 15, 1977, Jerry Ehman saw a chain of figures so close to ideal, he circled them with a pen and wrote the word, “Wow.” This piece of paper was saved and can be visited online. Just look for “the Wow signal.”
Haven’t heard about this? Well, it’s a curious thing, but the buzz didn’t last long. You see, the signal was never heard again. We know it came from somewhere near Sagittarius, but in all this time there’s been nothing else to Wow about.
Poets are also big on repetition. What we call Form is really what we choose to repeat. Meter, rhyme, the whole of prosody is not a matter of what happens in one line, but what happens in the next.
Because there was no second signal, many astronomers believe the first must have been natural, random, a blank verse, perhaps the gasp of a dying sun. If someone were out there, wouldn’t they keep talking?
Which brings me to the speechless woman.
I’m going to call her Edith. We met a while back at an eldercare center in West Los Angeles. My visit was part of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, a program that brings poetry to people challenged with dementia. Routinely, I engage the room in recitations of classic poetry and then create new poems based on their responses. On this day I read Kipling’s haunting piece, “The Way Through The Woods.” We discussed other paths we knew, like the way to the store or the way home from school.
It was around this point that Edith, who seldom spoke, suddenly engaged. Really, a better term would be “detonated.”
“Brooklyn!” she said. “So many cracked sidewalks in Brooklyn when I was a girl. Nothing like’ em. You know, it was the Great Depression and...”
It was the Great Depression and Edith was maybe seven years old. After school, she’d often make her way to the jewelry district. Nobody was buying much jewelry then, but some merchants kept their hours. Edith had somehow made friends with a few who occasionally let her play with new stones.
“They let me be a princess,” she said, “I wore rings and bracelets, sometimes a tiara, and I sparkled like a dream. I was always good about giving everything back. I never stayed too long and I never fussed. ”
She stopped there and looked at me, half smiling, half wary. She’d forgotten who I was again. I put my hand out and we started over. Later, I asked one of the nurses if she’d heard that incredible story. She said she hadn’t. I wondered, still wonder, if Edith’s family ever has.
How many of her fellow seniors, so advanced in their senility, are regarded as “unreachable”? On what experience do we presume the distance a voice must travel, even our own? Does what we say come from the present, or the past? How far back does it start? Years? Light years? Have we spoken yet?
If this is too romantic a notion, too “airy-fairy,” look at it this way: If it’s been a while since you wrote anything you care about, is that any reason to despair?
Photo: Brendan Constantine. Credit: Lily Marker.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Last week, the British betting firm Ladbrokes announced that Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami had emerged as the favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, coming in with 10/1 odds. As of yesterday, the international literary star has moved up in the rankings to 7/1—with none other than Bob Dylan, at 10/1, following tightly on his heels. Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom and Chinese author Mo Yan are right behind them, at 12/1.
Last year, the eventual Nobel winner, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, was given 9/2 odds. But he wasn’t expected to win: Syrian poet Adonis was the final favorite, coming in at 4/1 (this year, Adonis still makes the top twenty, but has fallen to 14/1). Dylan was also a close candidate last year, at one point late in the betting even coming in as the number-one pick, pulling ahead of Murakami (who was at the time 8/1), Adonis, and eventual winner Tranströmer.
In the past decade, North America hasn’t fared so well in the Nobel race. The last American to win the prestigious literary prize was Toni Morrison, who won in 1993. Aside from Dylan, the only United States authors to make it into the top twenty this year include Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Phillip Roth. Canada, who has never had a Nobel Laureate, tops the list with short story writer Alice Munro (whose newest collection, Dear Life, will be released by Knopf in November), at 20/1. Other Canadians to make it into the betting pool this year include Margaret Atwood, at 50/1, and poet Anne Carson, at 100/1.
Also sitting in the 20/1 position is Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, whose forthcoming memoir, There Was a Country, will be released by Penguin in October. Hovering just above him in the line-up are Umberto Eco at 25/1, and Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, and E. L. Doctorow, all at 33/1. Joining Atwood at 50/1 are Ian McEwan, Maya Angelou, Chang-Rae Lee, and Peter Carey. And the list goes on and on, including such contemporary literary greats as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula Le Guin, David Malouf, Salman Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, Milan Kundera, Julian Barnes, and John Ashbery, all at 66/1; and Michael Ondaatje, Paul Auster, Louise Glück, and Jonathan Franzen coming in at 100/1.
Candidates to win the Nobel Prize in Literature may be nominated by Swedish Academy members or esteemed international literary figures. Earlier this year, Peter Englund, the head of the Swedish Academy, revealed that 46 of the 210 nominated writers for this year's prize were first-time selections.
