CruelestMonth.com

Congratulations to Robert Hass!

Time & Materials by Robert Hass has won the 2007 National Book Award!  We'll be changing that seal shortly.  The NY Times reports.

 

Yves Bonnefoy honored by the Franz Kafka Society

Belated but worthy news from last week:

In Prague, the Franz Kafka Society honored the French poet Yves Bonnefoy with the Franz Kafka Prize, given annually to "authors whose works of exceptional artistic qualities are found to appeal to readers regardless of their origin, nationality and culture."

The Guardian called Bonnefoy, 84, "one of the most influential French poets of the second half of the 20th century.  He is also a respected essayist and the pre-eminent French translator of the work of William Shakespeare."

2007 Quill Book Awards

Though Al Roker and Ann Curry have already announced the big-category winners some suspense remains.  At the Quill Book Awards' ceremony tonight the overall winner, the work that by its powerful nature renders classification by genre obsolete, will be announced by the lovely Ann Curry.  Kevin Young won in poetry for his collection For the Confederate Dead (Knopf, 2007).  For a full list of winners, visit the Quill site.

*Book of the Year -- Angels Fall by Nora Roberts (Putnam, 2007)

Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Which you probably know already!  For more details head to the OliveReader.

Robert Hass named as finalist for National Book Award

Time & Materials by Robert Hass is a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.  We're very happy on this end!  For the full list follow the link above.  Winners will be annouced at the National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony on November 14th. 

Much Ado

To relieve my inbox of what ails it, here's a highly incoherent post (My Outlook inbox has become the barometer of my anxiety level.  How terrible is that?  I'm too sensitive for all these e-mails.  What are they really saying!?)

Okay, retournons à nos moutons:

The war of the War & Peace's continues!  We never wanted to pick a fight, but, as these things go, it was picked for us. Newsweek runs a feature this week. Galleycat weights one side with links. And Publishers Weekly reports.

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The 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which honors the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year, went to Alice Notley's Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (Wesleyan University Press).

Judge Marie Ponsot had this to say, "[Notley's] poems give us thirty-five years of political, personal, death-defying engagement.  The nature Notley most loves is human nature.  That urban passion propels her speculative dramas of gender, class, and race; of Vietnam and Iraq; of schemes of power and the claims of art.  Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use.  Her aim is to speak to everyone; her book shows her success."

The prize is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and carries a $25,000 award.

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Did you know that HC United, HarperCollins 6-time-defending Metro League soccer champions, has a fight song?  I didn't until last week when it was composed by our friend Brock.  As you listen, please note that we're singing about the "Libro League" not about the unfortunate, though reasonably successful, league of another era.  Download h_c_fightsong_rough1.mp3

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I received an e-mail about the launch of Literary Comments, a site run by Daniel E. Levenson, author of the poetry collection Are These My Lions?

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Stephen Burt reviews Time & Materials by Robert Hass for the NY Times: "The Limits of Influence".

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Thomas Fink interviews Noah Eli Gordon at E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.  Follow the link to read more thoughtful questions like the one below (there are answers too):

TF: Novel Pictorial Noise (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), selected for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery, consists of fifty prose-poems, each a page or less in length and each followed by a line or two or three or sometimes more of verse. Sheila E. Murphy’s “American Haibun” is a prose-paragraph followed by one line, but your approach is more variable. I like what Ashbery has to say about this in his blurb—that “each prose-bloc” is “modified or modulated by the ghostly fragments that interleave them,” and the ghostliness often has to do with grammatical anomalies, like two prepositions in direct proximity that don’t normally interact. The modifications that Ashbery talks about are mysterious to me; how did you establish a relationship between the paragraphs and the verse, at least in your own mind?

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Finally, stretch your legs and make an event.  The American Academy of Poets offers proof of a busy October.  Academy events, Non-Academy events.

2007 MacArthur Foundation Grants

The 2007 MacArthur Fellows have been announced.  Out of the many luminaries selected for this honor, two come from the world of poetry: short fiction writer and poet Stuart Dybek, and poet Peter Cole.

Dybek's most recent book, I Sailed with Magellan, is a story collection out from FSG.  Cole is the author of two poetry collections, including Hymns and Qualms, and co-founder of Ibis Editions, a press specializing in literary works in translation from the MIddle East.

National Poetry Series 2006/7

Only a few more days until we have copies of Novel Pictorial Noise by Noah Eli Gordon, the 2006 Open Competition winner of The National Poetry Series (the website's not up-to-date).  Cover art by Michael Labenz.  I am excited to have this one in hand.  It goes on sale September 18th.

Last week, or a little before then, the 2007 winners of The National Poetry Series were announced.  House Held Together by Winds by Sabra Loomis, selected by James Tate, will be published by Harper Perennial next year.  Here the list of winners:

• Joe Bonomo of DeKalb, Illinois, Installations
  Chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye, to be published by Penguin Books
• Oni Buchanan of Brighton, Massachusetts, Spring
  Chosen by Mark Doty, to be published by University of Illinois Press
• Sabra Loomis of New York, New York,  House Held Together by Winds
  Chosen by James Tate, to be published by HarperCollins Publishers
• Donna Stonecipher of Seattle, Washington, The Cosmopolitan
  Chosen by John Yau, to be published by Coffee House Press
• Rodrigo Toscano of Brooklyn, New York, Collapsible Poetics Theater
  Chosen by Marjorie Welish, to be published by Fence Books

Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

...for lifetime achievement has gone to Lucille Clifton.  Congrats, Lucille.  The $100,000 award was established in 1986 and is presented by the Poetry Foundation.

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, commented: "Lucille Clifton is a powerful presence and voice in American poetry. Her poems are at once outraged and tender, small and explosive, sassy and devout. She sounds like no one else, and her achievement looks larger with each passing year."

So reports Shelf Awareness this morning.

Pleasant surprises...

It looks like Millicent Bennett, Associate Editor for Ecco, not only edits poetry, she inspires it.  Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion recently chose the winners of their Spring Lyric Contest.  Fifteen poems, out of 2,000 entries, were read on-air March 31st.  One of these fifteen qualified to win a Sleep Number bed from Select Comfort and three-dozen roses.  Penned by her father Bruce Bennett, "For Millicent and Giovanni, Who are going to Need a Bed" made it into the final fifteen, but did not luck out when Grace, a ten-year-old from Long Island, NY, chose from a hat the recipient of the bed and roses.  Still, Mr. Bennett's villanelle made it a long way and with MIllicent's permission I've reproduced it here:

"For Millicent and Giovanni, Who are going to Need a Bed"

By Bruce Bennett

Mill and Joe will soon be wed.
I will write a poem for Spring
that may win for them a bed.

Theirs is news that should be spread:
Love is such a splendid thing!
Mill and Joe will soon be wed.

Words that bind them will be said.
They will kiss and they will cling.
I must win for them a bed,

Or they'll use the floor instead,
much more suited for a fling.
Mill and Joe will soon be wed,

Flowers flung and tears be shed.
They've already got a ring.
What if they don't have a bed?

Therefore let this poem be read.
May it like the sweet birds sing!
Mill and Joe will soon be wed.
Bless their union with a bed!

The podcast of Garrison reading the poem can be found here.  Advance to 19:03 and you'll be right on it.

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Also, we're pleased to have been mentioned in "Online April is the Coolest Month" which appeared in PW today.