The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Rodney Jones, Griffin Poetry Prize 2007 International Shortlist
Salvation Blues is Rodney Jones’ eighth book of poetry. Previous collections include Kingdom of the Instant: Poems (2004); Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999); Things That Happen Once (1996); Apocalyptic Narrative (1993); Transparent Gestures (1989); The Unborn (1985); and The Story They Told Us of Light (1980). He was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award. Rodney Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
Judges’ Citation
“There are not many poets who get as much of American life in their poems as Rodney Jones. His Salvation Blues, a book made up of one hundred poems taken from six previous collections published over the last twenty years, brings to mind Whitman. Jones asks in a poem, what happened to all the people the older poet cheered westward across the continent? They are all here in his poems, making ends meet, working as farmers, shipping clerks, waitresses, car mechanics, butchers, strippers and teachers, while trying their best to believe in the American dream and a religion whose preachers tend to be actors and salesmen whose pulpit is television. Jones is a marvelous story teller and a contemplative man with an interest in both character and the way the world works. ‘Most of us are compositions that begin in error,’ he says. He never forgets that. His poems are angry, bawdy, funny, wise and deeply moving. They sing to remind us of our humanity and to heal the language of its long service as a mere tool.”
Summary
In Salvation Blues Jones has chosen the best of his previous work and included 25 new poems from the past three years which share a common theme. Ask Rodney Jones how he spends his time these days when he’s not writing poetry: he plays jazz guitar; he goes fishing; and he regrets the Bush administration. In describing the new poems in the collection Jones says: ‘The new poems make me uncomfortable. They seem aesthetically and politically unflinching, statements of my depression and disgust with the people of the United States.’
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
Rodney Jones reads The United States
The United States, by Rodney Jones
The United States
If you asked what it is all about I would say a field a green field in the turning rows a killdeer and after that barbed wire the hedge with its cardinals a blacktop then another field
Corn one of the main things after water and before milk for whiskey is in it and grits gold for chickens pearls before swine there is a factory in every plant if we could be properly humble
it is the greatness of the nation along with cartoon animation automobiles and rock ‘n’ roll jazz and basketball evolved here but not one other U.S. God just the corn’s imperial row
on row then Sylvester Stallone and airbrushed Elvis thank you very much ladies and gentlemen Presley Dylan and the Supremes no I would say a field a vast field at the center top-hogs and cattle
then art the cities New York Chicago Houston Seattle man told me last week experts can teach starlings to talk hell televangelists may yet witness in terza rima each stalk of corn
contributes it has been so hybridized with its immense ears it no longer resembles maize it is what we have left to barter for oil and microchips tones of it siloed and elevated
to float us through droughts and wars and speculations we ask which most cogently represents us Leaves of Grass or The Simpsons there is the idea that every living thing is a subset of human
control and the other notion that though we may go on a few hundred or thousand years the poison has spilled no more land will be made the search for another arable
planet may prove moot as the search for earthly sentience meanwhile this taco here crunches in the great scheme of things we persist one people one of the potential fates of corn
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