Griffin Poetry Prize Poets – Stay in Touch

The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry has the privilege every year of working and being associated with some of the world’s most talented and lively literary figures, both established and up-and-coming. Where does poetry take these vibrant individuals beyond their connections with the Griffin Trust? Check here to find out where previous Griffin Prize shortlisted poets have travelled and what they’re involved in now.

Several Griffin poets also stay in touch through the Griffin Poets’ Blog. Read the latest updates here.

If you are a Griffin Poetry Prize poet and would like to update the information in this section, please click here.

• Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht continues to garner enthusiastic reviews. Babstock is featured in the first of a series of bimonthly poetry interview podcasts provided by Maisonneuve magazine.

• Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld were pleased to see their translation of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open (shortlisted for the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize) issued in trade paperback in the fall of 2006. In March, 2007, composer David Del Tredici presented a new solo piano work entitled “Chana's Story”, a cycle on texts by Chana Bloch, which is described here and here. Chana Bloch is a contributing editor to new publication Persimmon Tree, which celebrates artists and writers over 60.

• Christian Bök took part in the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week, part of the International Arts Festival, in March, 2008. His performance at that event is described here.

• Roo Borson’s new book of essays, Personal History, will appear in September 2008, published by Pedlar Press in Toronto.

• George Bowering has been selected by the Griffin trustees to serve as a judge for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Di Brandt’s collection of creative essays So this is the world & here I am in it is nominated for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, part of the 2008 Manitoba Book Awards. Brandt recently contributed to a new one-woman opera exploring the life and work of Canadian artist Emily Carr.

• Dionne Brand’s latest volume of poetry, Inventory, was released in spring, 2006, is reviewed here, was nominated for the 2006 Governor General's Award for poetry, and was also shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Trillium Book Award.

• Kamau Brathwaite was the sole Musgrave Gold medallist recognized by the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) in 2006. In January, 2007, Brathwaite was awarded the top prize in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment competition, garnering $10,000 (Barbados) for Missa Solemnis, a collection of poems shaped in part by the Beethoven composition of the same name. Brathwaite's new collection of stories, DS (2): Dreamstories, is reviewed here.

• Robert Bringhurst’s most recent work, Everywhere Being is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking, is reviewed here. It is a companion volume to The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks, and both contemplate the connections between poetry, language, nature and philosophy. It has been shortlisted for the BC Book Prize Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.

• Anne Carson was named a member of the Order of Canada in August, 2005. In May, 2006, Carson’s “Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve” formed part of the narrative of Kammer/Kammer, by the renowned Forsythe Dance Company. In August, 2006, her translation of Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, was published, and is reviewed here.

• Victor Hernández Cruz was recently named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the first Latino to hold the post since the Board of Chancellors was established in 1946. Cruz’s most recent collection, The Mountain in the Sea, is described here.

• Leslie Greentree, David Kirby and Gerald Stern were joined by 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize winners Roo Borson and Charles Simic as part of a lively contingent of Griffin Trust friends and associates who participated in readings and celebrations for the 2005 Dublin Writers Festival on June 16th and 17th, 2005.

  Leslie, David and Roo kept a colourful blog of the trip, which you can read here.

• Leslie Greentree’s first book of short stories was published by the University of Alberta Press in spring 2006. A Minor Planet for You is a collection of short fiction about relationships, quirky and real, that everyone can relate to. Learn more about it here and read a review of it here. In the fall of 2006, Greentree won in the short story category for the CBC Alberta Anthology, with a piece entitled The Brilliant Save.

• Durs Grünbein presented a Poem Present Lecture at the University of Chicago in February, 2007.

• Phil Hall has contributed three new poems to the Griffin Poets' Blog – click here to enjoy them. Hall was recently profiled on poetics.ca.

• Michael Hofmann is shortlisted for the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his work on Ashes for Breakfast. Hofmann’s translation of Report From a Parisian Paradise: Essays From France, 1925-1939 was recently reviewed here. His translation of Frost by Thomas Bernhard is reviewed here. His Twentieth-Century German Poetry was cited as a favourite book of 2006 by Newsday.

• Fanny Howe’s most recent work is A Wall of Two, the translation into English of the poems of Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel. Read more about the book here.

