In September P&W-supported poet Tim Toaster Henderson was the featured performer at Coast Slam in Fort Bragg, California. First-time slam judge Gene Lock blogs about the event (with a little help by series director Christina Perez).

A poetry slam, we now know, has rules. Poems are orally presented, in front of a microphone. The poems must fit in a time slot of three minutes. Structure, rhyme, and meter are optional. Poets come to the front of the audience, one at a time, and deliver their work. Then the judges (there were five of us at the September slam) hold up cards ranging from one to ten, and fractions thereof. So, the poet might receive an 8.7 or a 9.3, a la Olympics. A time-/scorekeeper records the scores, discards the high and low, and averages the remainder.

In preparation for judging, my wife, Susan, and I learned that points are awarded for two components: 1) content—does the poem successfully use metaphor, alliteration, image, and tone? and 2) presentation—does the poet read the poem off paper (not so good), or deliver it from memory using voice, eye contact, and body language?

The roughly ten poets that night ranged from high school students to middle-aged folk. Some poems were funny, political, or whimsical. Some seemed highly personal—chronicling inner turmoil, thoughts of suicide, etc. These poems were especially moving. If nothing else, this contest gave the poets an appreciative, or at least open-minded, audience, and it let them communicate effectively, and get feedback in the form of applause.

The featured poet of the night was Tim Toaster Henderson. He is big, with a mess of huge hair constantly spilling from a grey knit hat. He spoke of being biracial and performed a poem about a man going back to 1968 and having a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. Another poem was a satire about the unconscious racism of a classmate’s mother. Hilarity turned biting, leaving us all to question how we too, might display our unwitting racism. When Tim switched topics, we learned about the short lives of insects and roared with laughter at their sex lives.

If I’d never gone, I wouldn’t much think about how such an event benefited poets, especially those wrestling with demons past and present. Now I see that it takes quite a bit of nerve and public speaking ability to deliver these poems to strangers.

The moderator, a poet herself, kept the program upbeat, and moving along well. My wife Susan was so inspired that she wrote a poem about the slam:

Slam

A metal chair
unfolded, absorbing
cold from the night air.

A clipboard clutching woman,
a white blaze
adorning her black hair.

A confident couple
she white, he half,
his tallness topped
with twisted tendril hair
ease concealing the depths
they will soon share.

A freshman poet,
his proud family filling out a row.
A pink-haired poet,
bubbling with anger and woe.

A tortured young woman
pushing back.
A bitten camper,
repellent left out of her pack.

A writer
with language and humor
at her command.
A first-timer
with notebook trembling in hand.

Gutsy people
seeking community,
rebuffing society,
altering history,
exploring mystery,
resolving polarity,
evoking hilarity

Opening themselves
to us more timid.

Photo: Tim Toaster Henderson (with pizza box) at Coast Slam. Credit: Tony Greene.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Sehba Sarwar blogs about her role as founding and artistic director of P&W-supported Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), a Houston-based alternative arts organization. A writer and multidisciplinary artist, Sarwar uses her poetry, prose, and video/art installations to explore displacement and women’s issues on a domestic and global level. Her first novel, Black Wings, was published in 2004, and she is currently working on a second manuscript tentatively entitled "Island."

On October 1, 2012, Inprint, Inc., and the Poetry Society of America in association with Nuestra Palabra presented a panel discussion, Red, White & Blue: Poets on Politics, featuring Sandra Cisneros and Tony Hoagland and moderated by the Poetry Society’s executive director Alice Quinn. The gathering, held at the University of Houston, drew a mix of students and community members and there was a rich conversation about the urgency of poets to speak in response to social issues. Both Cisneros and Hoagland read work by poets they admire, followed by a discussion about the importance of giving voice to community. Sandra closed with a poem by Amber Past, who lives in Mexico but archives stories of indigenous women.

