Council for Wisconsin Writers

Supporting Wisconsin writers from 1964 to 2022

CWW Awards Banquet

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Winning Poetry Book Was a Long Time Coming

Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award winner Marilyn Annucci worked on her book The Arrows That Choose Us for years. It went through various incarnations until she thought it was prize worthy. Here are her remarks followed by the two poems she read from her winning book at this year’s CWW Awards Banquet, held May 11 at The Wisconsin Club.

Marilyn Annucci

 

Thank you to the Council for Wisconsin Writers for the work involved in sponsoring these awards and for organizing this wonderful ceremony, and to Sean Thomas Dougherty for selecting my book for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. I’m also grateful to Edna Meudt for her long life as a writer, storyteller and promoter of the arts. My book The Arrows That Choose Us was a long time coming—a great exercise in perseverance—before it won the 2018 Press 53 Poetry Award, selected by Tom Lombardo. It went through many incarnations over about 20 years. I cut a lot of poems, added others, and kept fiddling with the order. I have other manuscripts, but  I just really wanted to get this one right. It’s an honor to be recognized for my work by the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

For more information on the book, including reviews of it and interviews/podcasts with Marilyn, go to www.marilynannucci.com

 

The Women of the Kazan Cathedral

     St. Petersburg, Russia

Quick ancients in kerchiefs

move quietly as breath

 

among carousels of candles,

snuffing the slender tapers

 

like stumps of cigarillos,

tossing them into the tin pail.

 

If the inch of wax still holds prayer,

still possesses the pilgrim’s desire

 

to burn all the way down,

it doesn’t matter

 

these Mothers of Christ

say with their silence,

 

say with their refusal

to meet your eyes.

 

Another stub, another prayer

has burned long enough.

 

Whole Foods

are so much better than little bits, little chewed off

pieces of foods one might leave for a bird or a woman

without a home.  Not whole, as in lacking parts: broccoli

without heads, potatoes missing eyes.  Maimed foods.

Pork chops on their last legs.  Tomatoes with their skins

blown off.  Bread crumbs.  The whole crumby world out

there, not in here.  Whole, as in what more could you ask

for: bright organic peppers in the jet of the spritzer.  Crisp

stalks of celery, fennel, white asparagus.  Complete, as in

all of us together, smiling, restored, fully realized as we reach

for that tiramisu.  Rich, as in not poor, not stuck with radiated

beef, milk, mutated chickens, as in not free, not free-range at all.

 

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Pulitzer Finalist, But No Cigar

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Mark Johnson was a finalist in the Pulitzer awards for feature writing for his work on the relationships medical students form their fellow students and cadavers in their gross anatomy classes. But inexplicably, according to Pulitzer observers, neither Johnson nor either of the two other finalists in that category won the gold.

Here’s a brief mention in a story about this year’s Pulitzer winners: 2014 PULITZER WINNERS IN JOURNALISM AND ARTS.

While some Pulitzer watchers took the selection committee to task for not explaining the reason no winner emerged, in Sandra Oshiro’s article, Pulitzer board’s no-award in feature writing goes unexplained, on the Poynter Institute’s website at poynter.org, Pulitzer Prizes administrator Sig Gissler says, “It takes a majority of the 17 voting board members to declare a winner. With three nominations, clearly no single finalist drew the nine votes required to walk away with the prize. The lack of a recipient also suggests that none of finalists blew away the judges. Yet each of the nominations represented substantial work.”

That seems to explain it pretty clearly, so far as I’m concerned.

Take a look at CWW’s contest winners and honorable mentions at http://www.wiswriters.org/2013%20winners.htm, and plan to attend the annual awards banquet on May 10 at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee. Details and reservation form are at http://www.wiswriters.org/banquet.htm.