Litmag Roundup

Refresh yourself on the last batch of picks here.

New and Recommended Poems

• Lucia Perillo contributes to The New Yorker.  Last month, Folio Found recommended her recent collection Inseminating the Elephant.
• “A Correction” by Idris Anderson in Agni.
• Also in The New Yorker, Richard Wilbur writes “A Prelude.“
• Poetry features a handful of works from Eleanor Ross Taylor, who was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize last month.  The selection is solid, start perhaps with “Where Somebody Died.”  We’ll be posting more on Taylor, but her Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008 (Southern Messenger Poets) is well worth a read.
• In the New Criterion, Adam L. Dressler writes of “The Lacedaemonian boy.“
• Mary Jo Salter won Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Prize for her “Unbroken Music” and “From a Balcony, Lake Como.”
• Robert Pinsky examines two Robert Frost poems at Slate, asking: Was Frost a Modernist?

img/Nobuyoshi Araki

The Finalists, Pulitzers #3

Rae Armantrout’s Versed deservedly won yesterday’s Pulitzer, and will likely garner more analysis and discussion in other outlets as a result. So as to not ignore the finalists, here are a few thoughts on the books:

1. Inseminating the Elephant, by Lucia Perillo. It’s a troubling sign when poetry reviewers call a book “funny” – it means one of two equally bad options: A) The poet wrote footnotes for a bilingual pun they’re quoting in the original Sanskrit. Or, B) Grandmothers and members of the clergy are likely to chuckle. So I was surprised when I caught myself laughing throughout this excellent collection. The poet’s humor is both aggressive and humble. It forced me to recognize in Perillo’s multiple sclerosis my body’s own fragility. Recommended.
2. Tryst, by Angie Estes.  Estes makes a lot of references – opera librettos, letters of Petrarch, Nijinsky’s fountain pen, Cimabue, the Indy 500.  I found myself skipping through just to look at the italicized quotes, which were always more engaging than the poems themselves. By the end of the book, I hadn’t been able to find Estes in her work – she was lost behind a constant display of erudition. Allusion for allusion’s sake. At one point, her footnotes actually recommended I try Google Translate. This collection might have fared better instead as quotes anthology.

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• Yesterday I mentioned having seen something odd in the Drama category.  Pulitzer jurist and theater critic Charles McNulty confirmed my suspicions in an interesting article in today’s LA Times. He writes “the [Pulitzer] board ignored the advice of its drama jury in favor of its own sentiments.”  In doing so, he argues that the board is on the wrong side of “the new guard of American playwriting.“

Monday links, Pulitzer edition #2

• 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