Sir Roderic Lyne and HE Dr Dejan Popovic, the main [...]]]> Vesna Goldsworthy at the launch of her Crashaw Prize winning collection The Angel of Salonika at the Serbian Embassy.

Sir Roderic Lyne and HE Dr Dejan Popovic, the main speakers.

(Salt, London) the three winners of this year’s Crashaw Prize are:

Now in its third year, this is the [...]]]> Press Release
9^th May 2011

The winners of the 2010 Crashaw Prize

(Salt, London) the three winners of this year’s Crashaw Prize are:

• Vesna Goldsworthy The Angel of Salonika (UK/Serbia)
• Rebecca Lehmann Between the Crackups (USA)
• Catherine Theis The Fraud of Good Sleep (USA)

Now in its third year, this is the first time that the Crashaw Prize has been won entirely by women, and the first year that all the winners were born, or are living, outside of the United Kingdom. There were sixty-eight entrants to the 2010 prize, a shortlist of eight was made in February 2011.

‘“I’m sure every judge remarks on the difficulties of making a selection from a strong shortlist; certainly I found this year’s judging extremely tough,” says Salt director Chris Hamilton-Emery. ”Everyone on the shortlist has produced a terrific book and I’m sure that each manuscript will find a home in the near future. However, my job has been to find the best books from those submitted. I think these three very different books offer readers something exceptional, rewarding, challenging and, in the end, serious.”

All three winners will be published in the autumn of 2011.

The other finalists were:

• Lauren Levin Not Time (USA)
• Alice Miller Theatre of Strangers (New Zealand)
• Stephen Nelson Lunar Poems for New Religions (UK)
• Charlotte Pence Other Interruptions (USA)
• Aidan Semmens The Book of Isaac (UK)

ENDS

For more information please contact: chris@saltpublishing.com

Catherine Theis’s The Fraud of Good Sleep begins with an epigraph from Catullus: “I hate and I love. Why do I do it, you may ask? / I don’t know, but I feel it happening, and it burns me up.” Indeed, the book draws extensively on antiquity for its themes and obsessions: pilgrimages, Sapphic [...]]]>

Catherine Theis’s The Fraud of Good Sleep begins with an epigraph from Catullus: “I hate and I love. Why do I do it, you may ask? / I don’t know, but I feel it happening, and it burns me up.” Indeed, the book draws extensively on antiquity for its themes and obsessions: pilgrimages, Sapphic fragments, Herakles, Martial — but this delight in the ancient world is interspersed with epistolary poems, mock lectures, zombies, saunas and even a banjo tune. It’s a joy to read, filled with an extravagant delight in what David Starkey called the “thinginess” of of history — as well as the things of our own world and its loves, and the litter of those loves.

Biography

I grew up in Chicago, was born in New York, and spent all my childhood summers in Sicily, where I swam in blue coves and ate gelato before dinner. My sister was the prettiest one in the piazza. I feel extremely lucky to have an American father and an Italian mother. As a child, I always wanted to be an American in America, and an Italian in Italy. My maternal grandparents and extended family lived in Aci Castello, a small fishing town outside Catania where supposedly Odyssey and his men romped with the Cyclops. My family taught me how to swim with a small knife tucked in my hand to catch the many crabs found scuttling on the lava rocks. My paternal grandparents lived right outside Chicago with a backyard of apple trees. In the fall, we’d climb up any chance we could. We’d have meetings in the trees, and read books up there, until my grandfather built us a stunning treehouse in the prairie style, and then we took to painting and practicing our dance moves. Extended outside hours. I still like reading outside the best, especially at the beach. Oh, and I like swimming, too. I’m not terribly good at swimming laps. In fact, I’m terrible at it, but I enjoy the water’s gentle resistance. Swimming is a lot like eating, pleasurable in the way it motivates your senses to fullness, and swimming is like reading and writing. I’m fascinated by doubleness. Waves.

The Interview

So where did the book begin for you and what was going on in your life while you were writing it?

