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Derrick Weston Brown reads "Misdirected," a poem in the form of the Bop incorporating lyrics from "Find a Way," a song off A Tribe Called Quest's album Love Movement. Brown's poetry collection Wisdom Teeth was published by PM Press in 2011.
"Sometimes in my dreams I sign and everyone understands me." In this 2011 documentary directed by Judy Lieff, a deaf teen is introduced to American Sign Language (ASL) Poetry and enters into the spoken word slam scene. Deaf Jam has inspired a website which includes resources for ASL poets and workshops with the artists featured in the film.
This week, select a random year from the last five to ten years, and by combing through your memory, old notes, e-mails, and calendars, jot down a list of events in your life from that year. What were some of your reactions and emotions that accompanied those situations? Write a poem that encapsulates the ups and downs of that single year. Be sure to explore how the intervening years between then and now may have provided you with a wiser, refreshed perspective on past occurrences, and offers a reflective conclusion to your poem.
Submissions are currently open for the 2016 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, given annually for a single poem. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Indiana Review. Camille Rankine will judge.
Using the online submission system, submit up to three poems totaling no more than eight pages with a $20 entry fee by April 1. The fee, which includes a one-year subscription to the review, must be mailed separately to Indiana Review, Ballantine Hall 529, 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405. All entries are considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
Judge Camille Rankine has written one poetry collection, Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and is the assistant director of the MFA program at Manhattanville College. “Poetry can say all the hard things, all the things that you aren’t supposed to say in polite conversation,” says Rankine in a recent interview with Indiana Review. “I’m drawn to poems that have something to say—it can be something large or small, but I want to read a poem that feels like it needed to be written.” Rankine’s full interview is available on the journal’s website.
Eduardo C. Corral selected Caitlin Scarano as the winner of the 2015 prize for her poem “Between the Bloodhounds and My Shrinking Mouth.” Eileen Myles selected Cecilia Woloch as the winner of the 2014 prize for her poem “2006.”
Established in 1977, Indiana Review is published biannually and edited by graduate students at Indiana University. The journal publishes poetry, fiction, essays, and art.
Listen to Camille Rankine read from her debut collection as part of the Poets & Writers’ Page One podcast series below.
The winners of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. The winners include Ross Gay in poetry for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press), Paul Beatty in fiction for The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maggie Nelson in criticism for The Argonauts (Graywolf Press), and Margo Jefferson in autobiography for Negroland (Pantheon).
Charlotte Gordon won in biography for Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House), and Sam Quinones won in nonfiction for Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury). Kirstin Valdez Quade won the John Leonard Prize—given for an outstanding first book in any genre—for her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (Norton). Carlos Lozada, an associate editor and nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Wendell Berry, the author of eight novels, two story collections, twenty-eight books of poetry, and thirty-one books of nonfiction, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
The finalists in poetry were Terrance Hayes for How to Be Drawn (Penguin), Ada Limón for Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions), Sinéad Morrissey for Parallax and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the late Frank Stanford for What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press).
The fiction finalists were Lauren Groff for Fates and Furies (Riverhead), Valeria Luiselli for The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press), Anthony Marra for The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth), and Ottessa Moshfegh for Eileen (Penguin Press).
The finalists in criticism were Ta-Nehisi Coates for Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau), Leo Damrosch for Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale University Press), Colm Tóibín for On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press), and James Wood for The Nearest Thing to Life (Brandeis University Press).
The finalists in autobiography were Elizabeth Alexander for The Light of the World (Grand Central), Vivian Gornick for The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), George Hodgman for Bettyville (Viking), and Helen Macdonald for H Is for Hawk (Grove Press).
Established in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are among the most prestigious prizes for literature, are given annually for books published in the previous year. A board of twenty-four working newspaper and magazine critics and editors nominates and selects the winners each year. The 2014 winners included Claudia Rankine in poetry, Marilynne Robinson in fiction, and Roz Chast in autobiography.
Photos from left to right: Ross Gay (Jim Krause), Paul Beatty, Maggie Nelson, and Margo Jefferson
"Nothing is so beautiful as a poem / except maybe a nightingale, / thinks the poet writing about death..." A poem from Kim Addonizio's collection My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014) is brought to life in this Motionpoems film by Thomas Bryan Michurski.
Actors Aidan Quinn, Ellen Barkin, Stockard Channing, Liam Neeson, and Gabriel Byrne read selections from Irish poets including Samuel Beckett, Francis Ledwidge, and William Butler Yeats for a project launched by Culture Ireland, an organization that promotes Irish arts worldwide.
Oxford Magazine, Miami University Press
"Blind Willie Johnson could coax / music from a single string. God plucked a rib / and found a woman." Kim Addonizio's poem "Cigar Box Banjo" is adapted by Danny Madden for this installment from Motionpoems.
"Robert, you've wasted so much of your life / Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you / Do that again? I would, a thousand times." In Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy, director Haydn Reiss tracks the evolution of the prolific, mystical poet and his impact on American poetry through interviews with Louise Erdrich, Edward Hirsch, Tracy K. Smith, and others.