• Kathleen Jamie’s collection of poetry, The Tree House (Picador), garnered extensive acclaim. The book won the esteemed £10,000 Forward Prize and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Most recently, Jamie became the first poet to win Scotland’s most valuable literary prize – the £10,000 Scottish Book of the Year Award. In early 2006, Jamie’s poem “The Blue Boat” was one of four English poems translated into Chinese and displayed throughout the Shanghai subway system, in part of an exchange with the United Kingdom that will see four Chinese poems translated into English and displayed throughout the London subway system. Also in 2006, Jamie wrote some specially commissioned poems to accompany Anatomy Acts: How We Come to Know Ourselves, an acclaimed exhibition that explored the social, cultural and scientific significance of anatomy. Later in 2006, she was interviewed by The Scotsman. Jamie is featured as part of an enhanced presence for Scottish poets in The Poetry Archive – her profile and selections from her work are found here.

• Suji Kwock Kim teaches full time at Drew University, but just added a second job teaching half-time at Sarah Lawrence College. She is finishing her second book of poems, co-translating an anthology of Korean poetry, and editing the Penguin Anthology of Asian American Literature, the first major anthology of Asian American literature in over a decade. She read at several universities and festivals recently including the 2004 National Book Festival/ Library of Congress, the 2004 Geraldine Dodge Festival, the 2005 United Nations “Community Commons” event, and the 2005 University of California at Berkeley “Lunch Poem Series” (curated by Griffin Trustee Robert Hass). Her poems have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Spanish (for the anthology Lineas Conectadas: Nueva Poesia de los Estados Unidos, in association with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), and German (for Berliner Anthologie, in association with Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin). Her poems are being set to music by the Mayako Kubo and the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, with premieres in Berlin and Tokyo scheduled for 2007. In 2006, Suji Kwock Kim was slated to complete a residency at The Hall Farm Center for Arts & Education in Vermont. In late 2006, she was the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award.

• David Kirby’s regular book reviews, articles and essays include the recent The art of making special. Kirby’s new collection, The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, is reviewed here, here and here, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and won the Florida Book Award for poetry.

• August Kleinzahler was interviewed in the Fall, 2007 issue of The Paris Review. Read an excerpt of the interview here. His newest volume of poetry, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, was released in April, 2008, and is reviewed here.

• Sylvia Legris’ and Christian Bök’s poems are part of an eclectic collection (including works by Charles Bukowski, e.e. cummings and Maya Angelou) that have been recently translated into Icelandic.

• Christopher Logue was honoured by the Queen in 2007 with a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services to literature. In addition to his acclaimed poetry, Logue has written for the theatre and cinema, and once penned a pornographic novel under the pseudonym Count Palmiro Vicarion.

• Heather McHugh was one of 50 recipients of a $50,000 (US) United States Artists grant, described here, in December, 2006. In the summer of 2007, McHugh received one of the $5,000 (US) Genius Awards from Seattle-based alternative newspaper The Stranger, as described here. In spring 2008, she read at the University of Rochester as part of the Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture Series.

• Don McKay has released an audio CD entitled “Songs for the Songs of Birds”, through Rattling Books. The CD celebrates the way birds “articulate the air” and considers what the world would be without them. Narrated by McKay, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species. It’s a wonderful way to listen to poetry while learning bird songs.

• Dunya Mikhail was interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) in July, 2007. Listen to the interview and selected readings here. Earlier in 2007, Mikhail took part in the University of California at Berkeley's Lunch Poems series, and a video of her reading is available here on YouTube.

• Erin Moure’s latest work, O cadoiro, is reviewed here.

• Paul Muldoon’s awards, achievements and activities are regularly detailed on the News page of his official Web site. In 2006, businessman Leonard L Milberg donated a rare collection of Irish theatre works to Princeton University as a tribute to Muldoon. In September, 2007, it was announced that Muldoon would take over as poetry editor for the New Yorker. In 2008, Muldoon will take part in the Hall Center Humanities Lecture Series at the University of Kansas. In April 2008, Muldoon was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Les Murray's latest book, Bi-Plane Houses, was published in the spring of 2006, wass shortlisted for Australia’s The Age Book of the Year, and is reviewed here, here and here. He shared his thoughts and reflections in an interesting interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in mid-2006. His work is examined from a medieval perspective in this interesting article published in The Australian in the spring of 2007.

