Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book
of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,
which we sit down to look over,
my rather recognizes for certain only
the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,
Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:
“Your mother has breasts,”
the children would say as they passed,
and frothing with rage he would give chase
some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.
The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,
the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.
This is like that, that is like this, oh,
let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:
nothing is like anything else.
Even the parrot and the apish ape
mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.
To begin: algae, abalone, alewife —
each the spitting image of itself.
Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)
Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,
nothing is more original than a bog,
more rare than the cougar and crane —
save all the above named.
I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,
deer, the descent of man and estuaries,
flakes of snow (no two like) fire,
flax, gannets and gulls.
Honeybees and the Hoover Dam
are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.
Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,
joshua trees, lagoons and the law
that to liken a lichen is tautological.
Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds
that all of these are idiosyncracies:
the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.
Virtually nothing is extraneous here —
not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.
This is the world of plenitude and power —
every bit of it out of this world:
the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.
As now we inch toward an end — vectors
and a winter that figures to be like no other,
say the selfsame earth is to your liking,
and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,
all things like, beyond compare.
Was I sad to leave the country? Is that where I was born? Am I my grandmother’s child? Am I a child of potion? Am I a child of folklore, or family crisis, some need for gender balancing? Maybe some need to keep my father? And who is my father too, is he Buddy my daddy, or is he some country man whose lasting seed my Grandma’am could pickle till it got to Detroit? Maybe a man prone to girls, maybe Mr. Howell Jones or Mr. Harold Grayson Senior or maybe his brother who looks nothing like him. Are my brothers really brothers to me, or am I sister to bay leaf and scorched root of cayenne?
Annalee is sorting through a box of seed packets. She has a swollen lip; her boyfriend punched her this morning because she had run out of bacon. She walks over to Wynn’s truck and inspects her lips in the sideview mirror. “It’s really strange to have somebody hit you,” she says. “When I was in high school, a boy hit me once and I remember thinking, If he hits me again I’m going to kill him. Then he hit me again and I didn’t do anything.”
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”
In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book
of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,
which we sit down to look over,
my rather recognizes for certain only
the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,
Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:
“Your mother has breasts,”
the children would say as they passed,
and frothing with rage he would give chase
some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.
The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,
the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.
This is like that, that is like this, oh,
let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:
nothing is like anything else.
Even the parrot and the apish ape
mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.
To begin: algae, abalone, alewife —
each the spitting image of itself.
Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)
Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,
nothing is more original than a bog,
more rare than the cougar and crane —
save all the above named.
I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,
deer, the descent of man and estuaries,
flakes of snow (no two like) fire,
flax, gannets and gulls.
Honeybees and the Hoover Dam
are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.
Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,
joshua trees, lagoons and the law
that to liken a lichen is tautological.
Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds
that all of these are idiosyncracies:
the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.
Virtually nothing is extraneous here —
not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.
This is the world of plenitude and power —
every bit of it out of this world:
the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.
As now we inch toward an end — vectors
and a winter that figures to be like no other,
say the selfsame earth is to your liking,
and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,
all things like, beyond compare.
Was I sad to leave the country? Is that where I was born? Am I my grandmother’s child? Am I a child of potion? Am I a child of folklore, or family crisis, some need for gender balancing? Maybe some need to keep my father? And who is my father too, is he Buddy my daddy, or is he some country man whose lasting seed my Grandma’am could pickle till it got to Detroit? Maybe a man prone to girls, maybe Mr. Howell Jones or Mr. Harold Grayson Senior or maybe his brother who looks nothing like him. Are my brothers really brothers to me, or am I sister to bay leaf and scorched root of cayenne?
Annalee is sorting through a box of seed packets. She has a swollen lip; her boyfriend punched her this morning because she had run out of bacon. She walks over to Wynn’s truck and inspects her lips in the sideview mirror. “It’s really strange to have somebody hit you,” she says. “When I was in high school, a boy hit me once and I remember thinking, If he hits me again I’m going to kill him. Then he hit me again and I didn’t do anything.”
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”