Walt Whitman Award
 

Sorry, I meant this for General Talk. Please move it there.

As a member the Academy of American Poets, I received the latest book that won the Walt Whitman Award. I've thrown away all of the winners over the last several years since there were no translations available. The latest, though, not only insults Whitman, but it is worse than I can imagine poetry being. I can follow only one poem, and it is the one cited on the back cover as a rare wonder among those, the critic suspects, most readers would love to shred. Does anyone else have the book, Put Your Hands In? Maybe I'm just in a cranky mood?

No, I haven't seen it, but I'm certainly curious now!

Maybe you're having one of those thingies, a mental mojo. Yeppers, I hear they're a bugger.:confused:

I think you're in the green.

Perhaps you're opening a hanging basket in the Southwest.

The judge was Rae Armantrout. No need to apologize for your crankiness.

It’s on Amazon, but they’re stingy about what’s inside (must have tried to read it).

Okay! Okay! Color me green. Admittedly, I’ve never won, but a really good friend did way back when they gave awards to actual poetry.

Yeah, Jeanne, my mojo’s messing my mind!

Now, Mary, if I could magically make that Hanging Basket reappear. . .

Michael, my copy says Ashberry for the 2013 winner, but that makes me even crankier.

The Academy of American Poets is run by several idiots with last names like Dimitrov and Legault. I suppose there are breaks in their onanistic organization when, with free hands, they manage to do something useful (like use the telephone, or if one's imagination can stretch so far, burrow in a book and actually read it), but the academy remains clueless, tasteless, and irrelevant to the outside (non-poetry reading) world.

My bad, Ralph. Rae Armantrout is the 2014 juge. The award has already been made and here's a sample - http://www.thevolta.org/twstbs-poem62-hspark.html. So prepare to be cranky perpetually. Alternately, you can save $25 a year by discontinuing your membership.

"I shall call him 'Mini Me.'" John Ashbery

Here's Ashbery's rationale:

In his judge's citation, Ashbery compares Hosea's poetry to a notorious Marcel Duchamp masterpiece, and declares that Hosea "somehow subsumes derision and erotic energy and comes out on top," adding: "One feels plunged in a wave of happening that is about to crest."

Ashbery defames Duchamp and Hosea defames the prophet!

Added in:

Here's a taste.

Hopscotch Smudges

The day you left
Do not leave
I cried out why
Any unsolicited female
My heart froze numb
Advertising material
My mind blank as
On this property
It were baked Alaska
Newspapers and magazines only
Vanilla noggin rocking
No dogs allowed
You stuck kiss to my ear
Do not feed
As if caught in a conch
The sea will not make any more
Passionate whispers
Boring art
I locked those secrets by a slide
Security provided
Hung with ripped phone cords
Guardian solutions
Rippled abs
Long gone forever
We deliver
For you
To you
For you

If the vanilla noggin's a-rockin', don't come a-knockin'. Or something.

Ashbery has always, followed his own project, though the corrupt boost from Auden with the Yale Younger Poets Prize didn't hurt, but imitation Ashbery is one of the great mysteries of our time.