Well, Rachel, how about after the 70's?

Now, let's take a moment and ponder my influences who have received poetry awards post-2000:

Winner of The Salt Hill Poetry Award and The Barrow Street Poetry Prize (2000):
Rachel Zucker

Winners of The Walt Whitman Award:
(2006) Anne Pierson Wiese- Floating City
 (2007) Sally Van Doren- Sex and Noon Taxes 
 
 Winners of The Wallace Stevens Award:
 (2005) Gerald Stern

Winners of The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize:
(2006) Eleanor Lerman- Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
 

Jordan asked me to write a poem about Christmas.

Up on the Rooftop.

This year, I let her know that I no longer believed. 
The halls, again decked in lights and temporal keepsakes; 
however, the Precious Moments nativity still claimed a 
Holy place above the TV. “What do you mean, you don’t believe?” 
Tearfully, she remembered the day she lost her St. Nick: 
half eaten cookies, empty bottle, drunken grandpa and the living room 
floor smelling of whiskey and pine needles. Last year he’d forgotten my
 chessboard. Before that, Michelle’s baby doll that could pee. 
“He’s just not the man I’d thought he would be.”

This year, I let her know that I no longer believed; 
however, I slept on the couch anyway. It wasn’t the clicking of
hooves that woke me, or the pleasant resonance of a laugh. No, 
it was the sensation of being lifted, or shaken – an impression I’m
not likely to forget. “So you think you can just forget about me, eh?” 
His breath reeked of venison and mulled cider. Sausage-link fingers dug
 beneath each of my armpits – he was keeping me far from the ground.
“Well, son, here’s some proof -- you know Santa won’t lie.” 
I simply couldn’t wait for a special surprise.

This year, I let her know that I no longer believed
in myself or the people who love me. When the jolly man placed me back on my
feet, he turned me around; I closed my eyes with delight. The wooden floor slightly 
moaned under the shift of his weight, a quick motion I could barely perceive. He bent me over his knee, pulled at my skivvies and slapped my ass with his big ham of a hand. “This. Is what. It means. To believe.” Each line accompanied by a matching 
flat-palm blow. Then a chuckle resounded. Jingle bells chimed.
 After looking up, he was gone.
Looking back now, I was wrong.

Joshua Beckman

JOSHUA BECKMAN

This loverly Thursday afternoon, Joshua Beckman gave a hypnotic reading in the TCNJ Library Auditorium. He performed for us three poems from Your Time Has Come, which was over in a matter of moments as the pieces are so short. It was his reading from Shake that was particularly interesting. He read through the entire first section of Shake, without skipping a poem or a beat. His pace and speech made each of the poems hypnotically ryhthmic, rocking back and forth or side to side as he spoke. While he read, certain themes became obviously important: the repetition, the sound choices, hands, wanting.

His work makes the ordinary and unoticeable into something extraordinary and important. Then many of his poems simply mock this importance. His work mocks modesty in its own humility. His words are seemingly about learning. The constant need to keep learning and moving. Wanting.

After the reading, he answered the questions just as we all thought he would: like a Rock Star.

He claimed that he spends years making the decisions concerning his collections. Nothing is done spur of the moment, and most of his work truly ends up on the cutting room floor. And when asked if being an editor has helped his work he said, " Probably not. It may hurt it, though!"

He was a good man, Charlie Brown. He enjoyed a cookie or two and made sure to sign every book we through at him.

That'll do pig.

On my Fall Break Vacation, I went to Witch Country!

1692

by Rachel Pinkstone

The room, stuffy and dated, filled
quickly with innocents and perspiration.
The voice behind us buzzed below within
our seats, charges vicious with intent.

The lights, dramatic, accusing, and timed,
poked like God’s angry finger at the damned.
The devil’s face flashed gruesome and waxen,
ready to take his heathens below.

They played loudly her voice as she cried 
out the lord’s prayers, “You are with the Devil,
now! The black man is at your back!”

Mr. Corey under boulders, Lady Nurse
dying behind bars, and the nudging
reminder to visit the gift shop. Kitchen-
witches and snow globes on sale.

We watch to learn tolerance.
We watch to avoid persecution.
We watched to receive the free Magick Wand.

Since this is a poetry kind of semester...

Here is a short moment listing my poetic influences pre- 1970:

1) Walt Whitman, of course- Leavse of Grass
2) Allen Ginsberg- Kaddish and Other Poems (1958-1960)
3) Marianne Moore- Collected Poems (1967)
4) Adrienne Rich- The Fact of a Doorframe (Poems 1950-1984), Leaflets (1965-68)
5) Elizabeth Bishop- The Complete Poems (1927-1979)
6) Gary Snyder- Back Country (1968), Regarding Wave (1869)

Fin.

Sometimes don't you just want a hot cup of Haiku?

“Fall(ing)”

Up high in the sill
the man in the pin-striped suit
sways calm in the breeze.


“Rent”

She opens them one
by one. Lays them on the desk.
He will never come.


“Five”

Struggling with words,
this language is new for him.
Remember he is young.


“Dow”

Money, paper, pens.
If it falls again, will we?
Try not to invest.


“Stephen-cat”

I reflect the light
on the floor. He likes to play
with his own shadow.

This one, I plan to fight for...

CHRISTINE SCHUTT

Christine Schutt is a novelist and short story writer who received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then, later, her MFA from Colombia University. Currently, Schutt lives in New York City where she is an English teacher at the Nightengale-Bamford School, an all girl prep-school. I suppose I find this so interesting because most of us only get to study under our writing idols once we've already labored through High School and most of college, but not these girls, OH NO, they get it that luxury even before they get their lisences. 

Schutt is also the senior editor of the annual literary periodical published by Diane Williams, NOON.

Her published works include:

Nightwork (1996)

Florida (2004)

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (2005)

All Souls (2008)

Schutt is a Pushcart and O'Henry Prize winning author and was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction, and Nightwork, a collection of  short stories was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her writing is raw, inviting and familiar, the kind of writing where you want to look away because it has gotten to you from within, but when you try to put it down, you simply cannot. You just won't.

"Another boy, another car, she used to let him feel her up just so long as she could sleep. 'The night shift,' she said to her father, 'is such a bitch. You're always tired. I can't talk,' she said, and she kissed her father. She opened her mouth to him and worried her hand inside his coat and felt the warm damp of his shirt, the hard back and heat of her father." ~You Drive

REVIEWS:

"In the opening piece, 'You Drive,' a grown daughter and her father cross the boundaries of any usual parent-child relationship as they sit in a car, sharing secrets, kissing and memorizing the smell and texture of one another's skin."

~Kirkus Reviews

"Shor through with [Virginia] Woolf's lyrical, restless spirit...A bold, sharp story about teenage girls, class and illness, about those moments when we achieve the miracle of human condition--and those when we don't."

~Maud Casey, New York Times Book Review

"Schutt's writing is sharp as ever, with a keen eye for life's everyday grotesqueries...Schutt continues to capture the messiness and confusions particular to adolescence, but in All Souls, new terrain refreshes this writer's astringent voice."

~Christopher Schmidt, Time Out New York