Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)

Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)

Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

I guess looking like shit is a matter of opinion, or taste, or preference, or fixation, or habit. Senator Harry Reid, who is from Searchlight, Nevada, a town I’ve been through many times as it is the one stop on the 111-mile route between Las Vegas and Needles, CA, home of my grandmother Beulah, who will be 91 in February, may not look like shit – if televised press conferences and talking head style interviews (sans rhythmic fear of air) are any indication he seems to possess a vigorous sheen no doubt succored by the folksy austerity borne of communing with creosote bushes while speculating on the nature of dialect and avoiding the speed trap that is the other major feature of Searchlight (pop. 562) along with a few casinos and a little gas station/McDonald’s/convenience store triumvirate that wields a large portrait of the Senator himself in its connective tissue between businesses and the oddly over-mirrored restrooms. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that a political son of Searchlight (there’s a great song by the late band Mule called “Searchlight” / which might / if I recall with any accuracy / which I do not typically / when it comes to memory / be about being pulled over / in the existential manner) may stake claim to a wholly archaic relationship with the notion of dialect – regular trips to our nation’s capital notwithstanding; one’s professional life and one’s speculations on human speech patterns in solemn collectivity should be separated by a near-impenetrable magnetic shield, as any creative commenter will tell you -– given that one may go very long periods of time in Searchlight, decades even, in isolated contemplation. This can produce a personal diction of curious historical range and one no doubt difficult to contextualize rapidly, as would be required on a word-by-word or even syllable-by-syllable basis. Serious reframing. Who can know from one word to the next if passing terms are from last year, last decade, or last century?

At any rate, to solve the two-poems-left mystery I decided to turn to K. Silem Mohammad’s book Breathalyzer and read only the next to last lines in all of his poems. The book was kindly just sent to me by the publisher in the same box as many copies of old books of mine that I didn’t even have to pay for because our publisher is too broke to charge me for copies in the first place and there’s a great deal of generosity to be found in a situation that can’t afford the integrity of a large scale distribution apparatus, much less a staff to keep track of shit, which I will nonetheless look like eventually before I get elected Senator (“I’d be a terrific Senator / because I’d love it”). In looking through one of my books I came across a poem I wrote in 1999 with the title “The banana peel is an important part of the eco-system,” which is something my brother Edmund said to me and which I even attributed to him out of some momentary moral failure (or else I was sub-consciously predicting the next century’s waves of attribution). But what got my attention was the following stream of words: “In the Iceman’s days nicknames / Were prevalent: Annie Annie Oakley / Ansy Slem Arnold Anton Ralton Leston / Selmton Tonton Selmselm Fuckton Cuntton Asston Workton.”

Seeing all those monikers again lit within me a burning urge to identify their sources so they might not get misunderstood as operating within a type of white dialect that could prevent me from getting elected in the future. I used to get e-mails from the Harry Reid folks that were part of a “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” general campaign of political schlock and aww, and if I take that example and run with it I want people to understand just what “Give ‘Em Argh Asston” is all about. Anselm can be a difficult name for you Americans to pronounce, and the above “lines” are actually a list of nicknames conferred upon this body across a roughly twelve year period that began at the age of nine in fourth grade when a few classmates decided it would be easier to call me Annie than try and deal with the tongrobatics required to utter the lm combination in Anselm. Christian Ortiz discovered a little biography of Annie Oakley in a pile of books at the back of the classroom one day, having been ordered there to mull over his loquacious bouts of inattentiveness, and his punishment gave way to the realization that it would be far more entertaining for our class to refer to me as Annie Oakley than just Annie, and so that stuck for several years.

