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It’s National Poetry Month this April and what better way to celebrate than a chat with author, poet, and creative writing instructor Karen Benke.

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Poet Gary Snyder has won $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from The Academy of American Poets. Snyder was picked by the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.

“Gary Snyder has brought to American poetry a lyric poem whose subjects and views are objectively epic,” explained Jane Hirshfield, chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, in a statement. “His words look into the world and our human lives with acuity, affection, and the ethics of a ten-thousand-year perception. They have altered and marked both how we know and how we say.”

Brenda Hillman won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which includes a $25,000 award. David Wojahn won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his work World Tree, which also includes a $25,000 award. Catherine Barnett won the James Laughlin Award for her work The Game of Boxes which fetched her $5,000 in prize money.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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There's no accounting for how much I loved Jane Hirshfield's Kindle Single, The Heart of Haiku.  Part biography, part exegesis, this beautiful essay took me to a deep and sweltering place.  Yes, it's about the 17th century artist Basho—about his wandering, about his work.  But it is also about living, breathing, seeing, something I'm not convinced that I do enough of.

It's short.  It's the price of a coffee.  It will take two hours of your life to read, and it will change you.  Buy The Heart of Haiku. 

An excerpt:

... Basho's work as a whole awakens us to the necessary permeability of all to all.  Awareness of the mind's movements makes clear that it is the mind's nature to move.  Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all.  First comes the sight of a block of sea slugs frozen while still alive, then the sharp, kinesthetic comprehension of the inseparability of the suffering of one from the suffering of all. First comes hearing the sound of one bird singing, then the recognition that solitude can carry its own form of beauty, able to turn pain into depth.

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Sleep did not befriend me last night (come on, I thought, what did I do to you?), but I made good use of time of the dark and restless time.  First, I prepared a series of reading/writing exercises for my visit to Villa Maria Academy today in honor of World Read Aloud Day.  We'll read Helme Heine's magical THE MARVELOUS JOURNEY THROUGH THE NIGHT as adults, for example, and then define our idea of paradise.  We'll dwell with the simple words of William Carlos Williams.  We'll write from different points of view and ask ourselves what makes for a first-chapter cliffhanger.

It will be fun, I think.  I'm just hoping that I can locate my speaking voice between now and 9:15 AM.

When I was all finished that, I decided to download one of the Kindle Singles I had read about yesterday in Dwight Garner's New York Times story.  My choice, but of course, was Ann Patchett's Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life, though in about five minutes I'll also be downloading Jane Hirshfield's Heart of Haiku.

In any case, there I was, four A.M., as wide-eyed as my puffy eyes would allow, reading Patchett's primer on writing.  My verdict:  Spend the $2.99.  Please.  It's memoir, it's advice, it's fantastic stuff on Grace Paley and Elizabeth McCracken.  Patchett is realistic.  She's not ashamed of the facts.  Writing is hard work, she reminds us.  And it doesn't get done until you show up to do it.

A sliver:

If you want to write, practice writing.  Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish but because there is something that you alone can say.  Write the story, learn from it, pull away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sentiment:  The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap.  Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama.  We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.

 Boy, I needed that.

And on another, final note:  That is not my dining-room table (though it is a restaurant where I tend to take my clients).  But if I did own that table and if I did have that much light, I'd work right there, writing the bad stories down so that I could finally (it's taking long enough) get to the good ones (they must be somewhere).

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A good poem always has some entrance into and reminder of the fact that genuine experience is unexpected. A good poem shocks us awake, one way or another -- through its beauty, its insight, its music; it shakes or seduces the reader out of the common gaze and into a genuine looking. It breaks the sleepwalking habit in our eyes, in our ears, in our mouths, and sets us adrift in a small raft under a vast night-sky of stars. We feel ourselves moving, too, above a vast, cold-streaming current carrying inner-lit sea creatures, tangles of kelp strands, fishes. Thus we learn the deep clefts of the mid-ocean land-rifts; thus the wave-blanketed mountains rise up before us as islands, a new habitation for heart and mind . . . We depart the known ease in order to arrive somewhere other than where we were. We travel by poem, as by any other means, in order to see for ourselves more than was seen.
                                    ~ Jane Hirshfield, "The Shock of Good Poetry,"
                                                The Writer, June 1999.  

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