Poet, Mark Doty, is the winner in the National Book Awards poetry category for 2008. This year’s winners received a bronze statue and $10,000.
His poetry collection, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins) beat out 4 other nominees:
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)
Doty has written twelve books of poetry and three memoirs. He’s no stranger to awards either. In 1995, he won the ₤10,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the first American poet to have done so. His memoir Dogs, about the life of two of his dogs, while dealing with the death of his partner, won the 2008 American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award.
Here is a poem from his website that I like,
SIGNAL
LOST COCKATIEL, cried the sign, hand-lettered,
taped to the side of a building: last seen on 16th
between Fifth and Sixth, gray body, orange cheek patches,
yellow head. Name: Omar. Somebody’s dear, I guess,
though how do you lose a cockatiel on 16th Street?
continued here ..
http://www.markdoty.org/id13.html
And over the next few days, we’ll try to bring you some snippets from the other poetry nominees, and some audio — if we can find it. Mark Doty does have an audio interview on his website, but unfortunately his audio links to readings aren’t working. I won’t get too pissy about it, but spend a little of that 10G on your site, dude.
Reely
Tags: modern poetry
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