Recommended Reading
The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize:James Fenton & Mark Kraushaar |
7.30pm Tuesday, 8 November 2011
Elizabethan Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol St SE, Washington, DC 20005
Tickets: $15
Introduction and conversation moderated by Joseph Harrison, poet and Waywiser Press Senior American Editor.
The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is awarded annually by Waywiser Press for a poetry collection by a poet who has published no more than one book. The winner receives $3,000 and his collection is published on both sides of the Atlantic. Mark Kraushaar is the 2010 recipient. He will be joined by this year’s judge, James Fenton.
Mark Kraushaar’s first collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, won the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize. He was the recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award and two Wisconsin Arts Board awards for poetry and has been a finalist for both the Walt Whitman Award and the May Swenson Prize. His poems are widely published and anthologized.
James Fenton has worked as a political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, and columnist. A winner of England’s Newdigate Prize for poetry, he is the author of several volumes of poetry. His latest work is Selected Poems. He edited The New Faber Book of Love Poems and D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems. He was an Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Excerpt from Third Street Muscles and Fitness*
…and for a moment, for a discrete, small portion
of what I will one day refer to as the past,
there’s the five of us facing three
double-door sized panes
of rattling glass:
rain on the awnings, rain over the windows,
rain over the gutters and rain
in soft, sparkling ropes along the curbs,
and into the drains and under the ground.
—Mark Kraushaar
*From The Uncertainty Principle © 2011 by Mark Kraushaar