Incendiary Lit

Even though I didn’t win { } I look forward to reading the manuscript Yusef Komunyakaa chose as the student winner for the mtvU Poetry Prize, which is linked to the National Poetry Series.

All of the NPS winners this year are:

Kristin Naca of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bird Eating Bird
Chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa , to be published by HarperCollins Publishers

Sarah O’Brien of Brookfield, Ohio, catch light
Chosen by David Shapiro, to be published by Coffee House Press

To all: CONGRATS!!!

A big congrats out to the wonderful Patty Seyburn for winning the 2008 Green Rose Prize issued by New Issues for a poetry manuscript by an established poet (with her book Hilarity). They should’ve picked my manuscript for the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize (for 1st book) and given Cal State Long Beach a 1-2 punch. But alas, Justin Marks’s A Million in Prizes won. Maybe California State University in Long Beach (like how I used the full name? Yeahhhhh) will get a little boost in interest because of this, as Patty teaches there with many other wonderful poets like Bill Mohr, Charles Harper Webb, Elliot Fried and Gerald Locklin.

Patty is also an editor at the always fabulous POOL: A Journal of Poetry, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. One of the best around.

OK, that’s enough butt kissing, sorry. Couldn’t help it, it’s very exciting for someone you know to win a contest.

The Writers @ Work (where hip meets lit according to their website) is a conference held in Utah June 23rd-27th. Yes, just days after my birthday and I didn’t win free tuition from a pool of hundreds. So sad. Anyway, here are the winners. Go here to check out more information about the conference. It looks really cool.

(from their website www.writersatwork.org)

Winner: Margot Wizansky, Brookline, MA, for “Cosmography”

About “Cosmography,” Ms. Addonizio had the following comments:

“The author of ‘Cosmography’ has a gift for narrative and for language which creates an experience of lived life for the reader. I admired this writer’s ability to convincingly render the voice of an eighteenth-century midwife in the ambitious opening poem. Like the description of a steak in ‘Breakfast at the Retirement Home,’ the writing here is often ‘luscious, blood-rare.’ ”

1st Honorable Mention: Keegan Goodman, Chicago, IL, for “Four Poems (’Residence’ and others)”

About “Four Poems: (”Residence” and others):

“From an autobiography written by a dead man to a woman attempting to construct human beings out of grease fat and coffee grounds, these prose poems create their own marvelous and off-kilter worlds.”

—

I don’t know about you guys, but that first honorable mention sounds awfully interesting. Russell Edson-esque is what I’m hoping for, but we’ll see. These winners will be published in an upcoming Quarterly West, and will receive free tuition to the Writers at Work conference. The poetry winners were chosen by Kim Addonizio, fiction by Steve Almond, nonfiction by Abigail Thomas. The other winners were (fiction)

Winner: Ben Roberts, Ogden, UT, for “The Three Nephites”

About “The Three Nephites,” Mr. Almond had this to say:

“My God. I was absolutely blown away by this story, which does what every great short story must: it creates its own world and sucks the reader into that world and horrifies us and at the same time (and this is the miracle, I think) makes us never want to leave. The voice is absolutely fearless, ecstatic, and dangerously wise. I could feel my heart thumping as I read the last line, and for a long time after.”

(not exactly a scathing review) and nonfiction:

Winner: Valerie Due, San Diego, CA (Yay San Diego), for “The Skinning Board”

About “The Skinning Board,” Ms. Thomas has the following comments:

“I love the emotional restraint coupled with the ravishing prose of the piece. It serves so perfectly the young narrator whose initiation into the harsh realities of life–and death–on a farm is being presented here.”

I tried the complex form of a double abecedarian, at my own suggesting, from the August 19th firestarter challenge, and just received word that it was a finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize put on by the North American Review. Of 331 Entrants and 1461 submitted poems, the readers and Molly Peacock chose 18 finalists, three received places and three Honorable Mentions. Yeah, I know, it didn’t win, well, I’m still learning too, ok? The first place poem was Kate Buckley, just down the road in Laguna Beach, for the poem “The Life Cycle of Moths,” which is very exciting for her. Second and third places went to Sarah Heffner’s “Elevator Conversation,” and Deborah Fries’s “Reconstitution.” So you too can turn an exercise into a publishable poem. Give it a shot!

The honorable mentions were:
Joan Colby for “I am calm and happy but desperately anxious to live”
Elizabeth Haukaas for “Red”
Michael Kriesel for “Secret Women”

The other finalists (who will also be published in that issue)
Roy Bentley for “Funeral in the South”
Greg Braquet for “Car Maps”
George David Clark for “The Secret Lives of Lady Gymnasts”
Barry Dickson for “Barry Dickson 1945–”
Zebulon Huset for “Cabo San Lucas, 2007: A Double Abecedarian”
Kimiko McGonigle for “She Learned”
Susan Norris for “For My Mother”
B.V. Olguin for “Chin”
Douglas F. Parham for “The Jealous Praise of Flannel Sleep Attire”
Emily Lupita Plum for “Two Islands”
Michael Spence for “And Don’t Forget the Fruit”
Joshua Wood for “Dream Creatures”

Coming from the UK (New York) Times, this interesting article about Cormac McCarthy. I’m sad to admit other than his name, and the title of some of his books (mostly ones turned into movies) I’d be lost to tell you anything about the Pulitzer Prize winning man, or even his writing style. It’s one of those rare days where I can say “I learned something today.”

