Griffin 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 Poetry Prize shortlisted poets have travelled and what they’re involved in now.

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• The late Margaret Avison‘s posthumous collection Listening is reviewed here.

• The late Robin Blaser read at the respected Lunch Poems Noontime Poetry Reading Series at UC Berkeley in November, 2008. A webcast of Blaser’s reading, as well as those of other renowned poets who have taken part of the series, can be found on the Lunch Poems Web site. The video of Blaser’s reading has also been posted to YouTube:

• 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 Persimmon Tree, which celebrates artists and writers over 60. Bloch and Kronfeld’s latest collaboration is the translated work Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, published in April 2009.

• Christian Bök is enjoying a resurgence of interest in Eunoia, which won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. Within two days of Bök being interviewed on a BBC radio show at the end of October, 2008, the entire print run of the new UK edition of his volume had sold out. The book, which reached No. 8 on Amazon UK, is now in its third UK printing, and it also made the Times of London’s list of 2008’s Top 10 books. Read all about it here and here. Bök was recently interviewed at length on the subject of Canadian literary awards, and provided many absorbing opinions and insights, which are detailed here.

• George Bowering served as a judge for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. Bowering’s essay “Human Intellect and the Divine” was featured on the NPR and CBC Radio program This I Believe. In 2010, Geist Magazine featured reviews of each chapter of his collection My Darling Nellie Grey over the course of a Summer of Bowering.

• Di Brandt‘s collection of creative essays So this is the world & here I am in it was 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 is currently serving a busy three-year term as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Brand took part in the Griffin Poetry Prize 2010 readings, offering a memorable reading from the late P.K. Page’s nominated work, Coal and Roses.

• 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 won the BC Book Prize Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for 2008.

• Anne Carson was the 2008 Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the New York University Creative Writing program. Carson was named a member of the Order of Canada in August, 2005. Carson was a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. Carson’s latest collection, Nox, has received extensive critical acclaim.

• 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, and he is interviewed here.

• Elaine Equi and her partner and fellow poet Jerome Sala gave a lively reading from their respective works at Rust Belt Books in Buffalo in November, 2008.

• Clayton Eshleman was interviewed in May, 2008 on the KCRW Bookworm NPR radio program. Listen to and download the audio segment here.

• Paul Farley was the well-received keynote speaker for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize awards ceremony. Read his speech here. Farley took part in the inaugural Chapter & Verse Literature Festival in Liverpool in September, 2008. His most recent collection, The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems, was published in 2010.

• 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. 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;s work is examined in tandem with that of Paul Celan and Joseph Brodsky in Poetic Affairs by Michael Eskin, published in 2008. Grünbein is involved in German filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s project to create a 420-minute film version of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Grunbein’s most recent publication is Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations, released in 2010.

• Phil Hall launched his collection, Killdeer in the spring of 2011, and will be touring the UK to read from it in the autumn of 2011. Hall read from his new book at the BookThug spring book launch in May, 2011.

• David Harsent received a Cholmondeley Award in June, 2008. The Cholmondeley Awards for Poets were founded by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966 to recognise the achievement and distinction of individual poets. They are honorary awards for which submissions are not accepted. Harsent is also collaborating again with composer Harrison Birtwistle on a new chamber music piece entitled The Corridor.

• Michael Hofmann recently translated Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada – it is reviewed here. Hofmann’s translation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person is reviewed here. Hofmann recently offered a passionate defence of multilingualism in the Guardian.

• Fanny Howe was announced as the winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement in April, 2009. Learn more about it here. 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, won the 2004 Forward Prize and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. 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. Jamie was a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• 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).

  Kim’s 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. In 2009, she was a guest judge for the Poetry Out Loud competition.

• David Kirby’s 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 most recent volume of poetry, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, reviewed here, came out in paperback in April, 2009. Kleinzahler shared the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 2008 with Juan Felipe Herrera. Kleinzahler was most recently profiled in a lively piece in The Guardian.

• 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. Legris was appointed editor of Saskatchewan’s Grain Magazine in October, 2008.

• 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. McHugh’s most recent collection, Upgraded to Serious, was published in 2009.

• David McFadden’s most recent collection Be Calm, Honey, was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry.

• Don McKay was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada in December, 2008, for his contributions to Canadian literature as a nature poet and mentor of many emerging writers from coast to coast. In 2008, McKay 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. His award-winning volume Strike/Slip continues to garner wonderful reviews. McKay’s latest volume of poetry, The Muskwa Assemblage, was inspired by an “art camp” expedition to the Muskwa-Kechika wilderness of Northern British Columbia. Read more about it here.

• 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:

• A.F. Moritz will travel to Shanghai September, 2010 and present his poetry as part of Canada’s cultural program at Expo 2010. The cultural programming is under the aegis of Cirque du Soleil and Blue Metropolis, a Montreal literary organization. In the last weeks of December, 2009, the Globe and Mail named Moritz’s The Sentinel (2008) in its “100 best books of 2009” feature, and his Night Street Repairs (2004), along with The Sentinel, in an article selecting 39 “books of the decade”.

• Erin Moure characterized poetry as an extreme sport in a recent lively interview. Her most recent publications are Expeditions of a Chimæra (in collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei) and O Resplandor.

• 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 April 2008, Muldoon was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Amidst it all, Muldoon continues to front his Princeton-based rock band Rackett.

• Les Murray‘s collection Bi-Plane Houses, was published in the spring of 2006, was 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. His most recent poetry collection, Taller When Prone, was published in 2010.

• Alice Notley’s 2006 volume, Alma, or The Dead Women, is reviewed here. Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 won the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

• P.K. Page died in January, 2010 at the age of 93. Many heartfelt tributes to her and her extensive body of work have been published, including this retrospective from CBC Arts. Page remained very active in arts and publishing throughout her life. She 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 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. One of Page’s most recent works, a short fiction piece entitled Up on the Roof, was released in spring, 2007, is reviewed here and was longlisted for the ReLit Award in the short fiction category. She reflected on her work and other issues in this December, 2006 interview.

  P.K. Page’s last collection, Coal and Roses, was shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Michael Palmer was 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 here:

• Michael Symmons Roberts read at the Manchester Metropolitan University Writing School in February, 2009.

• Matthew Rohrer took part in some of the stops in the Poetry Bus Tour 2006, described in this lively article. Rohrer’s 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.

• Frederick Seidel was profiled in the New York Times Magazine in April, 2009 – read it here.

• Charles Simic was 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. He retired from the Poet Laureate post in 2008 to return to writing poetry, as he discusses here. Simic continues to regularly contribute poetry and prose to The New York Review of Books.



• 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 volume of poetry, Quick, reviewed here, won the 2008 Pat Lowther Award. Read more about it here. Simpson’s novel, Falling, is reviewed here.

• Karen Solie’s latest collection, Pigeon won all of the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry.

• 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 contributed new poems to a discussion series entitled A Question of Impeachment in the fall of 2007. Read more about it here.

• Priscila Uppal’s novel, To Whom It May Concern, was released in January, 2009. She was interviewed about it and other interests in the Toronto Star. In the winter of 2010, Uppal served as poet-in-residence for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

• C.D. Wright’s collection, Rising, Falling, Hovering, which won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize, is reviewed here.

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

• Ghassan Zaqtan has been nominated for the prestigious 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.