Rings of Saturn

by
W. G. Sebald
Contributor: 
Melissa Faliveno, <i>Poets & Writers Magazine</i>’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow,

Location

New York, NY
United States
New York US

“There’s something about Rings of Saturn that speaks directly to me as a writer.

Chewing Tinfoil

Brock Davis animates "OK" by Matt Sumell in Electric Literature's latest Single Sentence Animation.

Jo Shapcott Honored for Life's Work in Poetry

London-born poet Jo Shapcott has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, an occasional honor given since 1933 for either a single poem by a U.K. writer or a poet's entire oeuvre. Shapcott received the prize for her body of work, the most recent addition to which is Of Mutability (Faber & Faber, 2010), the poet's award-winning chronicle of her battle with cancer.

"The award of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is the true crowning of Jo's career," said U.K. poet laureate Carol Anne Duffy, who headed up the judging panel. "The calm but sparkling Englishness of her poetry manages to combine accessibility with a deeply cerebral engagement with all the facets of being humanalert to art and science, life and death."

Shapcott, who teaches at the University of London, is also the author of Her Book: Poems 19881998 (Faber & Faber, 2000); My Life Asleep (Oxford University Press, 1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize; and Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

In the video below, Shapcott reads from her most recent collection.

Apple Rumors, Most Anticipated Books of 2012, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
1.3.12

An upcoming Apple event is rumored to be about e-publishing; The Millions previews its most anticipated books of 2012; the New York Observer reports on authors whose work falls into the public domain this year, including James Joyce; and other news.

New Year's Resolution

Make your New Year’s resolution the title of a poem. Write a poem exploring the dimensions of the resolution, perhaps considering what would happen if you kept to it strictly for an entire year or if you broke it right away. Read Mark Halliday’s “Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women” for inspiration. 

The Meta-Narrative

Using John Ashbery's poem "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name" from Houseboat Days as a model, tell a story by telling us how to tell a story. Scaffold the narrative by meditating on the nature of storytelling.
This week's creative nonfiction prompt comes from Vijay Seshadri, director of the nonfiction program at Sarah Lawrence College and author, most recently, of The Disappearances (Harper Collins, 2007).

"Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of My Eyes"

Amy King, the author of six poetry books, including I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011), reads her poem "Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of My Eyes" in this clip. Ugly Duckling Presse published a translation of Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Dimkovska, a poet from Skopje, Macedonia, in 2006.

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