Fantasy Tour Update

As the Tour de France is coming to a close – One more day till it’s history…. The latest fantasy team challenge between my daughter and I:

• Team Poetry –914
• DieuxVelo – 400

*Note to daughter – this is purely informational and not bragging.

This thing

This thing you call success
is holed up in the laundry room
attached to black hoses
on life support

Poetry Prize Shortlist

 

The Forward Prizes were founded in 1992 to raise the profile of contemporary poetry – and annual award that carries a £10,000 prize. The shortlist is out and a final announcement of the winner will come in October.  The list  follows:

• Glyn Maxwell - Hide Now
• Sharon Olds - One Secret Thing
• Don Paterson – Rain
• Peter Porter- Better than God
• Christopher Reid - A Scattering
• Hugo Williams - West End Final

Source: BBC

Technorati Tags: The Forward Prize for poetry,Hugh Williams,Glyn Maxwell,Sharon Olds,Don Paterson,Peter Porter,Christopher Reid

A few powerful lines

I was reading an essay yesterday by Joyce Carol Oats in which Oats offers that confessional poetry has been replaced with what might be called the memoir of crisis. I find interesting her supposition that current literary culture is obsessed with memoirs.  Getting into the meat of the essay I was taken by surprise at her mention of Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face. I read this book a number of years back as well and her second book, As Seen on Television and found her to be a an exceedingly talented writer. What really took me by surprise was the mention of her death. For some reason this was totally off my radar. I had not knowledge whatsoever.

Grealy’s first book was a memoir of the sad and tragic life – a victim at an early age of a rare form of cancer of the Jaw, she was greatly disfigured through the illness and subsequent multiple surgical procedures. But for all that the young girl endured, her candor and ability to express herself was a gift to all who read her words.

Lucy Grealy was also a poet, and after reading her second book I went looking for any poetry I could find published. My efforts at the time fell short. I could find nothing. Today I was able to locate two lines attributed  to her. They are profound. Somewhere there must be other gems.

“When I dream of fire / you’re still the one I’d save / though I’ve come to think of myself / as the flames, the splintering rafters.” - Lucy Grealy

Technorati Tags: Lucy Grealy,Joyce Carol Oats,memoirs

a thought…

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. ~Susan Sontag

 

Technorati Tags: Susan Sontag,depression,melancholy

A Whose Who of Literary Magazines

Every Writer’s Resource has put out a list of the top 50 Literary Magazines. I’m sure it will likely have some additions or omissions from any list that you or I would compile. I’m not posting it for the sake of debate, but rather because it’s generally not a bad list and may be worthwhile to look at and see what publications you’ve perhaps missed and might find worthy of looking into further.

Top 50 Literary Magazines

Technorati Tags: 50 Literary Magazines,Every Writers Resource

Remembering Cronkite

The passing yesterday of Walter Cronkite is a monumental loss.  I grew up on Walter Cronkite. He was a staple for many Americans in a time when the nightly news was designed to inform not entertain. Cronkite was the consummate journalist. He set a standard which for several decades that epitomized news reporting.  When I think of Cronkite there are a series of historic benchmarks that he is indelibly connected to.

• The assassination of President John F. Kennedy and shooting of Jack Ruby
• The assassination of Martin Luther King
• The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
• Reporting of the Vietnam War
• The 1968 and 72 Presidential campaigns – especially the nominating conventions
• The landing of Apollo 11 on the moon

For some time now I have lamented the passing of the high standards of reporting which Walter Cronkite championed. The last decade has seen a an alarming shift in the delivery of news.  Cable news has created an ala cart variety of reporting, complete with attempting to not only report facts, but filter the facts and present them in such a way as to do our thinking for us. This has taken place over the years since Cronkite’s retirement.  His peers too have moved on and the advent of cable news networks has given us greater speed in news delivery but we’ve sacrificed something significant in the process.

Cronkite’s passing only serves to remind us that while he is gone physically, his work ethic has been missing for some time.

I suppose it is worth mentioning that his death only reminds those of my age how real mortality is when someone who was an American icon for much of one’s adult life is gone. 

Technorati Tags: Walter Cronkite,news journalism