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Who will win this Brave New World accolade? Allen Itz, Geof Huth, Jessie Carty, Brandon Brown, Sam Pink, Robert Lee Brewer, Dana Guthrie Martin, xTx, Rachel B. Glaser, Donald McNeil, January O’Neil, Emi Matsui, Jeff Lytle, Ron Slate, Mather Schneider, Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, Rob Mclennan, Jim DuBois, Brad Liening, Sina Queyras, Shmish Whims, George Szirtes. Only you can decide.

Of her work, Adrienne Rich has said, “speak of the underground life of women, the Southern white Protestant woman in particular, the woman-writer, the woman in the family, coping, hoarding, preserving, observing, keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and hypocrisies, nursing the sick, conspiring with sister- women, possessed of a will to survive and to see others survive.”
Poetry Foundation website

I thought of the word “boil”, of how it suggests agitation, of how the very word intimates lack of control, and I thought of the word “abscess,” derived from the Latin abscedere, “ab” for “away” and “cedere” for “to go” which suggests the humours leaving the body through the portal of the abscess, and how boil is the better name, how poetry is an assertion of mastery on unruly elements, and how this abscess, this boil, will take weeks to heal.

Do critics complain that Christian Bök doesn’t use enough rhyme-scheme? So why ignore the serious formal structures of, say, David McGimpsey, for the sake of his hilarious pop references, dismissing a collection that should have won major awards, it seems, as frivolity, and not “serious verse”? Are “flarf” authors, such as ryan fitzpatrick, accused of not understanding narrative storytelling? If books and manuscripts are to be (inevitably) judged, why can’t they be on their own merits, and not on what isn’t happening.

I was incensed by this poem! Enraged almost. It was just not so. The reason for my outrage revolved specifically around the phrase ‘a red wheelbarrow/glazed with rain water’. No wheelbarrow of my acquaintance was a) red or b) so pristine as to let water glaze it. Generally wheelbarrows were mucky things, rusty, dented with a wobbly wheel. They sit outside collecting rainwater and rusting until they are needed to shovel muck and move mud. As a farmers child I KNEW what wheelbarrows really looked like.

Poetry events typically turn out our smallest audiences, and patrons are generally more animated by a line-up heavy with fiction and non-fiction than one boasting a majority of poets. Whenever I talk to poetry neglectors about this, their reluctance is almost always linked to discomfort. They feel unwelcomed, as if poems are intentionally giving them the cold shoulder.
Peter B. Hyland/The Ploughshare Blog

The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

It’s estimated that a new poetry journal is released every day, and in 2010 alone, more than 100,000 new poems will be published. But, it’s not reader demand that’s fueling this escalating trend. Instead, the vast majority of new poems and poets will never find much of an audience for their work. To talk about the new math of poetry is David Alpaugh, a poet and a writer.
Elaine Grant/New Hampshire Public Radio

The Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry is awarded annually to a Canadian poet, based on a book published in the previous calendar year. The work should follow in the tradition of Acorn, Livesay, Purdy, Plantos and others by being accessible to all people in its use of language and image. The award is open to any living poet who is a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant. The work may be entered by the poet or the publisher. The award itself honours the poet.

The award consists of a cheque for $500.00 CDN and a medallion.

The deadline for entries published in 2009 is June 30, 2010, received.

Here are a few links for a slow Friday at work: The New Yorker has a few fun flash puzzles of their covers to shuffle. The Poetry Ark is a multi-part contest that involves round by round voting with prizes and an anthology at the end. McSweeneys presents the 24th Existential Olympics, because life is… you know.