Ansy represents a sadder tale, if you can believe that, for it was the teasing nickname my wonderful half-sister Kate used to call me and which I pretended to detest but secretly didn’t mind hearing until her abrupt and tragic death in 1987. No one has been allowed to call me Ansy since, though no one else really knew about it so its circulation was a little easier to control as opposed to the viral spreading of Annie Oakley around the halls of P.S. 19. Pointing out that Ms. Oakley was a crack shot with a rifle did not advance the cause of my true name. Slem was a kindlier nickname in that one of my track coaches in high school, Mr. O’Neal, simply could not pronounce Anselm without swapping the e and l and decided to shorten Anslem to Slem, thereby making things easier for the whole team. This worked until I got to college in Buffalo and starting being called Arnold by my three horrifying roommates who heard me do an imitation of the Hans and Franz “pump you up” characters from late-eighties SNL and decided Arnold was more apt for my then-130-lb. geek frame than Anselm. Finally came the –ton years. A very drunk but generally genial bass-throated gentleman named Mac started loudly calling me Anton one day from a balcony in downtown Buffalo during a massively attended street festival and that stuck. Shortly thereafter a new housemate (one of seven) revealed that some friends in his hometown, three brothers as it were, went by the names of Anton, Ralton, and Leston. Suddenly I found myself with a modular nickname, thus begetting, depending on the nature of an evening’s activities, Selmton (for those who could do the lm combo), Tonton, Selmselm, Fuckton, Cuntton (never sure if that should have one t or two), and on and on. It also became situational: Workton was what I was called leaving home for any job; Schoolton when threatening to study; Foodton I remember as well as Peanutbutter Foldton (a Buffalo delicacy) during culinary moments. One guy refused to call me anything but Ralton, thinking it the funniest thing he’d ever heard. No day went by during which I wasn’t referred to by a half-dozen different nicknames, a condition which, as one might imagine, had cause to infect my humor with a brooding idiosyncrasy.

When I left Buffalo in 1994 for San Francisco I left behind that whole world of –tons as well, and the poem in question was written during a flashback on a return visit to SF after having left that cuckoo joint for New York some sequence of trips later. The names poured back onto me and would have drownded me with their peculiar histories had poetry not been my ally and filter. Speaking of poetry, the experiment with Mr. Mohammad’s next-to-last lines in regards to the two-more-poems phenomenon (I have even, myself, felt the phrase ready its frame in my larynx for articulation wholly unprovoked by my own intentions, such as they may be, as if the words were their own act…which is why I only read from single long poems at readings now) have led me to isolate the following line as potentially useful in the classic ambiguous-yet-vitally-internal fashion of replaceable reference as practiced by Mallarmé, early Polvo, and the old weird America: “in a way love is all there is.” In order to finish the experiment I will from this moment forward choose to hear “in a way love is all there is” at any instance a reader is forced by mysterious compulsion to state “two more poems” near the end of their reading (I already ignore the awful apology implied by the occasional inclusion of “just” ahead of “two more poems” or “two more”). If you do it too then we can get together some day, and we’ll have a good time, for I will not report the results of our experiment here.

From a list of the most interesting list of of finalists ever (so says Ron Silliman), the National Book Award judges picked Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (UC Press) as this year’s winner.

Waldrop, a fixture of the poetry world of Providence, Rhode Island, has been celebrated as a translator (most recently of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal) and as a publisher, with his wife Rosmarie, of Burning Deck Press.

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy is made up of three long poem sequences that mix philosophy and poetry in a style familiar to readers of Waldrop’s fourteen other collections.

“These powerful poems,” says his publisher, “at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.”

Publisher’s Weekly called the collection “entrancing” and the Providence Sunday Journal said it’s “a complex, absorbing work.”

The National Book Award judges said: “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”

Pennsound has a large collection of Waldrop recordings up for those who want deep immersion into the transcendental experience.

For anyone else who just wants a taste of the celebration, here’s a short clip from St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Have the NBAs transcended?  Has this award gone to a notably different poet than it has in the past (2008: Mark Doty; 2007: Robert Hass; 2006: Nathaniel Mackey)?

There was also the other night with the video reading laced with empathy, resistance, Zidane, the wreckage of the pines, the taking of the photos of the sleeping men in their row, the cosmic interconnection of all things? Check. Futility of pain management as source of humour? Check. Controllable vices for purposes of a secondary level of interior life, echo of conscience trailing out? Check. A sense of time as discontinuous in its spread while expanding on a surface line that is only a reflection of a sense of line? Check. Total distrust of command but for the contradictory moments of necessity? Half-check. Digging the ecstasy of swinging? Yes. Laughing with the tree? Yes. Is the tree funny? Yes. Our ears act as instruments in responding to music, sounding their own tones in addition to the music in the room, like another instrument joining the orchestra.

Radioactive chalk on a wet post-portal playground was the yesterday excuse for meeting skipping. Help! I was frying some puppies on the stove when I thought I ‘d start to sell them on a blog in halloween costumes! But then I found your site (great site, really informative), and now I think I’ll sell surgical gloves made out of heroees. Thanks! Can I link to your blog? Can I buy goods from your friends and snort them? Not only is your blog pragmatic, it comes with a packet of silica gel (do not eat)! I like to make shapes in the head and in the ears, and I also like to make them in the room. Is there relation in the relation you relate to?

