Genre: Poetry

A Winner Emerges From Eliot Prize's Shortened Shortlist

G&A: The Contest Blog
1.18.12

Earlier this week the U.K. Poetry Book Society (PBS) announced the winner of the prize two notable poets found too controversial to covet. The T. S. Eliot Prize, a fifteen-thousand-pound award (approximately $23,110) given for a book of poetry published in the previous year, went to John Burnside for his eleventh collection, Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape).

A little over a month ago, finalists John Kinsella (Armour, Picador) and Alice Oswald (Memorial, Faber and Faber) withdrew their respective collections from the prize running in protest of the recently-announced cosponsorship of the award by Aurum, an investment banking firm. Aurum's funding replaces that denied the PBS this year by Arts Council England, though Valerie Eliot, the late poet's widow, is reported to be the Eliot Prize's major sponsor.

The remaining finalists were Carol Ann Duffy for The Bees (Picador), Leontia Flynn for Profit and Loss (Jonathan Cape), David Harsent for Night (Faber and Faber), Esther Morgan for Grace (Bloodaxe Books), Daljit Nagra for Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Faber and Faber), Sean O'Brien for November (Picador), and Bernard O'Donoghue for Farmer's Cross (Faber and Faber). Each finalist received one thousand pounds (approximately $1,540).

In the video below, Burnside discusses the title of his winning book and the subjects he's gone on to research, including the Weather Underground activists of the 1970s.

James Franco's Hart

Caption: 

The Broken Tower, the Hart Crane biopic writen, directed, and starring James Franco, was released this week and can now be downloaded or viewed on demand. There's been a lot of speculation about the film ever since Franco aquired the rights to Paul Mariani's biography of the same title, but at least one critic isn't impressed. Writing in Slate, Evan Hughes called the film "incredibly dull." 

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Poetry
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movie trailer
James Franco
Hart Crane
The Broken Tower
Paul Mariani

Ilya Kaminsky's Literary Journal Rundown

Readings & Workshops Blog
1.17.12

San Diego-based P&W-supported poet and presenter of literary events Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and co-editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry blogs about San Diego literary journals.

Among the literary presses and journals in San Diego is Sandra and Ben Doller’s 1913 press and  1913: a journal of forms. Founded almost ten years ago, the press and journal publishes some of the most innovative writing around—Eleanor Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Rae Armantrout, Cole Swensen, John Yau, Claudia Rankine, John Keene, and Sawako Nakayasu, among others. Sandra and Ben Doller, important contemporary poets in their own right, are very generous to donate their time and resources to make this literary feast happen in San Diego.

Another exciting literary journal published in San Diego is the P&W-supported California Journal of Poetics. This beautiful online journal that includes interviews, reviews, literary panels and conversations is presented with a profound desire to expand the literary discussion in new ways. Recent issues include interviews with longtime P&W-supported poet Robert Pinsky and a profile of Tomas Transtromer.

Certainly the oldest literary journal in San Diego, Fiction International, was conceived almost twenty years ago, and is considered one of the country’s leading literary publications. Having published such greats as Clarice Lispector, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, J.M. Coetzee, and many others, Fiction International promotes honest, musical, literary prose.

One is pleased to see that there are new journals and presses being launched in San Diego, even at this time of deep economic uncertainty. Just last week, I heard about the new national journal for undergraduates with a particular emphasis on literature in translation, Alchemy: Journal of Translation @ UCSD (University of California San Diego). The journal was founded by Amelia Glaser, a talented translator and first-rate scholar of Slavic and Yiddish literature!

Photo: Ilya Kaminsky.

Major support for Readings/Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Two for One

The Time Is Now
1.17.12

Take a poem you feel is finished, and divide the poem in half. Write two new poems by filling in those two halves.

Ilya Kaminsky On Red Hen Press

Readings & Workshops Blog
1.9.12

San Diego-based P&W-supported poet Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and co-editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, blogs about Southern California's Red Hen Press. 

It is impossible to begin a conversation about literary presses and happenings in Southern California without instantly mentioning P&W-supported Red Hen Press, which is a great deal more than just a literary press. Red Hen’s Kate Gale and Mark Cull, both talented authors in their own right, have created something very special with Red Hen—it is a press, a community force, an organization behind several reading series in Southern California, an outreach program for writing in schools, and many other things.

One Red Hen book I read recently moved me, the new novel by P&W-supported writer David Matlin, “A HalfMan Dreaming”—a second installment in his epic trilogy about the beauty and violence of the American landscape. Lupe, a protagonist is taken from the world of rose farms and egg ranchers in post-World War Two America, from a town haunted by the Enola gay and the nuclear Bomb, to prison in Detroit. The book is as terrifying as it is gorgeous, with beautiful, sensuous prose.

Another book of contemporary prose that I have read in recent months that just won’t let me be is Garth Greenwell’s “Mitko”—winner of Miami University Press’s 2011 Novella Contest (one of the very few such novella prizes in the country), this is a book about betrayal, forbidden desire, where sentence structures are as engaging as the plot lines and prose is musical, meditative and evocative; this is the story of an American who finds himself in Sophia, Bulgaria. A new take on Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” Greenwell’s novella is able to ask hard questions about loss, sexual desire, and loneliness. In Southern California, where I have heard many a writer complain of loneliness and absence of literary community, this work, somehow, particularly resonates. Garth Greenwell will read from his new workon April 16 at San Diego State University.

Photo: Ilya Kaminsky.

Major support for Readings/Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

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