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced later this fall. For more information about the prize, visit the Nobel Prize website.
On August 10, 2012, P&W–sponsored poets Wilfredo Borges, Caridad De La Luz, and Iya Ibo Mandingo performed at Dances With Wordz: Orisha Poetry in New York City, an event organized by Latinos NYC. Readings/Workshops program intern Nikay Paredes reports.
Dances With Wordz: Orisha Poetry, curated by Latinos NYC founder and CEO Raul K. Rios, featured performances celebrating the Yuroba faith of West Africa. The poets, garbed in white from head to toe, were an immaculate presence inside the Nuyorican Poets Café even before they took the stage. The Nuyorican has long been a venue and community for artists looking to elevate poetry, music, comedy, theatre, and the visual arts in a diverse, multicultural environment.
Dances With Wordz began with an open mic dedicated to the faith. Poet-nomad Wilfredo “Baba” Borges blessed the audience with a prayer-song. He spoke of ancestries, mothers and fathers, exclaiming proudly: “Where I’m from is a land of defiance, not defeat.” Poetry performances were complemented by song and dance, including a drumming performance by batá group Conjunto Oba Ire. The batá or Yoruba drum, they explained to the audience, is inhabited by Orisha or guardian spirits of the Yoruba faith.
Nuyorican darling Caridad “La Bruja” De La Luz read from her first collection, The Poetician, then proceeded to rap and sing after reciting what she fondly called “straight up poetry.” Writer, actor, and painter Iya Ibo Mandingo performed last, conjuring images of home: luscious mangoes and coconuts. He ended his performance with a declarative poem, inciting reactions from the audience, which ranged from the gleeful to the guttural.
Raul K. Rios closed the reading with these apt words: “Don’t praise behind closed doors. Let the conversation exist.” Rios, through Latinos NYC, aims to transform drug-ridden communities in New York City with feeding programs, clothing drives, and poetry readings.
He thanked P&W for helping him with the transformation: “Having Poets & Writers on our side every year means Latinos NYC can put on a better event and compensate the poets for their time and talent.”
Photos: (Top) Wildfredo “Baba” Borges. (Bottom) Caridad “La Bruja” De La Luz. Credit: Nikay Paredes.
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 A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Now that fall has almost arrived, ruminate about all that happened over the summer. Choose a moment or a scene that you distinctly remember and freewrite about it. What took place? Who was involved? Is it important? If not, why did you remember it? How did it make you feel? Review your freewriting and transform what you discover into an essay that transcends the subject at hand, so that it has universal appeal to readers.
Write a story with two major threads, each with two characters. For example, the first could be a man and a woman driving in a car–where are they going? what happens along the way? what are they discussing? The second thread could be about two boys in a canoe–do they get along? what is the relationship between them? what happens to cause tension between them? Switch back and forth between each thread, spinning each of the stories. Find a way to slowly weave the stories together: Do the two sets of characters cross paths? Are they somehow related? Is one story something that happened in the past of a character from the other story?
Write a poem that incorporates the following words: transfer, single, impend, knot, rhapsody, revue, air lock.
The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine have announced the winners of the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships. The prestigious $15,000 awards are given annually to five emerging United States poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one.
The 2012 fellows are: Reginald Dwayne Betts, the author of a poetry collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), and a memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery, 2009); Nicholas Friedman, a lecturer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Richie Hofmann, who has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and the AWP Intro Journal Award for Poetry; Rickey Laurentiis, whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, the Indiana Review, and jubilat; and Jacob Saenz, who received the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship in 2011 and is currently an associate editor of the poetry magazine RHINO.
The editors of Poetry magazine chose the winning manuscripts from more than a thousand submissions. On the Poetry Foundation website, editor Christian Wiman said of the winners, “The history of Poetry is filled with some of the best-known names in American poetry; my guess is that these young poets will be among those we'll be talking about in the years to come.”
The five Ruth Lilly Fellows will have their work featured in the November issue of Poetry and on the Poetry Foundation website.
Established in 1989 by philanthropist Ruth Lilly to “encourage the further writing and study of poetry,” the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship program gives $75,000 in fellowship prizes each year. The program is operated by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which also publishes Poetry magazine.
Founded by poet, editor, and literary scholar Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly magazine dedicated to the form. The magazine has published the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg, among many other distinguished poets, as well as numerous emerging writers. The Poetry Foundation is a literary organization that “exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.”
The 2012 Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry, an annual award of $100,000 given by the Poetry Foundation to a living United States poet, was awarded to poet W. S. Di Piero this past spring.