As lists go, to shatter the mindage of yea who built them, they may think of indolence in its softer terms, menu-like in its array of dreams in parti-colored favors: this brown face with those pink eyes cut out of these yellow cans, the artifice of neon whiskers, the textolatry of dirt in the form of specks riddling the dino-acts thinking through the objectification of feeling. So what if the rain is friendlier than your ever-slithering definition of work? What is most ordinary every day is defeating this desire to harden into respectable indifference.  I’m learning the characteristics of the space.

“So when I’m setting up I have to learn how to make the kind of shapes, the power of music that I want to generate in that place. I mix during performance only in one place, so I have to know the rest of the space by heard. It involves a tremendous amount of time, walking, listening, going back to the mixing-board, establishing levels and discovering what kind of world you want to make. In that sense you’re even composing, because you haven’t been in these spaces before. Do we perceive the sound in the room, in our head, a great distance away? Or do we experience these three dimensions at the same time? At Tokushima in these wonderful spaces it was even more possible to realize that. Or we perceive just enough to trigger patterns, melodies, created deep within our neural sensitivities, shaping some responses. Do we experience a sound dimension as though blocks away or very near, moving beside us, outside and around one ear only, do we feel melodies as they develop inside, within our ears, and we move our head, and we raise a hand to rub away a melody that’s circling our nose, does the sound drift, or does it fall like rain, does it make such a clear shape in the air we seem to see it, in front of our eyes? There are so many ways. Do we continue to hear sound as our mind processes aftersound, or music perceived minutes ago? And that affects how structural changes in sound happen in music.”

And it was very good to hear Claudia Rankine and Mom read, and to think about the above on sound from Maryanne Amacher, and to feel like the fresco of a collage at George Schneeman’s memorial, and to see into the future for no good reason, and to subdue verification for an angular tremulous wish in fastidious contrast to simoom for Will Alexander, whose Exobiology As Goddess caused the writing of my object is an emptiness on which words appear, and, much as one bends, to chalk the strong present tense against all rumours of wrath past and to come.

In a recent Slate article, Ron Rosenbaum explores uses and abuses of the word “genius,” suggesting:

Maybe genius has been, if not democratized, more widely and thinly distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a precious few…. Maybe we no longer live in the kind of romantic age that created Byron, the template of genius.

Or maybe we do.

Following the announcement of the 2009 MacArthur fellowships (which honored poet Heather McHugh, among others, with $500,000), the media have continued the tradition of calling the grants “genius” awards — “creating” genius where the MacArthur Foundation planned merely to give money. It turns out the Foundation abstains from the nebulous business of christening genius (or so it thinks):

We avoid using the term “genius” to describe MacArthur Fellows because the term connotes a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess. The people we seek to support express many other important qualities: ability to transcend traditional boundaries, willingness to take risks, persistence in the face of personal and conceptual obstacles, capacity to synthesize disparate ideas and approaches.

I find this paragraph most thoughtful for its use of “connotes,” which allows that “genius” holds no obvious meaning (some would disagree that genius’s chief connotation is intellectual rather than creative or otherwise). I find it most comical for its effect on headlines. The caveat prompts publications to frame the word “genius” within quotation marks, lending the label a vaguely sarcastic ring: “4 Mass. residents awarded ‘genius’ grants,” “Poet’s Wordplay Leads To MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award.” Ouch.

Why such loyalty to this disavowed, difficult term?

One answer is, I suggest, the same that explains high attendance at county fairs: our enthusiasm for enthusiasm — our joy in finding things extraordinary, and saying so (whether or not we know what we’re talking about). If the protean label “genius” tends to simplify, maybe we sometimes like to simplify, to say complexity doesn’t matter, or that certain work surpasses the need for nuanced evaluation: we just know what it is. It’s genius. And if we can’t, in turn, define “genius,” well…pass the corndogs!

But the quotation marks jerk us backward by our sun-faded, hay-permeated collars. “Don’t want to make any big claims, do we?” the quotation marks mutter in our ears. “Don’t want to say anything indefensible, am I right? Always need to be careful? Cynical age, this, isn’t it?” (For some reason the quotation marks, like most killjoys, speak in a British accent.)

Which is why the eschewal of quotation marks on the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog feels so refreshing. Two adjacent headlines announce “Heather McHugh, Poetic Genius” and “Edwidge Danticat, Genius.” Granted, the blog’s authors may have intended to highlight the absurdity of trafficking in grandiose judgments. But the magazine’s appreciation of McHugh and Danticat can’t be denied, and so I prefer to see these phrases as unpunctuated, unadulterated statements of adoration.