The Fraud of Good Sleep took a long time to produce (4, 5, 6 years). I mean, there was always something going wrong throughout production. Technical problems, lack of adequate funding, bad speakers, mountains, expired visas, expensive haircuts, blindness, egos, terrible boyfriends, reluctant landlords and landlords with very nice names as if they were characters in the great American novel, paintings so cheap the paint chipped off. Fines. Once, a leaky cup. Dinner parties. Trips to the greenhouse. Uncomfortable couches. Fire!

Ho ho. What one of our authors, Katy Evans-Bush calls stuff. What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?

Little by little, the failures and misadventures translate into a single moment of euphoria—the poem itself; a remembered thing you can never forget and always want to duplicate. I like writing poem by poem. The danger and thrill of having to start completely from nothing, like I have amnesia, or I’m a body double. I like costumes, long speeches, toned muscles. I just kept writing new poems and throwing the old ones away. I read a lot. I read Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Martial, Pliny, Dante, Woolf, Vallejo, Stein, Moore, Lispector, Notley.

I can see the Notley …

I searched for a women’s epic because I believe Beatrice should go off on her own pilgrimage. I don’t know. I kept thinking about ideas of honesty and tradition. I tried to be very dishonest some days. I tried to use my head less. I’ve always wanted to become headless. What would that be like?

Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?

I have two other manuscripts in the works. One—which I can’t really talk about—is called Fool Me Once. The other one, The June Cuckold and Other Tragedies combines poems and poem plays. The inside of a verse play or poem (or a painting or a song) is one of the last decadent places on earth. It reminds you that you are neither a machine nor an animal. I’ve always been interested in Greek drama, in the use of myth, and in how the Romans re-imagined Greek ideas. I’m drawn to voice (music) and tone (quality, pitch, and strength). I’m interested in rhetoric, in performance, in all night rituals. I want my work to have the force of something leaking from a mask, or booming from a leafy treetop. Balance—wildness of emotion and language coupled with the restraint that comes through form and grammar— interests me. Are you in the cave, outside of the cave, walking to the cave? All kinds. I want to shape a lightening bolt in my readers’ heads. A puff of smoke here.

Intimacy

(This poem first appeared in Gulf Coast)

The country’s manse requires a calmness

of mind, of method.

Pewter plates, tankards,

the dried firkins fitting comfortably

in the endnotes without disruption,

mummies wrapping themselves in parlance,

in abundant white cloth, how historical.

Here, drink this glass of milk, stay in bed,

do not think such strange thoughts,

do not think at all.

The cast-iron pan cast apart,

away from the mind’s deliberate action.

Holding things off,

as if one could be a butler or lady’s maid

to a very rich gentleman,

so estranged from a self-problem,

castellated. To be cast in metal,

to be a pellet disgorged

by a hawk’s decisive spirit.

Double-headed lights cast

through the darkness of night,

never carried inside you,

never broached, never recognized

as invoice or receipt of a city

made famous by its twilight.

Gold and silver. Birds nesting in the ivy,

voices resembling a tower,

their invisible faces, a cup’s worth

of goodwill chatter.

Water, smoke, lakeshore fogs & light now leaving—

new forms, new spaces, life’s materials

contributing to a structure

but not to sympathy,

the cupholder’s proof not measured

in finite steps, or as an ordering principle,

but roughed in sorrow

it sees its way through,

it passes into sense.

The skillful application of paint surprises you.

You suddenly realize you are not yourself.

