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awards and ebert

April 5, 2013 by L.S. Johnson

so i found out today that my story “terra ignota” was a finalist for the dana award for short fiction.  my little bridesmaid!

roger ebert died yesterday. in my youth he was one of those perpetual cultural figures on television and in the papers; i remember watching siskel and ebert almost religiously for a while, just around the age when i could plausibly sneak into an R-rated movie if i dressed up a little.  siskel and ebert were funny and sharp, and they were my first experience with criticism, with a critic’s body of work and knowledge.

but i have since tuned out of television, and i am late to the party understanding that ebert was also well-read, well-spoken, and a gentleman. i have often felt bitter about the way education is perceived by many people in this country, and it is so wonderful to see, well, a fellow american who can appreciate both a good, lurid b-movie and the work of saul bellow or whitman; who looked for the same quality of empathy in film that i am learning to value in fiction.

in one of his blog posts that is now circulating—because it is about death—he has a reading of a wonderful cummings poem. and i am thinking, now, that poetry can be my bridge for a while, between reading for pleasure and reading for research. we all need to read more poetry—that most empathetic of empathetic arts, and perhaps the loveliest as well.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Filed Under: News, Reading Tagged With: Dana Award, e.e. cummings, Roger Ebert, Terra Ignota

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