Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
Martyn Goff, bookseller and administrator of the Man Booker Prize from 1970 to 2006, has died at age ninety-one. In a statement, current Booker Foundation chair Jonathan Taylor said: “His contribution was invaluable and under Martyn the prize grew in stature and reputation, not least because of his tireless championing of contemporary fiction of the highest quality.” (Guardian)
“It has been a melancholy task to read this book [Drum-Taps]; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it. It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.” For its 150th anniversary issue, the Nation has reprinted twenty-two-year-old Henry James’s 1865 review of Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps. The complete edition will be re-released for the first time since its original publication by New York Review Books in April.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has commissioned ten major poets including Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, and Yusef Komunyakaa to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series of paintings, which are currently on view at the museum. Elizabeth Alexander, who selected the participating poets, will moderate a reading of the Migration Series poems at the MoMA on May 1.
Speaking of poetry responding to painting, the New York Times recently featured the collaborative work of poet Susan Howe and painter R. H. Quaytman, who is Howe’s daughter.
A crowdfunding campaign is underway to raise money for a documentary about Alvin Schwartz’s book series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. According to producer Cody Meirick, who launched the campaign on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, the documentary will explore the history of “one of the most controversial works of modern children’s literature.”
“Of course, poetry is not the same as history. But I think it comes before history in the way in which it represents realities and individuals that come up against them. So, it’s like a an X-ray, a history of human emotions, and a history of how individuals are affected by the real.” At the Poetry Foundation, Daniel Borzutzky interviews Chilean poet Raúl Zurita about his new collection, The Country of Planks (Action, 2015), which Borzutzky translated into English.
Friendships abound in many films and on television, but what about in recent books of fiction? At the Guardian, novelist A D Miller considers the reasons friendships in modern fiction appear to be underrepresented.