Discover more about Catherine Theis

Poems

http://www.typomag.com/issue14/theis.html

http://actionyes.org/issue14/theis/theis1.html

Poem-Play:

http://www.kelseyst.com/news/2010/11/20/ksp-november-2010-feature-new-work-by-catherine-theis/

Poem-Film:

http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com/theis.html

Collaborative Poems:

http://www.likestarlings.com/poems/robert_selby_and_catherine_theis/2_ct/

Recording:

http://www.box.net/shared/viu2r22kje#/shared/viu2r22kje/1/45013152/453000252/1

Chapbook:

http://sunsunsun.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/the-fraud-of-good-sleep/

Lauren Levin’s shortlisted book Not Time, is an experimental tour de force raiding interior monologues as well as drawing on an often comic conversational excess drawing on a hugely entertaining list of characters — these are poems working through time and consciousness, filled with fractures and non sequiturs that nonetheless convey the insistent stitching of [...]]]>

Lauren Levin’s shortlisted book Not Time, is an experimental tour de force raiding interior monologues as well as drawing on an often comic conversational excess drawing on a hugely entertaining list of characters — these are poems working through time and consciousness, filled with fractures and non sequiturs that nonetheless convey the insistent stitching of our waking experience, the continual narrative we make of ourselves, one might say the narrative of ourselves as political and social beings. As one line has it “shaken by a dream, edited, living innerly.” It’s a poetry that arrives from and pays deference to Bay Area poetics, is knowing but never arch, and raids literature without being either overly dependent or showy. It’s a deeply contemporary poetry that will leave the reader feeling her way through what it is to narrate our time and what responsibilities we have in doing so and making sense of ourselves and our world.

Biography

I grew up in New Orleans, where my dad and two of my grandfathers grew up.  One of my grandmothers grew up in Eunice.  My mom and her mom grew up in Houston.  For my grandmother, Houston was small.  She took the streetcar downtown.  Now Houston isn’t small and has no streetcars, but New Orleans is still small with streetcars:  too poor to grow or tear itself down.

I always wanted to write and I’m trying to figure out why. I was always interested in food and music and wanted to know why everyone did everything and to understand.

I’ve never had an easy time writing about New Orleans, though I always put it first.

New Orleans is a largely African-American and Catholic city.  My family is a Jewish family and last week when I visited my brother in Washington DC we sang a spontaneous round of “Rock of Ages” at his kitchen table, then shouted “Happy Chanukah, everybody!” at the end.

Many of the things I love invoke discomfort in me.  I’m not sure of my claim on them.  I’m not sure of my relationship to rap music, though I love it, or of my relationship to where I grew up, though I’m obsessed with it.

New Orleans is obsessed with its own questions. It remains an open question by persisting and by having so many contradictions.

When New Orleans people meet, they say, “Where did you go to high school?” Recently someone knew my high school already because I was Jewish from Uptown.  I was embarrassed to be so much who I’ve been, still.

I remember reading Hölderlin in Berlin as a 20-year-old and thinking that if writing this strange had been done in the 18th century, my writing should get stranger.

The Interview

Thanks for talking to me Lauren. Let’s start with how the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?

When I started Not Time, I was feeling very constricted by myself.  The language I had evolved for poetry didn’t have space for a lot of my experience.  I read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and felt tremendous permission:  everything goes in her writing.  The fearlessness of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s work was also freeing for me.  I started thinking about how much I was leaving out and how to find it.

I tried to articulate my habit of asking questions, build it into the poems. Questioning is a huge part of my mental life: might as well make something with it. Articulating an emotion, then interrogating the structures that cause me to feel that emotion. There’s a line in Lara Durback’s ZINECHAPBOOK: “I am obsessed with having emotional conceptual work.  Why.”  I also like to think about the impulse behind why.

What was going on in your life while you were writing it?

Moving to California.  Trying to understand hills. Listening to Lil Wayne mixtapes.  Thinking about my friend who had disappeared. A lot of swimming.

What do you think were the real driving elements in the book — what were the things that moved it all forward for you?

Well, names drove the book.  The poems are full of names and in my head I call many of the poems after the names that appear in them (Keenan, Tasha). Naming things became shorthand for related mental structures:  naming, defining, counting, categorizing.  I find those structures in myself a lot; I’m a pretty concept-driven thinker. And I’m fascinated and repulsed by them.

