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.
The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…
We will rebuild our city, yes—we will, we will build a new city in the image of our old city, a city that will withstand whatever nature sends against it, a city that will rise up into the sky, our mayor said, pointing, his arm trembling, a city raised up into the clouds, a cloud city, a city of the air currents, of the jet streams, of warm fronts and cold fronts, a city that will harness the power of the weather and put it to good use, only good, constructive use.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
Rat-baiting was the premier betting sport of the nineteenth century. Its prestige can be gauged in economic terms, circa 1875: admission to a then illegal prizefight between humans cost fifty cents, to dogfights and cockfights $2, while a fight pitting a dog against rats ran anywhere from $1.50 if the dog faced five rats or fewer, up to $5, in proportion to the number of rats. In the eighteenth century the biggest draw had been bearbaiting, but that sport gradually dissipated as the number of available bears decreased, although matches continued to be held up to the Civil War, notably in McLaughlin’s bear pit at First Avenue and Tenth Street. For a while, dog-vs.-raccoon contests were popular, but rats were so readily available that they came to dominate the scene; boys were paid to catch them, at a rate of five to twelve cents a head.
Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for
my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.
She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers
what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.
We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.
Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,
They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.
The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb
Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood
At a crucial joint, which anyway was out
Of square or measured wrong; then bending down
To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above
His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.
But certain afternoons, with men arrayed
Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam
In sawdust winnowing behind the blade
And catch the hammer cocked above a beam
In a still life of the legendary glamour
Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given
Long since and far away, where the poised hammer
Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.
The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…
We will rebuild our city, yes—we will, we will build a new city in the image of our old city, a city that will withstand whatever nature sends against it, a city that will rise up into the sky, our mayor said, pointing, his arm trembling, a city raised up into the clouds, a cloud city, a city of the air currents, of the jet streams, of warm fronts and cold fronts, a city that will harness the power of the weather and put it to good use, only good, constructive use.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
Rat-baiting was the premier betting sport of the nineteenth century. Its prestige can be gauged in economic terms, circa 1875: admission to a then illegal prizefight between humans cost fifty cents, to dogfights and cockfights $2, while a fight pitting a dog against rats ran anywhere from $1.50 if the dog faced five rats or fewer, up to $5, in proportion to the number of rats. In the eighteenth century the biggest draw had been bearbaiting, but that sport gradually dissipated as the number of available bears decreased, although matches continued to be held up to the Civil War, notably in McLaughlin’s bear pit at First Avenue and Tenth Street. For a while, dog-vs.-raccoon contests were popular, but rats were so readily available that they came to dominate the scene; boys were paid to catch them, at a rate of five to twelve cents a head.
Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for
my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.
She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers
what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.
We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.
Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,
They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.
The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb
Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood
At a crucial joint, which anyway was out
Of square or measured wrong; then bending down
To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above
His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.
But certain afternoons, with men arrayed
Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam
In sawdust winnowing behind the blade
And catch the hammer cocked above a beam
In a still life of the legendary glamour
Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given
Long since and far away, where the poised hammer
Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.