Endowed in perpetuity by the Glenna Luschei Fund for Excellence

Contributor Spotlight on Adélia Prado

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Mon, 02/02/2015 - 12:22
by Dan Froid

In June of last year, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award was bestowed on a poet whom, I suspect, most American readers know little about. And yet she is one of the most respected poets in her country, Brazil. Fellow poet Robert Hass paid her a superlative tribute: he noted that she has been compared to figures as disparate as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and St. Francis of Assisi.

Listen to This, Listen to That: War Portfolio

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Fri, 01/30/2015 - 14:12
by Dan Froid

Why does it seem easier to talk about war when it’s used as a metaphor?

I don’t think war is noble
And I don’t like to think that love is like war
But I got a big hot cherry bomb
And I wanna slip it through the mail-slot of your front door

Contributor Spotlight on Brock Clarke

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Mon, 01/26/2015 - 10:54
by Dan Froid

“Take a hapless Danish cartoonist with a fatwa on his head. Put an American secret agent with secrets of her own in charge of his well-being. Give her the half-baked idea of hiding said cartoonist in an upstate New York town, disguising him as a high-school guidance counselor. Turn up the emotional boil on love triangles and spy intrigue, then arm everybody with a gun.” That’s how GQ’s recent interview with Brock Clarke describes his newest novel, The Happiest People in the World (Algonquin Books, 2014). When I read the description, I thought two things: 1) “This sounds weird,” and 2) “I should read this.” Invoking those sentiments seems, fortunately, to be Brock Clarke’s game.

Listen to This, Listen to That: Travel Writing

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Fri, 01/23/2015 - 11:31
by Dan Froid

Travel writing is a genre that dates back to Herodotus—he of the tome Histories, which tells you all you ever wanted to know about life in fifth-century Greece, Asia, and Africa.

Life and Literature: Q&A with Writer Bernardine Evaristo, Women Published in 2014 to Read Now

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Wed, 01/21/2015 - 11:44
By Cameron Steele

2015 is well under way but it feels like an appropriate time to reflect on one of my least beloved holidays. I’ll say it now: I am not a huge New Year’s Eve fan. I can attribute this to:

A)    a string of lackluster NYE moments (stuck in a broken-down boat in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay with my family, for example, or stuck in an Alabama newsroom covering the first homicide of 2012), and, more importantly,

B)    the reality that I’d rather be at home reading a good book when the ball drops than anything else.

Brave New Reading List: A Blog Series on Dystopian Fiction

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Wed, 01/21/2015 - 11:41
By Brita Thielen

J: A Novel – Howard Jacobson

So, you read 1984 and The Giver in high school, and now you’re anxiously awaiting the final installment of The Hunger Games movie franchise. In the meantime, you’re wondering what else is out there in the great world of dystopian fiction.

Or maybe you’ve never read a dystopian novel before but hearing about them everywhere you turn has you curious. Where should you start?

Contributor Spotlight on Mari L'Esperance

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Mon, 01/19/2015 - 12:24
by Dan Froid

In an interview with Matthew Thorburn, Mari L’Esperance notes, “When writing, image almost always comes first. Images represent the earth’s body and ground us in the physical world. By the time an image makes its way into a poem, it’s been simmering internally for a good, long while.” Often dreamlike, L’Esperance’s poems are full of striking images, sometimes tenebrous, sometimes disarming. A poet, writer, editor, and practicing psychotherapist, Mari L’Esperance is also the winner of the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Listen to This, Listen to That: Ekphrasis

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Fri, 01/16/2015 - 15:06
by Dan Froid

Ekphrasis comes from the Greek, meaning “to speak out,” referring to poetry written in response to a work of art, typically painting. Poet Brandon Som suggests, in Air Schooner Episode 20, that ekphrastic poetry comes from the impulse to tell a piece of art about itself. Som also reads his poem “The Tribute Horse,” which was inspired by the painting “Finches and Bamboo.” On the other hand, as Scott Winter explains, “Perhaps wanting to speak to the art is really seeing the self somewhere in the art.” So ekphrasis might also refer to art that uses another piece as a starting point and refracts it somehow, developing it into a distinct work. I’m not talking about those books that, say, retell Pride and Prejudice from Darcy’s point of view, or pick up the story after the original novel ends—much less Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Alberta Clipper 12/23/14: “As the Snowplows Tear the Streets” by Greg Kuzma

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Tue, 12/23/2014 - 13:34

The winters of 1973 and 1974 in Lincoln, NE, were interesting times for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Cornhuskers. Tom Osborne, a familiar name amongst Husker enthusiasts, spent his first year as head coach of the Cornhuskers in 1973. In the following season, Tom Osborne coached the Huskers all the way to the Cotton Bowl, where they played a long-standing rival, Texas, concluding the game with a victory.

Listen to This, Listen to That: Series Syndrome

Submitted by Prairie Schooner on Fri, 12/19/2014 - 11:51
by Ashley Strosnider
It’s Friday morning, and the avid listeners of the most popular podcast ever, Serial, likely heard the last episode of the season sometime yesterday. (If not, no worries. No spoilers here.) There's something special about the format, the way the story unfolds, moving backward and forward across wrinkles and obsessions. There's something, dare I say, poetic about the ways the episodes talk back and forth with each other that resonates, too, with the way series of poems work with and against each other, troubling and teasing expectations in what Air Schooner Episode 41 calls "series syndrome."

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