Skip to main content

Emerson

Claudia Emerson, pictured here, has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2006, for her collection Late Wife, published by Dave Smith's imprint.

Smith is, himself, a leading poet - and, indeed, one of the central figures in the (poetry) regionalism debates of the last decade of the last century - a defender of voices from the South.

Those who notice such things - and there are many - will observe that Emerson writes a formal, conservative, even traditional lyric.

If one checks to see who the jurors were, one sees that the names Ted Kooser, Mary Karr and Michael Harper appear. Kooser, apparently contra much that is avante-garde or political in poetry, has written about the need for "lucid", reader-friendly poems.

I haven't read the collection but will try to locate the book here in England in order to do so.

For those interested in finding out more, here's the link to the collection's publisher, the BBC and finally the Pulitzer site with the list of jurors:


http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/Books/Fall2005/books/Emerson_Late.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4917338.stm

http://pulitzer.org/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
Post a Comment
Read more

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?
1 comment
Read more

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".
1 comment
Read more