WhimsyLand

I don't usually read Poets & Writers very carefully, but this issue had a lot of interesting material.  First up is an advertisement for the Dodge Poetry Festival with large type announcing poets like Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Gerald Stern and Ko Un and small type reminding you that Daisy Fried, Matthea Harvey, Natasha Trethewey, and Ona Gritz are apparently lesser lights, though it certainly seems like a coin-toss in some cases.  In case you don't know who Ko Un is either, he's a Korean Buddhist monk and poet who's supposedly published 120 books and tried committing suicide twice, apparently unsuccessfully.  There's a terrific article on Wave Book's Poetry Roadshow, detailing the impetus and players behind the 50-day roadshow.  The poetry marathon is increasingly popular, including the St. Mark's Poetry Project directed by Anselm Berrigan (remember Anselm, he comes up later).  Small Press Points features Seal Press, whose recently published Cunt: A Declaration of Independence was Jennifer Scalia's preferred reading material while she waited to testify in the Abu Ghraib trial.  Literary MagNet mentions Paris Review, McSweeney's, Iowa Review, and Speakeasy ... 3 of the 4 probably don't really need any more ink.  P&W interviews Donald Hall, the classic New Englander.  He manages to get through the entire interview without mentioning Jane, and cracked me up with his answer to the question "What are you most looking forward to about this appointment [to U.S. Poet Laureate]?", to which he answered "Probably the sale of my books".  Ken Gordon contributed The Posthumous Pickle that explores the ethical dimensions of publishing posthumously all the work that a writer withheld in his/her lifetime (and in at least one famous case, Kafka's, explicitly asked to be burned).  And, the first comprehensive article I've seen on Alice Notley, recently of Paris, formerly married to Ted Berrigan.  Her best line?  "I don't have a poetics.  I think that's bullshit."  Ryan Murphy is a very interesting dude:  he publishes "one-shot" chapbooks, hand-binding them and attributing the work to a made-up author, sometime male, sometimes female, that changes with every work (I love the title of the last one, "The Travelling Salesman Problem", a classic operations research topic).  Really good piece on T. Cooper and Adam Mansbach who have jointly produced A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing.  The ad for the U of NH MFA program has a natty guy holding a pitchfork and a book in front of a combine or something.  Full-page color ad for Saturnalia books, including blogmate Sabrina Orah Mark's Babies.  That's usually as far as I get as the rest of the magazine is Awards and Grants and Competitions and such, but it was interesting, too.  Anne Pierson Wiese won this year's Whitman for Floating City, judged by the mercurial and hugely funny Kay Ryan.  Here's a pair:  Bob Hicok and Donald Revell each won an APR award, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize (at some point, you have to wonder if they're making these names up).  Former MacArthur "genius" award winner (it's obligatory to surround genius with quotes) Lucia Perillo knocked down a hundred grand from the 14th annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  My favorite winner in this issue is Vanessa Haley who won the 2006 Dogwood Poetry Prize for her poem, "George Stubbs's 'Plate for the Sixth Anatomical Table of the Muscles, Fascias, Ligaments, Nerves, Arteries, Veins, Glands, and Cartilages of a Horse, Viewed in Front, Explained".  Hell, I have poems shorter than the title.  Anyway, the deadlines and submissions calendars and recent winner and such are all online, if you're interested. 

See you tomorrow.