Blog Posts tagged with "Poetry"

41 Posts

News / Awards & Prizes

Milkweed Editions Announces Regional Poetry Prize Expansion and 2019 Judge

Milkweed Staff — 12/06/2018

Milkweed Editions is pleased to announce that the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the largest regional poetry prize in the country, will continue under a new name, the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. The prize will also offer expanded eligibility, adding Michigan to the list of eligible states of residence for entrants in the upper Midwest. The 2019 judge will be acclaimed poet, essayist, and literary translator, Khaled Mattawa.

Authors

Excerpt: Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship

Sarah Ruhl — 09/17/2018

Max Ritvo began as my student. I met Max when he was a senior at Yale. This is how he began his application to get into my playwriting workshop: Dear Professor Ruhl, Thanks for reading this application. My name is Max Ritvo—I’m a senior English major in the Creative Writing Concentration. All I want to do is write. His application said that he was a poet and a comedian, part of an experimental comedy troupe. A poet and he’s funny? Huh. I reread his application, which had been left to stew in the “no” pile because he’d never written a play before. And because funny poets are a rare and wonderful species of human being, I moved Max to the “yes” pile, despite his lack of experience writing plays. It is hard to imagine now that Max’s application could ever have remained in any other pile—a strange parallel universe in which I never met Max.

Authors

Excerpt: The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo

Louise Glück — 09/17/2018

Max Ritvo was a prodigiously gifted poet; toward the end of his life, he was also volcanically productive. Nothing he wrote was without flashes of brilliance, but many of these late poems would surely have been revised or jettisoned; it was slow work to sift out the very best. This he asked me to do—it seemed to me an essential labor lest the weaker poems dilute the stronger. What follows, obviously, reflects my judgment. Nothing has been revised; Elizabeth Metzger, Max’s designated literary executor, suggested one minute cut. Cancer was Max’s tragedy; it was also, as he was canny enough to see, his opportunity. Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive.

Authors / News

Coming Fall 2018: More Max Ritvo

Milkweed Staff — 02/15/2018

Less than two years ago, Max Ritvo came into the Milkweed family like a ball of fire. We’re thrilled to share with you his next two books: Letters from Max, a book of correspondence between Max and the playwright Sarah Ruhl; and The Final Voicemails, a second collection of poems edited by Louise Glück.