Claremont Graduate University is handing out a couple of huge poetry prizes here in Claremont, California.
Earlier this month in a press release, CGU announced Marianne Boruch won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her book The Book of Hours. The prize, given to a mid-career poet, is one of the largest cash prizes a poet can win in the United States. Boruch teaches creative writing at Purdue University and is also involved in the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Heidy Steidlmayer of Vacaville, California, won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book Fowling Piece. The annual award is given for a first book of poems. Steidlmayer’s poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and in other prestigious poetry journals.
“We are delighted to honor these poets and celebrate their achievements,” Wendy Martin is quoted as saying. Martin, who is vice provost at Claremont Graduate University and director of the Tufts Poetry Awards program, goes on to say, “These Awards will help them gain wider recognition and will sustain their continuing commitment to writing outstanding poetry.”
The press release describes The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards as having been established in 1993 at Claremont Graduate University by Kate Tufts to memorialize her husband, a Los Angeles shipyard executive who had a passion for writing poetry. The goal of the award is recognize a poet who is no longer a beginner but is very much in mid-career.
A ceremony will be held at Garrison Theater (231 E. 10th Street in Claremont) on Thursday, April 18.
The following poem was delivered by inauguration poet Richard Blanco at President Obama’s second inaugural today. The text of the poem was provided by the Presidential Inaugural Committee.
“One Today”
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper — bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives — to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.
One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind — our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.
Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across cafe tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me — in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.
One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.
One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always — home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country — all of us —
facing the stars
hope — a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it — together
Coyote Canyon Press just published the first of two novels by Hermann Hesse, an endeavor we’re calling our Hermann Hesse Project. Just published is Gertrude. The text for this edition is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly.
Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann Hesse published in English and not part of an anthology. The novel deals with the destructive nature of love, its central theme the narrator’s enduring and hopeless passion for Gertrude, whom he meets through their mutual love of music. “Music was important to Hesse,” says Thomas Fasano, who wrote the Introduction to the book. “As a child he loved to listen to the church organ, learned to play the violin, and developed a passion for Chopin. His interest in music and painting and his lifelong association with musicians and painters greatly informed his writing.”
Fasano writes in the Introduction:
Hesse’s pre-World-War-I heroes are esthetes who live only in their own world of dreams, who shrink before bold action. Temperamental artists, they are paralyzed by their chronic indecision and consumed by loneliness—timid souls to whom the art of life and the art of love are forever unobtainable. They ask little of life and expect much. Such is the nature of the child of nature, Peter Camenzind, and the timorous composer, Kuhn. Such too was Hermann Hesse.
The second book in the Hermann Hesse Project will be a rediscovery of sorts: In The Old Sun, a novel published in English over one hundred years ago and essentially lost since then — until now. We’re planning a beautiful edition of the novel both in hardback and Kindle. In The Old Sun was actually Hesse’s first book published in English in the United States. It was part of an anthology called German Classics and has never been published as an individual book until now.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee has announced that Richard Blanco has been chosen to read a poem at President Obama’s inauguration ceremony on Jan. 21. The choice marks a couple firsts: Blanco will become the first Hispanic and the first gay poet to read at a presidential inauguration. He will also, at 44, be the youngest poet to do so.
In a recent posting on the NPR website, Blanco said, “Even though it’s been a few weeks since I found out, just thinking about my parents and my grandparents and all the struggles they’ve been through, and how, you know, here I am, first-generation Cuban-American, and this great honor that has just come to me, and just feeling that sense of just incredible gratitude and love.”
The New York Times writes that Blanco, a son of Cuban exiles, has felt “a spiritual connection” with Obama from the moment he burst onto the political scene. Like Mr. Obama, the Times reports, “Blanco has been on a quest for personal identity through the written word. He said his affinity for Mr. Obama springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay (and worked as a civil engineer while pursuing poetry). His poems are laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind.”
Frank Cerabino has a write-up about my brother today in the The Palm Beach Post. The interview was the result of a cold-call by Mr. Cerabino.
Hunt for Bigfoot yields more exercise than sightings Many of you are probably vowing to start exercising after the holiday season. It happens every year. Gym memberships swell in January. But maybe instead of joining the gym, you should consider hunting for Bigfoot. I thought of this after talking to Tim Fasano, a 56-year-old Tampa, Fla., taxi driver by way of a college philosophy degree.
“I wouldn’t last five minutes on a treadmill,” said the 260-pound cabbie. “But I can spend hours walking around the woods. It’s good for me. I need the exercise.” Fasano walks through Florida swamps, woodlands and forests about three days a week in search of Bigfoot. It’s more than a hobby with him.
He has devoted countless hours to the hunt and posted YouTube videos of suspicious footprints and audio clips of animal howls. His website “Sasquatch evidence.com” makes for enjoyable reading for anybody who has the inclination to imagine that the mythical Bigfoot creature lives in Florida. Fasano says it makes perfect sense for Bigfoot to be here. “Florida contains some of the wildest areas of remote, dense jungle and unexplored areas,” he said. And I’m guessing that if Bigfoot doesn’t live in Florida, certainly Bigfoot’s grandparents do.
(Sasquatch Village?) Fasano is used to the skeptics. But he’s too enamored with the quest, which probably has something to do with his philosophy degree. “I was very interested in exploring the universe and finding out why we are here,” he said. “With all the oceans explored, now the great explorers must look inward to find mythical beasts.” Fasano and a small band of enthusiasts have created something they call the Florida Bigfoot Organization. “I’ve been doing it four years now,” he said.
“I never thought I would be doing it this long. Every time I think I’m going to quit, I find something.” Like a large fresh footprint in a remote swamp. “I was covered with Off that day because the mosquitoes were so thick. So I couldn’t imagine a person would be barefoot out there. And I didn’t see anybody else,” he said.
His YouTube channel, “Fasano-Tampa,” has hundreds of videos posted, and they’ve already gotten more than 1 million views. The videos typically feature the camouflage-wearing Fasano wandering Florida’s swamps in search of clues with his camera. Some of his videos are shot at night, when creature sounds are heard and Fasano narrates to a black screen with a voice dripping with drama. “I’m putting myself in real danger in the middle of the night,” he explains on one video. “There are critters out here that can eat you.” Fasano is not beyond showcasing his own persona as something that might ultimately be far more fascinating than the theoretical beast he is allegedly looking for.
In one of his videos, he spoofs a popular beer commercial by calling himself “The Most Interesting Bigfoot Man in the World.” He says he’s been in touch with reality TV people in Los Angeles. He’s hopeful. But the field of Bigfoot searchers in America is already pretty crowded. So where does it all end? “I think it’s an ongoing quest,” Fasano said. “I don’t know if there is an endpoint, unless you find a dead body.
Until a dead body comes along, it will never be classified as an animal.” If nothing else, there’s always the exercise.
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