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Each year the University of Oregon Libraries hosts an Edible Book Festival featuring examples of edible artwork that "must be made from consumable components and reflect the concept of 'the book' through the use of text, form, or literary inspiration." The next Edible Book Festival will be held on March 31. Check out similar events at Duke, Xavier, the University of Puget Sound, and other schools across the country.
And now for something completely different...poet Cara Benson reads from (made), her collection of prose poems published last year by the Toronto-based indie press BookThug.
For the past twelve months, five poets and five composers from across the country have been working together to explore in words and sound the idea of sanctuary. Their project will culminate this month in the performance of a concert, titled The Sanctuary Project.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Wave Books, the Seattle-based poetry publisher that over the past five years has established a national reputation for its carefully selected and artfully produced books.
The former executive editor of Alice James Books reveals her strategies for editing a strong book.
Flip through the dictionary and randomly choose ten words. Write a poem with each word in every other line.
As if a pantoum isn't hard enough to write, this poet decided to make a short film to go along with it. The poetic form is composed of a series of quatrains in which the first and third lines of each stanza are repeated as the second and fourth lines of the next. The first and third lines of the last stanza are the second and fourth lines of the penultimate stanza; the second and final lines of the last stanza are the third and first lines of the first stanza. Got that? Now watch this.
The Yale University Library announced yesterday the winner of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar Bollingen Prize for a poet's lifetime contributions to the art.
The award goes to "fierce elegist" Susan Howe, author of works of poetry and lyric prose that weave together "history and mysticism, Puritan New England devotional writing and the Irish folk Ballad, visual lyricism and dramatic narrative, scholarship and memoir."
According to judges Peter Gizzi, Marjorie Perloff, and Claudia Rankine, Howe's most recent book, That This, published by New Directions in December, "makes manifest the raw edges of elegy through the collision of verse and prose, visionary lyricism and mundane incident, ekphrasis, visual patterning, and the reclamation of historical documents." Howe wrote the book after the sudden death of her husband, scholar Peter H. Hare, in 2008.
Howe's oeuvre also includes the poetry collections Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), The Midnight (2003), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), all published by New Directions, and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is author of the prose volumes The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).
The Bollingen Prize has been given biennially since 1948 to honor American poets. Past winners include John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Adrienne Rich.
On the fifth day of protests at the Wisconsin state capital in Madison, poet Kai Carlson-Wee, a student in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin, participated in the public filibuster opposing legislation introduced by the state's governor, Scott Walker, that could strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights. On Friday the state Assembly passed the controversial bill; it still has to pass the state Senate.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice will once again award ten-thousand-dollar grants to a poet and a fiction writer, but with a deadline falling a few months earlier than last year's. Entries for the 2011 awards, given to lesbian writers for work with lesbian content, will be due by the end of the business day on March 22.
Two finalists in each genre will receive one thousand dollars each and six honorable mentions will be awarded one hundred dollars each, with at least one of the grants given to a writer west of the Mississippi. A panel of distinguished lesbian writers, which has in the past been populated by writers such as Sharon Bridgforth, Staceyanne Chin, Kristen Hogan, Achy Obejas, and Pamela Sneed, will select the grantees.
For guidelines on what to submit and access to Astraea's online submission system (their preferred mode of entry), visit the foundation's Web site.
In the video below, 2010 poetry winner Lenelle Moïse reads a poem inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat over a montage of his paintings.
