Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 - Louise Glück

[Dr. Drib]

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2020) will be announced October 8.


Who's going to win?

Who's not going to win?

[poohbear_nc]

Will the committee take any account of the year of protests around the world?

[Camellia]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Will the committee take any account of the year of protests around the world?

I'm making an assumption and guessing that you're talking about the controversy surrounding Handke, so the most relevant information I can find is from this Guardian article. Here's a quote:

Björn Wiman, culture editor at Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, said: “Last year was an exhibition in how not to polish your brand. They followed up a year when they had been explicitly prohibited from awarding the prize with giving it to Handke. I’m sure they were aware of the colossal controversy that would follow, and which did, and which further deepened the crisis for the Swedish Academy.”

“This is important for this year’s prize because they will, I think, make a safe choice. They will give the prize to a female author, who is not from Europe, and who is, in the political and ideological and appearance-wise sense, the opposite of Handke,” Wiman added.

[binaryhermit]

I'm pretty sure there's always drama, like when Bob Dylan won it.

[Number9]

I think that Jamaica Kincaid will get the prize this year. 👍

[poohbear_nc]

Louise Glück wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Glück was recognised for "her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal"

My personal favorite is her collection The Wild Iris

[issybird]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Louise Glück wins Nobel Prize for Literature

My personal favorite is her collection The Wild Iris

It’s a difficult choice, but I think for me Ararat edges out Wild Iris. Both, happily, are in the volume of her collected verse, which is a terrific value as an ebook, but I’ll say as an aside that poetry is the one genre where I prefer paper to digital as the layout is so important. However, this is not to try to talk people out of trying her in digital if they haven’t read her poetry yet.

[Pajamaman]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/har...rrated-poseurs

Exemplary Lines: "This, this is the meaning of / 'a fortunate life': it means / to exist in the present."

She is perhaps our greatest example of mediocrity ascending to the very top (currently hands out the Yale Series of Younger Poets award--oh, how we have fallen from Auden!). As with Sharon Olds, her poetry is an accurate reflection of the abysmal decline of American feminism from its radical incarnation in the seventies. First book, Firstborn, was stillborn Plath, and it only got worse--though she took 17 years between books at one time to figure out her direction, going from Plath's angry confessionalism to pure domesticity. Takes herself so seriously that her domestic travails are the subject of her own mythology (herself=Penelope). Utterly humorless--a characteristic common to the other mediocrities on this list.

On a brief reading, I see nothing that merits a Nobel Prize, or even a prize really.

For sure, Dylan deserved it more:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

[issybird]

I found this rebuttal of Shivani’s comments quite entertaining. And persuasive.

https://flcenterlitarts.wordpress.co...in-literature/

But I guess Shivani got tired of sitting in neglected glory down in Houston, where his novels, short stories and poems are published by small presses and nominated for second-tier prizes.

In Shivani’s case, as in Peck’s, critical judgment, grounded in a specific, defensible aesthetic, has been replaced with angry subjectivity. And, I suspect, resentment. The entire problem with the 15 writers Shivani assails seems to be that that are more famous, honored and successful than Shivani himself.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by issybird

I’ll say as an aside that poetry is the one genre where I prefer paper to digital as the layout is so important. However, this is not to try to talk people out of trying her in digital if they haven’t read her poetry yet.

I'm interested in getting into more poetry, could you give me an example of what you mean?

[Dr. Drib]

Issybird may wish to expand upon this.

The scansion of a line of poetry (the metrical rhythm of the line) can sometimes be compromised due to the width of the screen size on an individual ereader.

To put it another way: A line of poetry may have to be shortened due to the screen realities of the individual ebook reader that one owns, which means that a 'long' line may have to drop to the next line (when no line break occurs in the original poem), which can impact upon the look as well as the reading and appearance of the original line. This can compromise the beauty and the meaning of some poems.

Some of these issues can be 'overcome' if one makes the print tiny.

[Uncle Robin]

Thanks for the explanation, Dr Drib. It sounds like reading in landscape might help lessen the damage in many cases, perhaps?

[poohbear_nc]

Some publishers insert a page before the TOC displaying a sample line, with instructions to adjust your reader settings so that all the words fit onto one line. I use this line to decide whether to read in portrait or landscape mode.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Thanks for the explanation, Dr Drib. It sounds like reading in landscape might help lessen the damage in many cases, perhaps?

Yes, that's true: it can lessen the issue.

(But Issybird may wish to expand upon some components of what I see as a limitation of reading poetry on an ebook reader - and I LOVE ebook readers.)

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Issybird may wish to expand upon this.

The scansion of a line of poetry (the metrical rhythm of the line) can sometimes be compromised due to the width of the screen size on an individual ereader.

To put it another way: A line of poetry may have to be shortened due to the screen realities of the individual ebook reader that one owns, which means that a 'long' line may have to drop to the next line (when no line break occurs in the original poem), which can impact upon the look as well as the reading and appearance of the original line. This can compromise the beauty and the meaning of some poems.

Some of these issues can be 'overcome' if one makes the print tiny.

Exactly.

There are minor additional issues, but they’re more of a quibble. Poems that follow one on another on the same page, compounding the problem of a poem that overruns lines or page. And, the loss of the physical and psychological limitation of one slender book of poetry, as opposed to an omnibus, whether real or virtual. Poems take time. A thin volume with a limited number of poems as discrete entities encourages one to slow down, to savor, to examine the lines and what the poet is doing with language and meaning. You don’t want to bang through poems.