The next morning, I had a spontaneous breakfast with Sandra, who I know because I’ve been part of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop for the past four years. The group, which began fifteen years ago with twenty writers gathering at Sandra’s kitchen table, long before a nonprofit was formed, gave San Antonio and Austin-based writers a space to gather and share their work. Once Macondo evolved into a nonprofit arts organization, annual summer retreats were organized in San Antonio. At its peak, Macondo had as many as 80 members. We gathered in San Antonio from around the United States and Mexico to workshop our writing or to gain time to write. Today, the Macondo Writers’ Workshop is going through a transition as Sandra steps back to focus on her own writing.

Many artists, like Sandra, initiate arts organizations because they have a passion for their work and want to share art and resources with a larger community. However, there is a natural tension between the creation of art itself and the formalization of an arts organization. Art is not a prescribed process. One begins the journey without knowing the ending and most artists who start arts organizations either give up their own art or step away from the formal structures they create. Next year, Sandra will be taking a year’s retreat in Mexico so she can write. “I’m going to Mexico for the same reasons you go to Pakistan each year,” she tells me. “I need to be reinvigorated.”

The act of writing is solitary. We need community for feedback and support, but to create work, we need time to be alone. As I reflect on my visit with Sandra, I remember a January 2012 New York Times opinion piece by Susan Cain, who talks about how “group-work” is over-emphasized in today’s world. “Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption,” Cain states. Her words make sense to me. In the flutter of our time, when to remain visible one must tweet or post on Facebook and always keep a product in sight, the need to slow down and reflect is underestimated. I applaud writers and artists who resist producing, and instead, dedicate time to the process.

Photo: Sehba Sarwar. Credit: Emaan Reza.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston 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.

Hilary Mantel, author of the historical novel Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) has been awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize. This is her second win. 

Mantel first received the prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), the first book in a trilogy of which Bring Up the Bodies is the second installment. Mantel is only the third author—after Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee—and the first woman to win the prize twice, and is the first to win with a sequel. She receives an award of 50,000 British pounds.

The Wolf Hall trilogy surrounds Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, and the eventual death of Anne Boleyn. In an announcement made last week on the Man Booker website, the judges said of Mantel’s work: “Her resuscitation of Thomas Cromwell—and with him the historical novel—is one of the great achievements of modern literature.”  

The book was selected from a shortlist that included Tan Twan Eng for The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books), Deborah Levy for Swimming Home (And Other Stories), Alison Moore for The Lighthouse (Salt), Will Self for Umbrella (Bloomsbury), and Jeet Thayil for Narcopolis (Faber & Faber). Peter Stothard, Dinah Birch, Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens, and Bharat Tandon judged. 

Mantel is currently at work on the third and final installment in the trilogy, to be titled The Mirror and the Light, which will continue Cromwell's story until his execution in 1540.

In the video below from the Guardian, Mantel discusses her second Man Booker win. 

The Story Prize, an annual book award given for a short story collection, has announced its panel of judges for the 2012 awards. They are critic and writer Jane Ciabattari, author Yiyun Li, and bookseller Sarah McNally.

Jane Ciabattari is the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire (Canios Editions, 2002). Her reviews, interviews, and reportage have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, Bookforum, Salon, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among many others.

Sarah McNally founded McNally Jackson Books, New York City's largest independent bookstore, which she has owned and operated since 2004.

Yiyun Li is the author of the story collections Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House, 2010) and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House, 2005) and a novel, The Vagrants (Random House, 2009). A former MacArthur Foundation fellow, she has received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of its Best of Young American novelists, and in 2010, The New Yorker named her one of its top 20 fiction writers under 40. 

Judges for The Story Prize are selected from various literary fields, and have included writers, editors, booksellers, librarians, critics, journalists, and academics.

Founded in 2004 by director Larry Dark, the Story Prize is given for fiction collections published in the United States during the previous year. The winner receives $20,000, and each finalist receives $5,000. Past winners have included Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Doerr, Mary Gordon, Patrick O'Keeffe, Jim Shepard, and Tobias Wolff. Last year, Steven Millhauser won the prize—edging out finalists Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman—for his collection We Others (Knopf, 2012).

The submission deadline for this year’s Story Prize is November 15. Finalists will be announced in January, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on March 13. For more information and up-to-date news, visit the Story Prize blog.