Defining is often so authoritarian.  After Hurricane Katrina, people were just abandoned, left for days without food and water.  African-Americans going into stores were called ‘looters’ in the media.  White people doing the exact same thing were said to be ‘providing for their families.’   Naming is violent in that situation.  So I ask myself: What can I even think, with a categorizing brain?

I was similarly fascinated with over-sized abstract terms like ‘goodness’ as containers for whole histories of judgment and convention.  I like to tease them out and try to make them get dumb. I was also driven by making bad jokes with myself.  And by sound.

Can I ask how long did it take to bring it all together?

Two or three years?  Too long.  I want to write faster and get interested in the plenitude of my potential failures.

Who was important to you in developing your writing life?

I sometimes think that I only have myself to look at the world with, and feel grossed out by that. But conversation feels like a kind of outside.  I have lots of best friends and I like to call them best friends and I feel fortunate to have their talk as a lens to help me look at things and find an outside to myself.

I don’t know if sound is a ‘who’ but I do feel that sound has a body; it’s material.  Alli Warren says that sound brings the singer’s body with it, so I try to be a better listener.   I like slang for the same reasons.  As a form of group creativity that I’m part of, but that’s also outside me.

While writing Not Time I was reading Bernadette Mayer, Gertrude Stein, César Vallejo, Jennifer Moxley, Lisa Jarnot, Edmond Jabès, Laura Solórzano, Charles Dickens, Juliana Spahr, Bert Brecht, and Alice Notley. They felt like my boon companions.

I am also challenged and enthralled by the writers and poetries of the Bay Area. People push at poetry or outside of poetry here.

Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?

I have a lot of schemes and dreams for projects.  I would like to start an interdisciplinary series with my husband, Tony Valadez; he’s an architect and we think about the different fields talking to each other.  But we need a bigger apartment first.  And I started blogging, yikes.

Starting projects is related for me to thinking about issues of gender.  I feel conflicted about public space, even in the small sphere of poetry.  But with issues like those that came up in the VIDA 2010 Count, or the way Hilary Clinton was treated running for president, or a million other things, my personal self-doubt seems less personal.

How do women function in public space?  How do women claim public space in a way that is attended, noticed?  Those questions have made me want to be more overt and public about my feminism:  in my writing as well as by trying to start projects.

I’m in the middle of confusion, actually, about trying to be overt, while also loving mystery.  I love excess in sound, food, music, and poetry.  But I want to say things.  But I don’t want to lose the part I can’t define.  With friends I edit the poetry magazine Mrs. Maybe.  Its tagline is “A Magazine of Skeptical Occultism,” so I guess that says it.

I wound up writing my biographical note for you mostly about New Orleans, where I grew up.  The last time I was visiting home, I walked by a warehouse where it happened that Mardi Gras floats were being built — just in a residential neighborhood — and took some photos.  So this one is a float on the theme of “American Excess”…

Poem

(this work first appeared in Try Magazine):

You is scrutiny.     You is a back.

If speech were to come from a point on     the scene

it would come.

Time creates weight at the point

from which it issues.

Shilly shally.     Will shall.       The fabric is hot there

footing the ball currently a tree.

A  hill condenses on the interloper spar.

I am venturing to inflect with arrogance

logo fat and foliating on a local chain.

Away crumbly scales!    With the partnership of lichen.

Smear off the ink box number a-line, u-line.

A scale is a furrowed hill flat in the direction

of landscape without spatial words.

Take possession of time, the most violent

flattened element — you is scrutinize.

Not so.     Is someone smiling at a phone screen.

Is a category, like skronk.        For which you are unqualified,

nor did many qualify.    Unso, words justly lead there.

In a furrowed brow you can.

until it came to be written on your writing.

Each  of  these  is  a  line.

Each of these who could       to heavying here

around a fat ring-bearer.

These old fake flower clots have been replicating in slices.

Clots are a point at the eye

Clouds changing wedge.

This disappearance  /  death    is another flexible one

written on a ticket            until it came to be written on like plaster.

