Check out the following for why she won:
And why I got:
Dear Poet,
Thank you for submitting your work to the 2011 Walt Whitman Award. This year's judge, Fanny Howe, has selected Elana Bell's manuscript, eyes, stones, to receive the award.
Of the nearly 1,200 entries we received this fall, there were so many extraordinary manuscripts. If by September your manuscript has not yet found a publisher, we hope that you will consider submitting to the Walt Whitman Award again. Many past winners submitted several times before their manuscripts were ultimately selected.
The judge for the 2012 award will be announced later this summer, and the submission period will extend from September 15 to November 15, 2011. To receive guidelines and to submit your work on-line, please visit the Academy of American Poets' website at www.poets.org/whitman.
We wish you the very best of luck with your writing. Thank you, again, for submitting to the Walt Whitman Award.
Respectfully,
Alex Dimitrov
Awards Coordinator
The Academy of American Poets
But, no worries. I still stand by my work. I'm not as accomplished a poet as many who submitted to the various awards competitions to which I submitted my manuscript. I applaud the winner, for she is obviously deserving and darn good, and hope some day to have an award to flaunt. Haha! Pick up your pens and your notebooks, poets, we have work to do!
She won because there is nothing distinctive in her verse and she doesn't threaten the establishment of hacks. She'll be eternally grateful and will carry their undeserving memory into the living canon.
ReplyDeleteI am so sick of literary garbage and I'm sick of people grading living poets on a curve.
That tastes strongly of bitterness.
ReplyDeleteOne man's trash is another man's treasure, as the saying goes.