- The 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded today to Rae Armantrout’s Versed
. The deserving book seemed a good bet for the prize, as mentioned earlier on this site. Here are three poems from the collection in the most recent edition of NO. Finalists are Angie Estes’ Tryst and Inseminating the Elephant
by Lucia Perillo.
- Broadway musical Next to Normal won the drama prize, its citation appended with the following note: “Moved into contention by the Board within the Drama category.” The Pulitzer board has been known to intervene when dissatisfied with the jury’s selection – most famously when the board awarded no prize in 1963, objecting to sexual themes in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. This year’s strange citation might have something to do with another of the finalists: In The Next Room or the vibrator play.
- Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, premiered at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, won this year’s award for music. Congratulations to the winning composition – and my town’s orchestra!
- The Times favorably reviews Charles Bernstein’s new selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven
, as well as translator-extraordinaire Edith Grossman’s new book, Why Translation Matters
. To go along with the book’s publication, Grossman wrote an interesting piece on translating Don Quixote for Guernica magazine.
- The Australian looks at Les Murray’s new collection, Taller When Prone.
- In a letter to Paul Demeny, Folio favorite Arthur Rimabud wrote: “I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.” Many have interpreted this ‘derangement’ as some sort of synesthesia. In the American Journal of Human Biology, Kevin Mitchell reviews a new overview of the phenomenon, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia
.
img/deborah.brown
Folio Found. 