Darkness at Noon
Watching an insurrection from afar is not all it's cracked up to be. Lukas Rowland contemplates the chaos in Washington and if he'll ever be able to go back home again.
So how are the organizers of the $50,000 Montreal International Poetry Prize doing? You might remember the announcement and my piece here on March 28, 2011
What has happened since is the publication of a longlist of almost 150 poems in October. It would have been 150 except that a few were disqualified as they had been published previously. The names of all the poets on the longlist are on the site now, and a Longlist e-Anthology published by Véhicule Press will be made available shortly for free download.
A shortlist followed on November 17. You can check out the 50 shortlisted poets, among whom are several Canadians. Two poems per day from the shortlist are now appearing on the prize site, along with MP3s of most of the poems in the poets' own voices.
The winning poem will be announced Thursday, December 15, at 7 p.m. EST.
An as-yet-unnamed “prominent US artist” has agreed to do a broadside of one of the shortlisted poems. That announcement, too, on December 15. “This is all part of our hope to bring attention to new poetry,” says prize director Len Epp.
© Linda Leith 2011
Watching an insurrection from afar is not all it's cracked up to be. Lukas Rowland contemplates the chaos in Washington and if he'll ever be able to go back home again.
To win it feels, still, completely improbable. It's a huge delight and a big break and an honour I'll try to keep living up to in my writing.
The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner author Jennifer Quist's post-graduate work at the University of Alberta includes translations from the Chinese. These include two pieces by Lu Xun. The second appears here.
Phillip Ernest elaborates on his life in Toronto, the city to which he fled at the age of fifteen, on his first university studies there when he was thirty, and on the writing of the Sanskrit vampire story entited The Vetala that LLP publishes on March 10th.