Junot Diaz’s first novel (following sensation short fiction collection Drown) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a tale of immigrant struggles, a bone fide curse, a sci-fi fantasy dork (Oscar) and his tumultuous family. It was one of the most highly reviewed books of 2007, getting praise like “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel” from Publisher’s Weekly and “Propelled by compassion, Díaz’s novel is intrepid and radiant.” from Booklist, yet, its sales thusfar have been a mere 27,000. And it is highly likely to be nominated for a Pulitzer. Isn’t that scary? That your book can be wonderfully reviewed, there’s buzz of a Pulitzer (Junot has yet to cross over into his 40’s) and yet, your book, your baby, is left to be dusted on store shelves. Jeez.

Here’s a yahoonews article outlining other publishing failures, and successes of 2007.

Warning: Poet Laureate Loitering!

That’s right, earlier in this month Charles Simic was named US Poet Laureate. If you keep up on the poetry news you already knew that, but on the odd chance that you weren’t, just thought I’d mention it. Simic’s a wonderful poet born in Yugoslavia, who immigrated to the US at 16, and has been producing wonderful poems since. He specializes in short, somewhat abstract imagistic poems… I know what you’re thinking… but sometimes you’re just in the mood to read a Simic poem, or book. I read Walking the Black Cat and Hotel Insomnia each in just one sitting, and have revisited both many times. Anyway, here’s the slightly fuller story from www.pw.org which I highly recommend browsing, as well as joining their message board at the speakeasy. There are some very knowledgeable, and helpful writers/editors who post there. And here’s a link to www.poets.org which has a great biography as well as some of Charles Simic’s poetry. He currently works as poetry editor for the Paris Review, and if you’re really on a knowledge/insight kick, here’s a link to his Paris Review interview titled “The Art of Poetry.” Below this line is one of my favorite Simic poems. If he happens upon this and would like me to remove it, at but a whisper it will be gone.
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It’s fall again, or, it will be very soon, and that means a few things for us writers: Most college produced literary magazines reopen for submissions, and the big first book contests are back. But, with contest fees reaching deep into the pocket ($25 to read my book? Is it really that bad?) you have to pick and choose wisely. The major first book awards which have their submission period in the fall are American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, with a whopping $3,000 Prize, one of the largest for first books, outdone by Spring’s big buck prize University of Pittsburg Press’s Agnes Lynch Starret Poetry Prize at $5,000. This year’s Honickman judge is none other than our favorite narcissist Tony Hoagland. Why does this matter? Well, in a way it doesn’t, nor does the particular press publishing the winning manuscript, technically. The first answer always given by editors is always “Excellence is our only requirement” or some such blanket statement. But what excellence are they looking for? Robert Pinsky excellence? Fanny Howe excellence? Stephen Dunn excellence? They all are good at what they do, but few presses/journals are truly as eclectic as they claim, and why should they be? Anyway, what I was getting at is that one can reasonably judge that aside from excellence, the judge might like poems similar to their own. This gives you a slight insider track on what to submit. Then comes the bad part, when we realize that many poets like a wide variety of poems, and that your manuscript is up against hundreds of other hopefuls who have been honing their own brands of excellence and submitted their most excellent (says Bill S. Preston, esquire) poems without regard to the final judge’s own poetry. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. For instance, Billy Collins selected Spencer Short’s Tremolo for the 2000 National Poetry Series. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, just not exactly that similar to Collins’ work. Honickman’s deadline is October 31st, and the reading fee is $25. Another prestigious first book award is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which is on the lower end of the reading fees that have been climbing as fast as gas, at only $15, and luminaries such as Carolyn Forche are past winners. Their deadline is November 15th. Now, another little way to toe the waters of a contest you might be interested in submitting to is to take a look at past winners books.
For instance, before I entered the Agnes Lynch Starret prize I bought a copy of the last winner that was available, at the time it was Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground and while it didn’t really affect my poem choices, nor the outcome, it was an excuse to get a new book from a new voice. Always a fun exercise. So none of these tricks are foolproof, nor do they even make a huge difference most of the time, but you never know. It won’t hurt anything to buy the book of a judge or a past prize winner, and it could be the difference between being eliminated by one of the anonymous readers buried in the thank yous, and being eliminated by the guest judge in the final round. Other first book awards coming up shortly are Boa Editions Ltd.’s A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize judged by Jean Valentine, ending November 30th, with an entry fee of $25, and a grand prize of $1,500. Also the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by the one and only Carl Phillips, with a $15 reading fee and a grand prize of $2,000. The New Issues Poetry Prize deadline is also November 30th.

Is William McGonagall the world’s worst poet? I’ve read some awfully awful poetry, yet this guy’s fans claim he is the worst poet. I guess I’m just lucky that no one says anything about my poetry, because if I ever earned the honor of having my fans lobby heavily, for my status as the world’s worst poet, only then would I be truly honoring my family name. Anyway, the samples they show are very typical bad syntax, forced rhyme, archaic language that can be found in high schooler’s notebooks nationwide. Just an odd little beat I found on AOLNews that I figured might interest someone.

Yeah, this isn’t entirely new news, but if you don’t follow poetry news too closely, and I don’t see how you couldn’t, Lucille Clifton has won the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which brings one of the largest paychecks a poet can hope for, $100,000. Woot Woot! Congratulations Ms. Clifton. Full article here