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.
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead enroute to raid.
We meet undercover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can’t tell you. The past restages
the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
But the coded trill a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails
as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of
this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know
close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead enroute to raid.
We meet undercover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can’t tell you. The past restages
the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
But the coded trill a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails
as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of
this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know
close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.