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Is the writer of the quote this blog is named after:
“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.”
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge
THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER is Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s blog in celebration of National Poetry Month 2007. It will run only for a limited time, from April 1st to April 30th, and will focus on poetry as a spoken art form––meant to be listened to and read aloud––and on the processes that go into making a physical book of poetry.
Original material created in conjunction with FSG’s legendary roster of poets will be available for free here throughout the month: MP3s of our poets reading, broadsheets posters for download, book giveaways, and even a ringtone for your cell phone.
Enjoy the site, and of course, National Poetry Month. Any questions or comments can be directed to poetry@fsgbooks.com
Learn more about National Poetry Month at the Academy of American Poets’ website.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux was founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus. The firm is renowned for its international list of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux authors have won extraordinary acclaim over the years, including numerous National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and Nobel Prizes in literature.
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Hughes had initially intended to study English literature, but found the department’s curriculum too limited—archaeology and anthropology proving to be areas of the academic arena more suited to his taste. Two years after graduating, Hughes and a group of classmates founded the infamous literary magazine St. Botolph’s Review—known more for its inaugural party than for its longevity (a single issue). It was at that party that Hughes met Sylvia Plath. They were wed in 1956 and remained married for six and a half years, having two children, Frieda and Nicholas.
A few months after their marriage, Plath entered a number of her husband’s poems in a competition judged by W. H. Auden, among others. Hughes was awarded first prize for his collection The Hawk in the Rain (1957). With his next publication, Lupercal, in 1960, Hughes became recognized as one of the most significant poets to emerge since World War II, winning the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960 and the Hawthornden Prize in 1961.
Hughes grew increasingly interested in folklore and mythology, beginning with his collection Wodwo (1967), which was comprised of short fiction, poetry, and a radio play. This work led Hughes into a fascination with one of the most solitary and ominous images in folklore, that of the crow. He published his best-known volume of poems, Crow,in 1971. The New York Review of Books said that Crow was “perhaps a more plausible explanation for the present condition of the world than the Christian sequence.” Among his other books of poetry are Gaudete (1977), Cave Birds (1979), Remains of Elmet (1979), Moortown (1980), River (1984), Flowers and Insects (1986), and Wolfwatching (1990).
The publication of Birthday Letters in January 1998 was one of the most talked-about literary events of the decade. A volume of eighty-eight poems, Birthday Letters told one of the most powerful stories of postwar literary history: the romance of Hughes and Plath, from their first meeting in 1956 until her suicide in 1963. In it, Hughes—who had never commented publicly about their relationship—presented his artistic statement about their life together. The poems (with two exceptions) were written in the form of letters addressed to Plath—some love letters, others recollections, ruminations, animal poems, and ventures into myth. Birthday Letters won the Forward Prizeand the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize, which was awarded to Hughes for a second straight year.
Hughes served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II from 1984 until his death in October 1998 at the age of sixty-eight.
Bill Knott was born in Carson City, Michigan. The author of ten previous volumes of poetry, including The Naomi Poems and Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems, 1969—1999, he is also a book artist whose handmade, one-of-a-kind volumes are prized by collectors. He teaches at Emerson College.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His eleven books of poems include Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Copacetic (1984); and Taboo (2006), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Award. He also co-translated The Insomnia of Fire, by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995), and co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (with Sascha Feinstein, 1991). His prose was collected and published in February 2000, as Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries. Komunyakaa has collaborated with the composer T. J. Anderson on a libretto, Slip Knot, commissioned by Northwestern University, and with jazz musician John Tchicai on the CD Love Notes from the Madhouse.
For his poetry, Mr. Komunyakaa was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s 2004 Shelley Memorial Award, the 2001 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts; he received the Bronze Star for his service as a correspondent in Vietnam. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in Trenton, New Jersey.
Randall Jarrell (1914–65) was a poet, novelist, literary critic, and teacher. His first collection of poetry, Blood of a Stranger, was published in 1942, followed by Little Friend, Little Friend (1945); Losses (1948) The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) which received the National Book Award; and finally The Lost World (1966). He died after being struck by a car in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he was teaching at the time.
LAWRENCE JOSEPH is the author of five books of poetry: Shouting at No One (1983), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Curriculum Vitae (1988); Before Our Eyes (FSG, 1993); Into It (FSG, 2005); and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (FSG, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), a book of prose that has been optioned for film by John Malkovich.
His poems, prose, essays, and criticism have appeared widely in both national and international publications. Among Joseph’s awards are two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1989, he lectured on law and on poetry in Jordan, Israel, and Egypt through the cultural affairs offices of the United States embassies in each country. In 1994, he taught in the Council of the Humanities and Creative Writing program, at Princeton University.
Joseph was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948. His grandparents were Lebanese and Syrian Catholics, among the first Arab American emigrants to the United States. He was educated at the University of Michigan, where he received a B.A. in English literature in 1970 and was awarded a Major Hopwood Award in poetry; Magdalen College, Cambridge University, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. in English language and literature; and the University of Michigan Law School, where he received a J.D. in 1975. He then served as law clerk to Justice G. Mennen Williams of the Michigan Supreme Court. From 1978 to 1981, he was a member of the School of Law faculty at the University of Detroit. In 1981, he moved to New York City, where he was associated with the firm of Shearman & Sterling; his practice included securities fraud, bankruptcy, and products liability litigation. Since 1987, he has been a professor of law at St. John’s University School of Law. Joseph has published extensively in the legal press, and has been invited to speak at law schools throughout the country, including Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, New York University, Northwestern, and Georgetown.
He lives in New York City his wife, the painter Nancy Van Goethem.
Richard Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and studied at the Sorbonne as a Fellow of the French Government. He is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Talking Cures (2002); Trappings (1999); Like Most Revelations (1994); Selected Poems (1991); No Traveller (1989); Findings (1971); Untitled Subjects (1969), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; and Quantities (1962). He has published more than 150 translations from the French, including works by Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, Camus, de Beauvoir, de Gaulle, Breton, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Cioran, Claude Simon, and Stendhal, as well as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, for which he received the 1983 American Book Award for translation. He is also the author of Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, which was first published in 1969 and expanded in 1980. In 1994 he edited the Library of America edition of the Travel Writings of Henry James, and in 1995, The Best American Poetry. In the spring of 2005, Turtle Point Press published a new collection of poems, The Silent Treatment.
Mr. Howard’s honors include the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Lyric Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government, and the PEN Translation Medal, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He was president of PEN American Center (1979–80) and poet laureate of New York State (1994–96). Howard formerly held teaching positions at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, where he was the Luce Visiting Scholar in 1983, and at the University of Houston from 1987 to 1997. Currently he is the poetry editor of The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review. He is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City, where he teaches in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. In 2002, Mr. Howard was given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, and in 2004, the Poetry Society of America presented him with the Frost Medal.