Scrounged is to placate the per capita in time’s narrator.

Time in “A Winter’s Tale”

Discover more about Lauren Levin

http://mrsmaybe.wordpress.com/

http://electiveaffinitiesusa.blogspot.com/2010/07/lauren-levin.html

http://www.realpoetik.org/2009/08/lauren-levin.html

http://www.kelseyst.com/news/2009/12/19/461/

Brief video of Lauren Levein reading from in a journal of “poem-films”:

Lauren Levin from joshuamarie on Vimeo.

Link to Lauren’s new chapbook:

http://lamehouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/now-available-lauren-levins-keenan.html

A talk Lauren gave as part of a conference on poetry and labor:

http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2010/09/lauren-levin.html

Recording of Lauren reading from the Bay Area readings site A Voice Box:

http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/2009/06/lauren-levin-artifact-72608.html

Collaborative writing with Alli Warren on music in the journal Con/Crescent:

http://www.concrescentpress.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=58

This year the Crashaw Prize — the UK’s only international prize for full length collections of poetry — received over eighty entries from four continents. The writers span not merely the English-speaking world, but also the striking diversity of contemporary poetry written in our extravagant tongue. It would be impudent to argue [...]]]>

This year the Crashaw Prize — the UK’s only international prize for full length collections of poetry — received over eighty entries from four continents. The writers span not merely the English-speaking world, but also the striking diversity of contemporary poetry written in our extravagant tongue. It would be impudent to argue for any sense of the centeredness of modern English usage, no one can claim to own or direct poetry in English — and perhaps one ought to argue for entirely the opposite: that we should recognise that poetry in English is both expansive, baggy and unlimited — traversing peoples and national boundaries and even imaginations.

The prize, now in its third year, has come reflect both this extraordinary plurality of practice and the continuing excitement poetry evokes in communities far and wide — poetry is clearly thriving. What characterises this year’s entries is the clear points of contact many poets now have through the Web and social networks into communities of readers who are, as it were, without borders.  Though poetry can be passionately local its new habitat is online and global and this brings with it a new excitement and a new set of ambitions for poets writing today in our networked societies. Poetry is very much a public and participative art which everyone can enjoy. This brings additional and sometimes complex pressures in selecting works which we believe can engage a wide readership where the readership may be widely dispersed. We believe we have done this and I’m delighted to announce the shortlist for this year’s prize.

The shortlist (in alphabetical order)

Vesna Goldsworthy The Angel of Salonika (UK/Serbia)

Rebecca Lehmann Between the Crackups (USA)

Lauren Levin Not Time (USA)

Alice Miller Theatre of Strangers (New Zealand)

Stephen Nelson Lunar Poems for New Religions (UK)

Charlotte Pence Other Interruptions (USA)

Aidan Semmens The Book of Isaac (UK)

Catherine Theis The Fraud of Good Sleep (USA)

The winners will be announced in during April, National Poetry Month.

Notes for editors

1. The Crashaw Prize is the only international poetry prize for full length collections of poetry written in English.
2. The prize is administered by Salt and judged by Publisher, Chris Hamilton-Emery.
3. The prize began in  2008. Winners are published the following year of entry.
4. Since the prize began it has successfully published ten first collections.
5. Previous winners include:

2009 Winners

Nathan Hoks, Reveilles (USA)

Andrew Pidoux, Year of the Lion (UK)

Nick Potamitis, The Book of Night Terrors (UK)

Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip (UK)

Ryan van Winkle, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here (UK)

Anna Woodford, Birdhouse (UK)

2008 Winners

Tom Chivers, How to Build a City (UK)

Abi Curtis, Unexpected Weather (UK)

Jamey Dunham, The Bible of Lost Pets (USA)

Jared Stanley, Book Made of Forest (USA)

I’m delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Crashaw Prize. After an extremely tough selection process, we’ve chosen poets whose work we found presented significant, promising and vibrant new work — in what has become a very diverse list with each poet operating in an often quite distinct range of forms or [...]]]>

I’m delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Crashaw Prize. After an extremely tough selection process, we’ve chosen poets whose work we found presented significant, promising and vibrant new work — in what has become a very diverse list with each poet operating in an often quite distinct range of forms or writing practice.