Thanks also to that blog for providing McHugh’s response to the use of “genius,” as compact and mysterious as a poem: “How do I feel about the word ‘genius’? Bottled.”

I’ve seen Martínez Pompa read before; last year, he was one of a handful of feature poets for The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry anthology reading, hosted by the anthology editor Francisco Aragón at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley (you can read Aragón’s Poetry Foundation article here). I remember one of the poems Martínez Pompa read at the time, “Amputee Etcetera,” which I found hilarious and troubling.

At this point I’m cracking up, knowing it’s a terrible thing, my need to laugh this hard.

And

And

Ouch. That’s us, and that’s himself he’s poking at. Still, poetry isn’t completely distant or safe to Martínez Pompa. In the book’s introduction, Espada writes, “his compassion for the damned may bring Whitman or Hughes to mind.” I think of My Kill Adore Him as a space in which Martínez Pompa confronts the contractions — distance and safety versus compassion for the damned.

Chicago is his city, and it is filled with these “damned” — the “homeless wound, breathing // litter flung to the street / like a half-smoked cigarette,” the day laborers smothered in the July heat, the young brown men mistaken by the police for other young brown men, the gay kid who gets his ass beat in gym class. There are so many nameless you’s in these poems, and not only does he hold our gaze upon them, he urges us to zero in, and listen.

* * *

In Chicago, he’s the Mexican who can’t speak Spanish, and this is a source of disconnect. In “Poetry Reading at the Cafe Tamalé,” invited by a high school Spanish language teacher “who promised her students an authentic cultural experience,” he is “authentic as the Diego Rivera prints nailed to the wall” of the tamale shop. Then ensues this dialogue:

But he does know. In “Retablos: 10 Deleted Tongues,” he writes:

He’s a Mexican poet, and so he gives us the requisite abuelita poem, which he appropriately titles “The Abuelita Poem” (in two parts):

In part II, he tells us he really called his abuelita grandma. She was the woman who would call Pizza Hut to order food, which she did “with the spirit of Mesoamérica / ablaze in her fingertips.”

This is some good snark. At this point, I hope you can tell Martínez Pompa is having a lot of fun screwing around with ethnic authenticity, and the ways in which the “ethnic” American poet plays the tropes and performs ethnicity, by treating ethnicity as artifact. This reminds me of a guy I knew in college, the editor of a Chicano literary publication, who, amid the throes of reading submissions, ranted, exasperated: “If I have to read another Mama Tortilla poem….”

Martínez Pompa continues with the snarky tone as the average guy grappling with masculinity, as fed to us by mass media and advertising. How much stuff do we need to buy in order to think of ourselves as beautiful? I think of the poem “Banana Republic Politick,” as the guy version of Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings:

Really, no examination and critique of masculinity is complete without the homoeroticism of the locker room shower. In “Shower Stall Baller,” he’s calculated a “12-man roster, / 14 years in the league, 82 games each / means 12,628 exposures to NBA dick.” He dedicates this poem to Tim Hardaway, for his homophobic remarks regarding the coming out of a retired NBA player. Indeed, think about how young men of color grow up in this country with African American professional athletes as their major role models, whose beliefs these young men choose to espouse. I think there’s also an undercurrent to this poem about young men of color whose career aspirations are to become objectified and replaceable bodies.

There is so much more going on in this book that I haven’t gotten to mention here. My Kill Adore Him is an exciting and tough collection of very well-composed and accessible poems. It’s been a while since I tore through a book of poetry and really enjoyed the read, for all of its Hell yeah! and WTF and Oh no he didn’t! moments. Pretty dope.

