Litmag Roundup: New York Edition

Refresh yourself on the last batch of picks here.

Spending the next few weeks in New York and Boston. Regular posting will return late August.

Low-hanging fruit:

• Rae Armantrout’s “Errands” in the New Yorker.  If you haven’t yet, check out her collection Versed, which won this year’s Pulitzer.
• Frederick Seidel watches 4th of July fireworks off the Hudson in “Downtown.” Independence Day poetry likely reached its acme with Elizabeth Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” though – which manages to capture the celebratory pomp of the holiday as well as a reticence to embrace it. Bishop hears the parade, muted through her library window:
  

  On the east steps the Air Force Band
  in uniforms of Air Force blue
  is playing hard and loud, but – queer –
  the music doesn’t quite come through.

• Also in the New Yorker: a former poetry teacher of mine, Catherine Bowman, with “The Sink.”
• Karl Kirchwey, “Wissahickon Schist” in Slate.

Litmag Roundup

• The Missouri Review publishes a series of “Dream Poems” by Richard Bausch.
• Joanna Klink talks poetry in Jubilat.  Looking forward to her next collection, Raptus, which Penguin is releasing this May (preorder a copy).
• Rae Armantrout in Poetry.
• Robert Bly in the APR, “Nirmala’s Music.”
• Bly is hitting the magazines hard this month.
• Poetry Northwest announces its newest issue with a poem by Rick Barot. He is the author of Want: Poems– a book worth a few readings.
• After this week’s premiere of Treme on HBO, I like to imagine John Goodman reciting this poem.  Fady Joudah in Callaloo – behind a wall for subscribers and libraries.
• Atlanta Review has the most bizarrely charming web presence.  I’m not even sure this is the entirety of Michael Lee Phillips’ prize-winning poem, but it’s still a solid narrative piece.
• Adam Zagajewski, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh, in Five Points.

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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.

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