This list gives further credence to those suggesting we are in an age of diversity, no longer of poetics in conflict, but of poetries of significantly different trajectories existing alongside each other. What this list also recognises is the diversity of poetry’s audience, too, and indeed we know at Salt that the tastes of our customers are not confined to any specific form of writing. We can have it all. This year, we hope we can bring you something challenging, refreshing, expansive and ultimately entertaining in the highest sense of that word. We commend all the poets and would like to congratulate everyone on the shortlist for a major achievement.

Winners of the 2009 Crashaw Prize

1. Nathan Hoks, Book of Clouds
2. Andrew Pidoux, Year of the Lion
3. Nick Potamitis, The Book of Night Terrors
4. Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip
5. Ryan Van Winkle, Untitled
6. Anna Woodford, Birdhouse

The 2009 Crashaw Prize attracted 120 full length manuscripts from poets in the UK and Ireland, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The international prize continues to provide an extraordinary shapshot of new writing from most of the English-speaking world, as such it is the only prize of [...]]]>

The 2009 Crashaw Prize Shortlist

The 2009 Crashaw Prize attracted 120 full length manuscripts from poets in the UK and Ireland, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The international prize continues to provide an extraordinary shapshot of new writing from most of the English-speaking world, as such it is the only prize of its kind, drawing attention to the best debut collections from around the globe.

The Crashaw prize is unique in discovering poets from many different cultures and locations, yet it is clear that we share not only a language but increasingly a shrinking, more accessible, digital world. Poetry in English is now a global exchange of ideas and practices: there are no dominant modes of writing, no success patterns to adopt or defend, no single model of expression and our heritage is a global one. Audiences, too, are as diverse as the writing and writers. This diversity as well as the community of poetry in English is to be celebrated and, indeed, forms the background and impetus to the Crashaw Prize itself.

This year’s submissions were especially perplexing: the standard of submissions was exceptionally high, the talents astonishingly various, the book themselves filled with an abundance of innovative and rewarding poems that deserve a wide audience. After a great deal of deliberation and from an internal longlist of thirty-five collections we have now chosen twelve manuscripts we feel are exceptional works. All of these poets deserve our interest.

This year’s shortlist consists of :

1. Phil Brown, Il Avilit (ENGLAND)
2. Matt Bryden, Boxing the Compass (ENGLAND)
3. Theodore Z. Cotler, House with a Dark Sky Roof (USA)
4. Nathan Hoks, Book of Clouds (USA)
5. Yvonne C. Murphy, Aviaries (USA) WITHDRAWN
6. Andrew Pidoux, Year of the Lion (USA)
7. Nick Potamitis, The Book of Night Terrors (ENGLAND)
8. Terry Ann Thaxton, Getaway Girl (USA)
9. Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip (ENGLAND)
10. Ryan Van Winkle, Untitled (SCOTLAND)
11. Eoghan Walls, The Salt Harvest (IRELAND) WITHDRAWN
12. Anna Woodford, Birdhouse (ENGLAND)

From this shortlist we will make our selection of this year’s winners and will publish four collections during in 2010 — the tenth anniversary of Salt. The winners will be announced on Friday 26th of February.

A shortlist from 120 submissions has now been made for the 2009 Crashaw Prize, the listing will be made public later this week. We’re just checking on a last minute withdrawal from the prize to see if we can avoid that.

The winning titles will be announced in [...]]]> STOP PRESS

A shortlist from 120 submissions has now been made for the 2009 Crashaw Prize, the listing will be made public later this week. We’re just checking on a last minute withdrawal from the prize to see if we can avoid that.

The winning titles will be announced in February.