I am judging a poetry contest. I’m not going to say which one. And I didn’t know I was judging it until after the deadline so it wasn’t like I could say hey I’m judging so you should send your manuscript in. I was a little glad I was judging it. I mean it was flattering. But then of course then the giant box of manuscripts arrived the drycleaners where I receive packages. Uhnnnh.  I don’t have to tell you that I work really hard. You work hard too. I know that. I’m still cleaning up this and that from the work I didn’t finish before I got here (MacDowell) which is to say I’m not yet working on a novel or some incredible piece of prose. And I’m not putting a new manuscript of poems together which seemed so easy when it was all on my computer or hard drive and now its scattered on scraps in the nice black boxes from the container store I store my poem scraps in. It’s in notebooks. So I could spend the month organizing scraps and notebooks hauling that baby, the new manuscript of poems out of chaos and into the light but I’m sufficiently superstitious that I think that when something different happens (and yes it’s modest of me to refer to losing my computer and hard drive and three netflix DVDs as just “something different”) you should probably make a different plan. I’ve not made that plan yet but I will and meanwhile I’m finishing up a little business, editing a long interview with another poet, and when I finish that then doing something on Friday night, well then I will begin something new. I’m dying for the gust of new, the leap into the unknown - beginning a new project and you know I’m only here at MacDowell for a few more weeks so the only thing between me and that leap is that giant box of manuscripts sitting there from the poetry contest. What if I just stuck my hand in with my eyes closed and acted like it was a fishbowl and my MacDowell studio was a stage and I was a spokes model in an orange evening gown and a big hairdo with a blindfold across my eyes and gracefully I’ pull a poetry manuscript out from the box on the floor and the audience grows silent and I beam my famous smile and say and the winner is: and surely it would be some pretty good poet who deserved it right. I don’t think this is a slush pile. Or what if it is. What if everything is. I mean ultimately. Do you believe in excellence. Think of some of the terrible people who win contests and get big grants. Are those great poets. Well sometimes they are. But often they are not. How does this happen. Surely the judges read all the submissions, hey?

What about some of those places poets aspire to publish in. Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, what else. The Nation? Conjunctions? Chicago Review. Granta. What is Granta? A British grain that helps with constipation? How about American Poetry Review. That should move things along. More importantly what about all the truly little poetry magazines in the world, the funky ones, the cool ones, experimental ones, the one offs. Bi-lingual journals. Webzines. Throw all of them up in the air. Who chooses what goes into any these journals. Do editors read the poems really. Or do they get someone to help them who’s hot. What would you do. I take my responsibility very seriously the editor might say. But does it matter. Do we care. Does the editor have good taste. Which editor. I’m just suggesting that whatever the editor thinks and feels, whatever the judges do there’s still such a high percentage of randomness (or corruption) in the mix that what if she or he instead just picked every eighth one or cut the pile in half and then cut that in half and then asked a perfect stranger walking down the hall to pick one from that pile and another from this. The idea of “knowing” is so massively influential in these decisions, these realms – either knowing the poets personally, knowing someone that recommended them, or knowing that THIS kind of poetry sucks and this kind is what MATTERS…something deep in me that really wants do my own writing (that most random thing of all) thinks the fishbowl method is probably good and fair. I am leaning over the weightiness of this decision. In my beautiful dress, in my blind blind mind. I wonder what we will do.

I love that somebody didn’t like my exchange with Bobby Byrd about whether the tortillas were good. Is it tortillas they didn’t like, our friendly exchange or whaa? I rarely use a question mark. Gertrude Stein said if the sentence doesn’t contain the question you didn’t write it well enough. Though whaa is a cartoon Americanism up there with #@%!!! and all kinds of swears. If you’re getting baroque you might as well go all the way and throw in an excessive punctuation mark at least one. Paint your sign! I’m looking forward next time I’m online (maybe tonight) to tell whoever that I didn’t like him not liking my exchange with Bobby. Not only will I say not like. I’ll say Phew! You stink.

Just before I bought the tortillas Bobby and I went to the gallery at UTEP and saw part of an amazing show called The Disappeared. It is work by fourteen artists from the Americas on the subject of the extensive tortures, imprisonment and political murders of dissenters in South America and Mexico in the last quarter of the 20^th C. The show is accompanied by a succinct statement by an American academic about what exactly the plan was country by country in terms of our country’s support for these murderous regimes. A state department dude calmly explains in 1948 that it’s time to cease talking about “vague and unreal objectives such as human rights” and that a lot of the world wants what we have and we are going to have to work hard securing a future in which THEY will not be able to get their paws on OUR stuff. And as usual a lot of our stuff happened to be underneath the ground or in the trees of their land. So in this show we have a Chilean flag made out of human bones (Arturo Duclos) a swastika made out of light called “Joy Division” (Ivan Navarro). The wall text of the show and earlier readings from the poet novels of Roberto Belano will help remind us that the transmigration of the Nazi ethos to South America during and after World War II contributed to the style and effectiveness what South Americans refer to as “The Disappearance.” These recent artists’ (who themselves grew up in the wake of these events) work has strong resemblances to Holocaust art. I’m thinking for example of Christian Boltanski’s 80s photographs of kids. Class pictures here are enlarged and “the missing” from someone’s high school class are circled. Class reunions in South America thanks to the Monroe Doctrine are very different affairs from our own American ones.

