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Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, as well as Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning, passed away yesterday in their respective countries; novelist Paul Auster has engaged in a war of words with Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey; Open Letters Monthly examines the hidden life of Virginia Woolf's institutionalized half-sister, Laura Makepeace Stephen; and other news.
How many times have you been to a poetry reading that sounds like this? Here are some helpful and hilarious tips on how not to read your poetry, from the Fishbowl Improv group.
The Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of this year's Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, two of the more lucrative honors in the genre. The one-hundred-thousand-dollar Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given to a writer in midcareer, went to New York City poet Timothy Donnelly for his second collection, The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books). Donnelly, whose first book, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of "Eine Lebenszeit," was published in 2003 by Grove Press, has also published widely in journals such as A Public Space, the Nation, and the Paris Review.
Debut poet Katherine Larson of Tucson, Arizona, received the ten-thousand-dollar Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press). Larson's book was published in 2011 as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize the previous year, selected by Louise Glück.
The finalists for the Kingsley Tufts prize were Ed Roberson for To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press) and Christian Wiman for Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Finalists for the debut award were Julie Hanson for Unbeknownst (University of Iowa Press) and Shane McCrae for Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center).
Serving as the final judges for the award were poets David Barber, Kate Gale, Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, and Carl Phillips. The preliminary judges were poets Jericho Brown, Andrew Feld, and Suji Kwock Kim.
The winners will be feted on April 19 at a ceremony in Claremont, California, presided over by poet Maxine Hong Kingston.
The video below was filmed at Donnelly's Cloud Corporation release party at the offices of A Public Space in Brooklyn, New York.
GalleyCat reports adult hardcover sales were down in November; Oxford professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill offers choice words for the United Kingdom's poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy; Sherman Alexie responds to a ban of ethnic studies in Tucson classrooms; and other news.
Read the headlines in today's newspaper. Choose one that you find compelling, and without reading the accompanying article, write a story based on the headline.
Chinese activist Zhu Yufu is facing a prison sentence for a poem he circulated on the Internet; Melville House ponders if James Franco's forthcoming novel will be a bestseller; eighteen days before Charles Bukowski died, he faxed a poem to his publisher; and other news.
“Two thousand eleven was a year of seismic change—I held my breath and leapt into self-employment, got a house, got a dog, and set foot in three separate countries (not including New Orleans at Mardi Gras, which, believe me, should also count). It was hard to find a second to read, and when I did, I seemed to gravitate toward novels preoccupied with place and class: Money (Viking, 1985) by Martin Amis, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), Ship of Fools (Little, Brown, 1962) by Katherine Anne Porter.
"In 1999 the noted Dutch historian Geert Mak, author of The Bridge (Vintage, 2009) and In Amsterdam (Atlas, 1995), set out to travel through Europe and take stock of the tumultuous century that was then just passing. His account, In Europe (Pantheon Books, 2007), is part travelogue, part history, and takes the unique approach of tying its historical and culture themes to specific European cities, cities that Mak returns to in recurring chapters at different times.
Pick up a dictionary and randomly choose ten words. Write a poem in five stanzas, with five lines in each stanza, using two of the ten words in each. Make the number of stressed syllables in each line consistent among the stanzas. (The first line of each stanza should have the same number of stressed syllables, etc.)
In the Realms of the Unreal, a documentary film directed by Jessica Yu, explores the mystery of Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor in Chicago who wrote perhaps the world's longest novel and became one of the most famous figures in outsider art.