• Alice Notley’s newest volume, Alma, or The Dead Women, is reviewed here. She read at the University of Pennsylvania in November, 2006. She was recently interviewed in Toronto’s Eye Weekly.

• P.K. Page was paid special tribute by the Victoria Symphony on the occasion of her 90th birthday in September, 2006 with a special celebration, described here. The Malahat Review recently announced a new P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry, which will recognize the excellence of the publication's contributors by awarding a prize of $1000 to the author of the best poem or sequence of poems to have appeared in the magazine’s quarterly issues during the previous calendar year. Page's latest work, a short fiction piece entitled Up on the Roof, was released in spring, 2007 and is reviewed here. She reflects on her new work and other issues in this December, 2006 interview.

• Michael Palmer is the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Learn more about it here. When Palmer read at the Lunch Poems Noontime Poetry Reading Series at UC Berkeley, it was captured in this 30-minute YouTube video.

• Michael Symmons Roberts published two books in 2006: The Miracles of Jesus, a companion volume to the major BBC One television series, and Patrick’s Alphabet, his first novel, which is reviewed here. The online archives of the CBC Radio program Tapestry provides an extensive audio interview with Michael Symmons Roberts. Roberts crafted an interesting review of his top 10 verse novels, works that balance between prose and poetry, in this Guardian Unlimited article. Roberts recently served as a judge for the Arvon International Poetry Competition.

• Matthew Rohrer took part in some of the stops in the Poetry Bus Tour 2006, described in this lively article. Rohrer’s new volume of poetry, Rise Up, was released in spring, 2007, is described here and is reviewed here. Rohrer welcomed celebrants to the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize awards gala with an entertaining and provocative speech.

• Charles Simic is the 2007 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. On the same day in August, 2007 that Simic received this award, the US Library of Congress announced that he had been chosen as the new US Poet Laureate. Simic also recently served as a judge for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. His latest volume, Sixty Poems, is reviewed here.

  

• Anne Simpson appeared in an episode of the second season of Heart of a Poet, a documentary “television series in which each episode profiles the life, inspiration and performances of a working Canadian poet. Read more about it on the program’s Web site. (Christian Bök and Karen Solie appeared in episodes in the inaugural season of this series in 2006.) Simpson’s new volume of poetry, Quick, reviewed here, has been shortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award. Read more about it here. Simpson’s new novel, Falling, is reviewed here and here.

• Louis Simpson’s work appears in the new volume Second World War Poems (Faber), which is reviewed here. Simpson was also interviewed for the upcoming book Our Fathers’ War: Growing Up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation, described here. In March 2006, Simpson took part in a rare literary reunion of alumni contributors to the famed Columbia Review, described here.

• Karen Solie’s second collection of poetry, Modern and Normal was nominated for the English Language Trillium Book Award for Poetry and longlisted for the ReLit Award. The book is described here and reviewed here. Solie is a judge for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. Solie was one of 12 Canadian poets, including Ken Babstock, Paul Vermeersch, Tim Lilburn, Suzanne Buffam and six francophone poets who participated in a workshop at the Berlin Poetry Festival with 12 German poets, in which they did translations of each other’s poems with the help of prepared word-for-word literal translations and interpreters. The translations will later be published in a trilingual anthology.

• Gerald Stern was the 2005 recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Read more about the honour here. Stern will contribute new poems to a discussion series entitled A Question of Impeachment in the fall of 2007. Read more about it here.

• C.D. Wright was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, a no-strings-attached $500,000 (US) grant for work that shows “exceptional merit and promise.” C.D. Wright shared company with an eclectic list of fellowship recipients, described here. Wright also won the 2005 Robert Creeley Award, named after the renowned poet and former Griffin Poetry Prize judge who died in March, 2005. Wright’s latest book is Cooling Time, described here. Most recently, Wright was a judge on the poetry panel for the 2006 National Book Awards. In summer, 2007, her poem “Like a Prisoner of Soft Words” appeared in The New Yorker.

• Charles Wright has been awarded the lifetime achievement Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for 2008, described here.