A stained and mottled child mannequin is obsessively photographed until its plaster dents and abrasions stand in for a real kid’s wounds. In a like manner poets and readers of my generation have found Roberto Belano. His fictions are changing my own past. When I think that while I was sitting in workshops at St. Marks Church (1975-77) poets in Chile were having rats forced up their vaginas and electrodes attached to their testicles for attending the wrong poetry reading, having the wrong friends, going to a demonstration against our government and its puppet dictatorships. It really is as simple as that. Some countries (Uruguay) had only small numbers killed but thousands tortured and imprisoned. Others (Guatemala) had more like 200,000 dead. Because it was good for business. My generation likes to tell younger poets how different it was when we were coming up with our cheap rents and free government supported art classes. When I backpacked in Europe after college it wasn’t with the memory of listening to the howls of agony in other cells that I couldn’t know for sure wouldn’t soon be my own. I’ve faulted myself for not being wilder, not staying in Europe longer after college but I didn’t have enough to run from yet. I wonder if knowledge, eventual knowledge is enough to make one turn against their own country for good. I’m at MacDowell tonight and a filmmaker showed a bunch of clips from his films including one about the Weathermen. He kind of laughed about how little he knew about that bunch of 60s weirdos, middle class kids, who wanted to do something drastic in response to the killing going on in Southeast Asia. His films got funnier and funnier until the final one was about a giant mall in China, the biggest in the world that was such a failure it was going to get knocked down. It was really his best film because his own ambivalence had found its perfect subject. I gave him a hard time, not for his work but for his attitude. I felt that he got funded for his project because he seemed a little dumb. Not that he was stupid. He was obviously a smart man. But there’s that American way we have where we’re always just kids, not really understanding at all what’s going on. That’s where we start. For that boyish tone we will get the big reward, and the promise that the show will go on. Until it falls which seems to be happening right now. Finally we have brought it on ourselves. There is nowhere to go since we have exported our product everywhere. We are pulling the covers up tight tonight. Hey where’s MacDowell’s money from. I mean really?!

Oakland, CA — The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2008 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, December 28th at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way in Berkeley, CA. The awards will take place from 4 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Authors attending will read selections from their works and sign copies of their award-winning books. A reception and book signing will take place following the ceremony. This event is free to the public. For more information, call (510) 681-5652.
California Poet Laureate Al Young will host the event. Al Young was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger, who has said of Mr. Young, “Al Young is a poet, an educator and a man with a passion for the arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration.”
The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.

On May 15th, PEN Oakland Vice President Reginald Lockett died. In his honor, PEN Oakland has named its Lifetime Achievement Award, the Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. This year’s winners are poet Diane di Prima, and playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Allen Ginsberg said of Diane, “A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.”
Adrienne Kennedy was a key figure in the Blacks Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is best known for her first major play “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” winner of the 1964 Obie Award for most distinguished play. In 1995, critic Michael Feingold of the Village Voice declared that “with Beckett gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater.”
The PEN Oakland Censorship Award will be given to Project Censored, for its ongoing research on national news stories ignored, misrepresented or censored by the U.S. corporate media, in particular important stories about the nationwide move to impeach President George W. Bush and the fact that over one million Iraqis have lost their lives since the 2003 invasion, with more than 50% of those deaths attributable to U.S. troops and their allies. Based on the premise that an uninformed or misinformed public cannot make valid policy decisions via the ballot box, PEN Oakland honors this organization for their efforts to bring facts to light that are willfully buried by many mainstream media outlets.
A reception will be held after the awards where the public will have an opportunity to meet the authors, and purchase signed copies of their award winning books. During the program, winners will be presented with a plaque and asked to read selections from their work.
For more information, please call (510) 681-5652.
2008 Josephine Miles National Literary Awards winners are:

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Essays) by Rebecca Solnit (University of California Press)
187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971—2007 (Poetry & Short Stories) by Juan Felipe Herrera (City Lights)
Sleeping with the Moon (Poetry) by Colleen J. McElroy (Illinois Poetry Series)

The Stillness of Love and Exile (Fiction) by Rosa Martha Villarreal (Tertulia Press)

Dude, Where’s My Black Studies Department? The Disappearance of Black Americans from U.S. Universities (Non-Fiction) by Cecil Brown (North Atlantic Books)

Apex Hides the Hurt: A Novel (Fiction) by Colson Whitehead (Anchor)
About Now: Collected Poems (Poetry) by Joanne Kyger (National Poetry Foundation)