Ed Werstein shares his thoughts about winning the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award and two of his winning poems:
living room watching a Pavarotti DVD
so am I, and just as certainly.
And what if it were five-hundred?
and then not be.
Supporting Wisconsin writers from 1964 to 2022
by jhayslett
Ed Werstein shares his thoughts about winning the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award and two of his winning poems:
by jhayslett
Council for Wisconsin Writers President Geoff Gilpin notes that Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker, for whom the CWW Norine Niedecker Poetry Award is named, got a mention in an unusual place: the year-end roundup of best classical music recordings in the New York Times: Classical Critics Pick the Top Music Recordings of 2014 [Dec. 18, 2014]
“There’s a new album (“Chamber Music”) by British composer Harrison Birtwistle that includes settings of Niedecker poems,” Geoff says. “It’s not on Spotify, but here’s a quote from Amazon:
‘Settings of the writings of US Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), scored for soprano and cello in 1998 and 2000, begin and close the album. As Bayan Northcott writes in the booklet, These concentrated songs demand the utmost of their performers in precision, expression and timing. As in Webern’s settings, the few words and notes on the page can seem to imply whole worlds of thought and feeling.’”
See more about the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award and other CWW’s contests at http://www.wiswriters.org/rules.htm. These contests for 2014 work by Wisconsin writers are open for entries until midnight, Jan. 31, 2015.
by jhayslett
Our warmest congratulations to Amaud Jamaul Johnson, whose new collection Darktown Follies received the 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry on Friday at the Carnegie Library in Northwest Washington.The judges found that the poems in “Darktown Follies” laid bare “the difficult terrain of the false images” created “by black face in Vaudeville.” Johnson’s collection, “crafts a manuscript which balances the false and ugly with the beauty and truths of the black lies that exist beneath the gaze.”The Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation, which is based in Washington, was founded in 1990 with a mission to ensure the survival of black writers and literature by black writers.Here at Tupelo Press, we couldn’t be more pleased or thankful to see Amaud’s dazzling work receive this important and enduring distinction. It’s a brave and brilliant book, and we feel honored to have had the gift of publishing it.
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