Writer editorial board member wins prestigious poetry prize

John Koethe, a former Milwaukee poet laureate and current editorial board member of The Writer, has been honored by the Academy of American Poets for his poetry collection, Ninety-fifth Street. The $25,000 Lenore Marshall Prize is given annually by the Academy for the best book of poetry published in the previous year.
 
Koethe, a college philosophy professor with a doctorate from Harvard University, has also received other distinguished honors, including the Kingsley Tufts Award for his poetry collection Falling Water and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for North Point North: New and Selected Poems. His many other achievements include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  

In an interview that appeared in the Southwest Review a few years ago (reproduced online at Poetry Daily's website), Koethe had this to say about poetry:

"I'm not sure what [W.H.] Auden meant by that famous remark, ['poetry makes nothing happen']. If you think that poetry ought to materially affect the world, then I suppose he's right...But I think that successful poetry can affect reality by adding to it, by creating possibilities of feeling, thought, and perception that weren't there before. That can be true even if the poet is a rather incidental figure to whom nothing important happens."

Congratulations to John Koethe!
 
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Some good news for readers, authors
 
In the past couple of years newspaper book review sections have disappeared with alarming frequency, but The New York Observer reported on Friday that Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal are doing just the opposite: launching a new, pull-out book review section that will be inserted in The Weekend Journal. While details of the launch haven’t been announced yet, the section is expected to debut in September.

 --Martha Lundin, editorial associate, The Writer

Comments

mother's happy child wrote re: Writer editorial board member wins prestigious poetry prize on Thu, Sep 16 2010 8:26 PM Re: Good News for Readers, Authors Hi Martha, The New York Times currently has a pull-out Book Review section in their Sunday edition.  I must admit I enjoy reading up on the latest releases with my Sunday morning coffee.  I would guess that the WSJ and the NYT may be reviewing the same material at some point in time - who knows? Mother's Happy Child

Martha Lundin wrote re: Writer editorial board member wins prestigious poetry prize on Thu, Sep 30 2010 5:18 PM Hi, MHC! I believe the first WSJ book review section came out either last Sunday or the Sunday before that. I haven't seen it yet, have you? And you're right -- I would think both the WSJ and the NYT would end up reviewing the same books. It will be interesting to see how they fare in competition with each other.