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2003 in poetry
Events
- January 29 — Poet Dana Gioia, who had retired early from his career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full time, becomes chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's arts agency.
- After First Lady Laura Bush invited a number of poets to the White House, one of them, Sam Hamill started organizing a protest in which poets would bring anti-war poems. The February 12 conference was postponed, but Hamill organized a "Poets Against the War" Web site with contributions from others. More than 5,000 poems were contributed, including work by John Balaban, Gregory Orr, Rita Dove, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Marilyn Nelson, Jay Parini, Jamaica Kincaid, Grace Paley and even U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Also on the Web site, W.S. Merwin contributed the highly emotional statement: "To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein." The new group, "Poets Against the War", organized poetry readings for February 12 across the country, demonstrating the strong links between many established poets and left-wing pacifism.[1]
- Early November — Carl Rakosi celebrates his 100th birthday with friends at the San Francisco Public Library.
- Call: Review, an American little magazine, is founded by poet John Most.
Works published
Poets in Best New Zealand Poems
Poems from these 25 poet s were selected by Elizabeth Smither for Best New Zealand Poems 2002, published online this year:
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- Murray Edmond
- Paula Green
- Michael Harlow
- David Howard
- Andrew Johnston
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- Robert Sullivan
- Jo Thorpe
- Rae Varcoe
- Louise Wrightson
- Sonja Yelich
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- Ciarán Carson: Breaking News, Gallery Press, Wake Forest University Press, awarded the 2003 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection
- James Fenton: The Love Bomb, verse written as a libretto for a composer who rejected it; Penguin / Faber and Faber[3]
- Lavinia Greenlaw, Minsk, Faber and Faber
- Peter Redgrove, Sheen
- Simawe, Saadi, editor, Iraqi Poetry Today, London: King's College, ISBN 0-9533824-6-X
Criticism, scholarship and biography in the United Kingdom
- Dick Allen, The Day Before: New Poems (Sarabande Books)
- Charles Bukowski, sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way (Ecco)
- Henri Cole, Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); a New York Times "notable book of the year"
- Cid Corman, Now/Now
- Annie Finch, Calendars
- John Hollander, Picture Window
- Wi lliam Logan, Macbeth in Venice
- Howard Nemerov, The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, edited by Daniel Anderson (Swallow/Ohio University) published posthumously); a New York Times "notable book of the year"
- Mary Oliver, Owls a nd Other Fantasies: poems and essays
- Kenneth Rexroth, Complete Poems (posthumous}
- Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho History (scholarship), Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 9780333971703 ISBN-10: 0-333-97170-1
- C. J. Sage, editor, And We The Creatures: Fifty-one Contemporary American Poets on Animal Rights and Appreciation (Dream Horse Press)
- Charles Simic, The Voice at 3:00 a.m.: Selected Late & New Poems (Harvest Books)(Harcourt)); a New York Times "notable book of the year"
- Tracy K. Smith, The Body’s Question won the 2002 Cave Canem Prize for best first book by an African American poet (Graywolf Press)
- Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn Publishing)
- William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams & Louis Zukofsky, edited by Barry Ahearn (Wesleyan University Press)
- Kirby Wright, Before the City (Lemon Shark Press); winner of the San Diego Book Award for Poetry
Poets included in The Best American Poetry 2003
The 75 poets included in The Best American Poetry 2003, edited by David Lehman, co-edited this year by Yusef Komunyakaa:
Other
Awards and honors
- Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement:
- Montana New Zealand Book Awards First-book award for poetry: Kay McKenzie Cooke, Feeding the Dogs, University of Otago Press
- Cholmondeley Award: Ciaran Carson, Michael Donaghy, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jackie Kay
- Eric Gregory Award: Jen Hadfield, Zoe Brigley, Paul Batchelor, Olivia Cole, Sasha Dugdale, Anna Woodford
- Forward Poetry Prize Best Collection: Ciaran Carson, Breaking News (The Gallery Press); Best First Collection): A. B. Jackson, Fire Stations (Anvil Press)
- Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: U. A. Fanthorpe
- T. S. Eliot Prize (United Kingdom and Ireland): Don Paterson, Landing Light
- Whitbread Award for poetry: Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Notes
- ^ [1]Knowles, Joe, "Poets Against the War", In These Times, February 14, 2003, accessed January 25, 2007
- ^ Poetry International Web - Pam Brown
- ^ [2]Web page titled "Books by Fenton" at the James Fenton Web site, accessed October 11, 2007
- ^ Hofmann, Michael, editor, Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
- [3] "A Timeline of English Poetry" Web page of the Representative Poetry Online Web site, University of Toronto
See also