"a cube of hot, smoking conscience."
Pound, Merwin, Moore, Ignatow, Clifton, Pasternak
Ezra Pound, to Merwin, 1946 (Merwin was 18):
If you’re going to be a poet you have to work at it every day. You should write about seventy-five lines a day. But at your age you don’t have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to work translating. The Provençal is the real source. The poets are closest to music. They hear it. They write to it. Try to learn the Provençal, at least some of it, if you can.
W.S. Merwin:
Marianne Moore:
David Ignatow:
Maxine Kumin insisted her students memorize 30 to 40 lines of poetry a week:
“The other reason, as I tell their often stunned faces, is to give them an internal library to draw on when they are taken political prisoner,” she told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans in 2000. “For many, this is an unthinkable concept; they simply do not believe in anything fervently enough to go to jail for it.”
Yehuda Amichai (trans. Ted Hughes and Assia Gutmann:
Lucille Clifton:
Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetaeva, May 23, 1926:
About Sean Singer
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Calls for Poems and Essays
92Y Unterberg Poetry Center Discovery Contest, Four prizes of $500 each and publication in the Paris Review Daily are given annually for a group of poems.
Colorado Prize for Poetry, A prize of $2,000 and publication by the Center for Literary Publishing is given annually for a poetry collection.
Levis Reading Prize, A prize of $3,000 to $5,000 and an all-expenses paid trip to give a reading at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond is given annually for a first or second book of poetry published during the previous year
Roxane Gay Nonfiction Project, $2,000 for nonfiction essays
Sustainable Arts Foundation, Up to twenty awards of $5,000 each are given annually to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers with children.
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