October 31
Happy Halloween! In honor of this ghoulish holiday, the Poetry Foundation has put together a sampler of Halloween poems. Read and listen to them, then write one of your own.
Genre: Poetry
Lord Byron's Darkness
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To get us all in the mood for this evening's festivities, here's a reading of "Darkness," a poem written by Lord Byron in 1816, also known as the Year Without a Summer because Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies had erupted the previous year, throwing ash into the atmosphere that blocked the sun and caused abnormal weather patterns across northeast America and northern Europe. Happy Halloween!
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How to Identify a First Edition
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Learn how to decipher the sometimes arcane methods that publishers use to label first editions (the language and lines of numbers on copyright pages) in this incredibly helpful video from AbeBooks.
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ReLit Awards Honor Canada's Indie Press Authors
The 2011 ReLit Awards, celebrating books of poetry and fiction by Canadian authors published with Canadian small presses, were announced last night at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Presented along with signature rings featuring movable dials of type—a gift that almost didn't come to pass this year due to funding shortages—the awards' focus is on "ideas, not money" (no prize purse accompanies the honor).
The 2011 awards went to poet Dani Couture for Sweet and Craig Francis Power for his novel, Blood Relatives, both published by Toronto-based Pedlar Press. Tony Burgess won for his short story collection Ravenna Gets, from Anvil Press in Vancouver. The winning books were all published in 2010.
There is no entry fee for presses to submit books, which are due at the end of January each year. Visit the ReLit website for submission guidelines.
In the video below, Couture reads three poems from her winning book, including the title piece.
Whiting Awards Help Early-Career Writers "Negotiate With Their Doubts"
Last night in New York City the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation offered another group of emerging writers what could be a life- and career-altering gift. Since 1985, the foundation has annually offered fifty-thousand-dollar prizes to ten writers whose early work suggests the promise of a flourishing career—Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes are among the 270 poets, authors, and playwrights to have received the award in the past.
The 2011 Whiting Writers' Award honorees, most of whom have published only one book, are poets Don Mee Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Shane McCrae, and Kerri Webster; fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Ryan Call, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne; memoirist Paul Clemens; and playwright Amy Herzog. None of these writers applied for the award; winners are nominated by a group of anonymous literary professionals, which have historically included editors, agents, bookstore owners, and critics.
Poet Mark Doty, who received the Writers' Award in 1994, delivered the prize address, encouraging the winners to "savor this brilliant occasion of attention and celebration" and store it for those inevitable occasions where rejection and self-doubt threaten to define the day.
"May these awards...help you to negotiate with your doubts," he said. "May this award lend you aid and comfort while you move ahead in what I hope will be a long, happy work in service of what is real."
In the video below, Don Mee Choi reads from her book, The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010).
M. L. Liebler Retreats
Longtime P&W-supported sponsor and writer M. L. Liebler, author of fourteen books of poetry including The Moon A Box, which received the 2005 Patterson Poetry Award of Excellence, blogs about the second annual Detroit Michigan Writers' Retreat in downtown Detroit.
On the morning of September 17, about forty or so metro-area writers attended the second annual all-day Detroit Michigan Writers’ Retreat sponsored by Metro Detroit Writers and Springfed Arts at the legendary Virgil H. Carr Cultural Center in the heart of Paradise Valley. Folks arrived early for coffee, greetings, and to meet new writer friends. John D. Lamb once again offered an affordable, excellent retreat as he has since 1998. The retreat, for many years, was in northern Michigan, and each retreat featured a great lineup of acclaimed writers such as Michael Moore, Ben Hamper, Joyce Maynard, Thomas Lux, Alicia Ostriker, Dorianne Laux, and Billy Collins, among others. Last year, John moved the event from the wilderness of northern Michigan to the center of the city.
This morning began with a poetry craft talk by Denise Duhamel, who stressed the need to bring the concrete experiences of life into poems to make them as real as possible for audiences. She used examples from great works by Pablo Neruda, Ezra Pound, and Etheridge Knight. Denise was followed by Ohio novelist and memoirist Robert Olmstead, who offered detailed fiction techniques that reached many of Detroit’s fiction writers.
Following Robert's talk, writers took to the park in front of the Carr Center for lunch, gossip, and other writerly things. After lunch, E. Ethelbert Miller gave a motivational talk about the importance of being “activists for literature." I could hear by the discussions that followed, Miller's ideas resonated with Detroit-area writers. The afternoon craft talks ended with a strong presentation on memoir writing techniques and ways to get the most from our life stories. Miller shared his memoir on growing up in Trinidad and coming of age in New York City.
The day concluded with an open mic by the participants. This is the chance for attendees to share their talents, and I always find it very inspirational. Topics ranged from world peace to an exploration of diversity and multiculturalism. I was particularly struck by Ami Mattison, a Guam poet, who read an engaging poem about her life as a member of the Chamorro people.
By 6:00 that evening everyone left the retreat invigorated, charged up, and ready to take on their writing in new, inspirational ways... Success!
Photo: M. L. Liebler.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Detroit, 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.
October 24
Choose a draft of a poem that you've been working on or a poem that you aren't satisfied with. Print it out double-spaced. Write a new line between each line, then revise the poem as a whole, working to first expand it, then distill it to its most powerful form.
Chip Kidd's Cover Design for Murakami's 1Q84
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Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf and Pantheon, talks about his cover design for Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. Note the Spirograph drawings behind his desk (three of them were featured in Kidd's design of the January/February 2010 cover of Poets & Writers Magazine). And read Ken Gordon's take on the girth of Murakami's huge book and others in the current issue.
The Quiet, the Pizzazzy Compete for T. S. Eliot Prize
U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is among the writers shortlisted for this year's T. S. Eliot Prize, given for a poetry collection published in the United Kingdom. The award, which Duffy received in 2005 for her previous collection, Rapture (Macmillan), has honored international luminaries such as Anne Carson, Mark Doty, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott since its founding in 1993.
The books up for "the most demanding of all poetry prizes," in the words of judge and poet Gillian Clarke, are:
John Burnside's Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape), which won the 2011 Forward Prize earlier this month
Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees (Picador)
Leontia Flynn's Profit and Loss (Jonathan Cape)
David Harsent's Night (Faber and Faber)
John Kinsella's Armour (Picador)
Esther Morgan's Grace (Bloodaxe Books)
Daljit Nagra's Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Faber and Faber)
Sean O'Brien's November (Picador)
Bernard O'Donoghue's Farmer's Cross (Faber and Faber)
Memorial (Faber and Faber) by Alice Oswald, who won the Eliot Prize in 2002 for Dart (Faber and Faber)
"To me an exciting book is one that makes me want to be a poet—to stop and write a poem at that very moment," says Clarke, who will select the winner with the help of fellow poets Stephen Knight and Dennis O'Driscoll. "All these books are nourishing, exciting, and challenging. Some are more challenging, others more nourishing, but all are tremendously important to us in their different ways—in quiet ways and in pizzazzy ways."
The winner, who will receive a fifteen-thousand-pound prize (approximately twenty-four thousand dollars), will be announced by the Poetry Book Society on January 16. Each finalist will take home one thousand pounds (approximately sixteen hundred dollars).
The Publishing Revolution
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Richard Nash, the former head of Soft Skull Press and currently the CEO of Cursor and publisher of Red Lemonade who's interviewed by Gabriel Cohen in the current issue's special section, is shown here at this year's BookExpo America, where he discussed the ongoing changes in the publishing industry.
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