Belly up to the table friends. This post will be a mouthful. I’ve just been trying to catch up with my blog reading, and I missed four days, which means my google reader account was in the triple digits. So, gobble gobble, here are some highlights that jumped out at me.
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First, two posts about the Whiting Awards and the demographic breakdown. Very interesting in a numbers kind of way. I haven’t had time to sit and think on this, but I will. First, Victoria Chang offers her breakdown and thoughts. One thing I thought was particularly interesting was when she wrote: “My intuitition is that minorities will try to help other minorities and non-minorities gravitate towards each other in general, as people and their work. But this sounds so archaic to me. I hope I am wrong, but I do wonder how much of our world at large and our poetry world at large have really erased the glass ceiling towards women and minorities?” I have to say that I read widely and without borders. I hope that my own experience is a look toward the future of poetry and not an anomaly. Maybe after I’ve caught up with my post-conference work, I’ll look at the numbers on my poetry shelf and see where I fall. Second, Steve Fellner offers his thoughts on the numbers. Here’s a bit from his opening: “There’s more curious news. Look at the history of the award. In 2008, 3 out of 10 were women. In 2007, 3 out of 10 were women. In 2006, 4 out of ten were women. In 2004 and 2005, 5 out of ten were women. According to the anonymous panel, women’s writing must be declining in quality, and fairly quickly.” Honestly, I don’t think I would have thought to look at the history of prizes like this. I tend to try to insulate myself from these things in an attempt to ward off both jealousy and jinxing myself. Both of these writers have given me food for thought. I’ll try to let you know how the digesting goes.
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I’ve been reading Kelli Russell Agodon’s posts about her recent winning of the White Pine Press award. She’s been honest and open and offers great insight to all of us sending out manuscripts. Check out her latest answers to reader questions. If you haven’t been following along, I highly recommend looking at the last several weeks of posts.
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Charlotte Pence has a post about memorizing one poem from her lineup at a recent reading. This is something I’ve been meaning to do and meaning to do but never got around to it. Actually, since I read so much from Blood Almanac in the last three years, many of those poems are as familiar as well-worn jeans, but none of them are formally memorized. Ah…something new to aspire to. Love Charlotte’s comments about how the one memorized poem changed the other poems as well.
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How a Poem Happens features Anna Journey this week. I love this blog because I get to see just a tiny view inside a poet’s creative process. Fascinating. Here’s my favorite bit because she talks about couplets in a way that resonates with me: “I often choose to write in couplets; perhaps that’s because they’re about as far away as you can get from prose. There’s a cool restraint to couplets, a formal clarity, and a kind of—I don’t know—buoyancy that helps give my speedy, image-packed, lush language room to breathe. So, it’s about balance; it’s my recipe for staving off some sort of baroque implosion.”
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Finally, dessert. I went back through the daily poetry sites that I’d missed during the conference and found this stand out on Poetry Daily: How to Make Armor by Jennifer K. Sweeney. I love a good “how to” poem, but too often they go awry in their prescriptiveness. This one rocks it.
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Urp. (Consider that my delicate, lady-poet burp.)
