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This is old news, but in 2005, the Poetry Foundation gave the poet Billy Collins something called the Mark Twain Poetry Award of $25,000, “recognizing a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry.” The press release included these two sentences: “Billy Collins has brought laughter back to a melancholy art. He shows us that good…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the second post on Portsmouth, New Hampshire by…
Nearly ten years ago, when I was a twenty-year-old baby-poet with a sense of self-importance even more inflated than it is today, I organized a “Poetry in Protest” reading in Amherst, Massachusetts to demonstrate against what became, a couple months later, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” My work screening manuscripts for this event forever changed the way…
As I said in my previous blog post about the most intriguing small presses publishing poetry, I really think small presses are publishing some of the really interesting poetry out there right now. I had the good fortune of speaking with Joshua Edwards, the editor of Canarium Books. He seems like a really fascinating person…
Book reviewers generally frown on unnecessary adjectives. Precisely how they frown depends on the situation, but you can bet if an author’s use of adjectives comes up in a review it’s not as a compliment. If a book is filled with rare and unusual descriptions (e.g. “a perturbing peccadillo”), it’s “flowery” or “over-wrought”; if it’s…
1. Writing is fun. In one of my favorite films, Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams explains his motivation for running: I will raise my eyes and look down that corridor; four feet wide, with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence. The film goes on, of course, to contrast his statement with Eric Liddell’s:…
I first read Eduardo C. Corral’s poems in Poetry and was knocked out by them. I then found out that Carl Phillips had chosen Eduardo’s first book “Slow Lightning” as his inaugural choice as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize (the first Latino poet to ever be so honored) and e-mailed Carl…
“You can say anything with kindness” is the oft-repeated phrase of most professors in writing workshops. It’s a reminder, of course, to speak the truth in our criticism of each other’s work, but to speak it gently. It’s one way to make the workshop environment feel safe and comfortable. Most of the time it works,…
Birds of a Lesser Paradise Megan Mayhew Bergman Scribner, March 2012 $24.00 240 pages In the twelve stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s debut collection, the past is always present. Children live in the failing light of dying parents. Lovers make their beds on inherited sheets. The furniture in a rented house smells of a previous…
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