This year's MacArthur Foundation Fellows, commonly referred to as recipients of the organization's "Genius" grant, have been announced. Among a class of fellows that includes a virologist, a cellist, an architect, a lawyer for elder rights, an evolutionary geneticist, and a silversmith, poet Kay Ryan is honored for her "deceptively simple verse of wisdom and elegance."

Ryan, who from 2008 to 2009 served as the sixteenth U.S. poet laureate, will receive the five-hundred-thousand-dollar prize, designed to encourage continued work, but with "no strings attached," over the next five years. Author of seven collections, she was honored earlier this year with the Pulitzer Prize for her latest book, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010).

Translator and poet A. E. Stallings, whose work is influenced by her training in classical Greek and Latin, also received the fellowship. Currently living in Athens, Stallings is recognized for "revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity's relevance for today." Aside from her translations of Plutarch, Lucretius, and other classical writers, her original works include Hapax (2006) and Archaic Smile (1999). A new poetry collection, Olives, is forthcoming in 2012 from TriQuarterly Books. 

For biographies of and interviews with the 2011 fellows, who range in age from twenty-nine to sixty-seven and represent ten states, plus Washington, D.C., Greece, and British Columbia, visit the MacArthur website.

In the video below, Ryan describes the impact of the MacArthur grant, especially for a writer at sixty-five, and where she is in her work, "always just beginning."

Ruminate on the following lines by Greek poet Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget / falls drop by drop upon the heart, / until, in our own despair, / against our will, / comes wisdom / through the awful grace of God."

Use these lines as the epigraph to a poem. Once you've finished the poem, delete the epigraph.

Longtime P&W-supported writer Patricia Roth Schwartz blogs about the literary happenings across Seneca County, New York.

What can you say of a region that boasts scenic views rivaling those of England's Lake Country? Where grapevines laden with fruit slope down to lakeshores in late summer? Where over one hundred wineries offer tastings, lakeside cafés? Eleven lakes offer angling, paddling, and sailing. Mennonites’ horses and buggies traverse country roads creating a landscape that seems over a century old.

It's a poet’s world. Making connections with other poets and writers, though, isn't easy. Without the kinds of venues more urban areas can sustain, this loose collection of hamlets, villages, townships, and two small cities, Auburn and Geneva, has had no central clearinghouse for writers.

Still, we're out here. Some at local colleges, some transplanted, educated and polished, others untutored having written secretly for years. We are seniors eager to write memoir, teens braving an open mic, mothers with toddlers and manuscripts in tow, retirees finally finding time to write.

The number of literary events, and venues for them, has grown in recent years. Public libraries offer most of the literary programming: readings by published authors, writing workshops, poetry readings. An evening at Seneca Falls Public Library on April 1st, with featured readers and an open mic, was particularly successful. The Seneca County Arts Council which maintains a small space in Seneca Falls full of vibrant artwork, has also hosted literary-based workshops.

Mary Genter, aka "Marabee, your hometown muse," has started a reading series at Riverbend Café in Auburn. Charlotte Dickens of Watkins Glen has curated a P&W-supported reading series, now held in Montour Falls near the southern tip of Seneca Lake, for twenty years. I've begun an open mic series at ZuZu Café in Seneca Falls. Writer/ publisher Steve Tills sponsors events at Buffalo Bill's Family Restaurant and Tap Room in Shortsville; John Cieslinski of Macedon, uses his charming bookstore, Books, Etc., for readings and author appearances. Fatzinger Hall above Waterloo Library, a Victorian lecture hall where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas both appeared, hosts a reading series.

We learn about what’s happening through e-mails, fliers, news articles, and word of mouth. As a sense of community begins to gel, Tills and I have formed a grassroots organization, the Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes, hoping to bring all of this together. Our inaugural P&W-supported reading, "An Evening of Poetry," at Fatzinger Hall, was attended by poets from Auburn, Geneva, and Rochester.

Should you travel here, look for me lakeside, sipping wine and writing poems.

Photo: Patricia Roth Schwartz. Credit: Sandy Zohari.

Support for the Reading/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

We've caught some buzz over the past few days about an organization called the World Poetry Movement holding a Bill Murray Poetry Contest. While there's no promise on the contest website that the beloved actor will actually read the poems written "for" him, our friends in the poetry world are embracing the challenge with whimsy—after all, the competition, which promises one thousand dollars and publication (plus possible "recording"), is free.

Blogger Kelly C at Videogum, who pens a wonky sonnet for the actor, breaks it down, "Well, I don’t know. Obviously this raises a lot of questions that I wasn’t able to answer with a quick look at the website. Publication where? Who would record it and for what? What is this thing even about at all? But it doesn’t matter, because when you win it you will win one thousand dollars apparently, from someone, and who couldn’t use an extra one thousand dollars from someone?"

The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog gave the contest a shout-out too, though, unlike Ms. C, no staffer took a stab at a Murray tribute poem. However, someone does hope to have arrived at the winning title, courtesy of Murray's Herman Blume: "Yeah, I Was in the Shit."

Whether or not you get in on the action (entries are due on September 30), check out Murray's poetry reading for construction workers on a break from building a new home for New York City's Poets House in 2009. (Perhaps the Rushmore-esque music will inspire a your Murray muse.)