the nobel prize

the newest nobel laureate in literature was announced today & kudos to the novelist, i was obsessed with the prize giving when i was a bit younger, & i don't mean to poo-poo the massive lifetime achievements of its winners, i was quite happy when seamus heaney & tomas transtromer & wislawa szymborsska got the coveted award, & some of the lodestar writers of my life, william faulkner & ernest hemingway, were also laureates of this great honor, but at the risk of sounding jaded & silly, the award means little to me now, cuz some of the most important & critical writers of my life, be it thom gunn or nicanor parra or james schuyler or jim mccrary or tom beckett or jonathan hayes or eileen tabios or jean vengua or mark young or alex gildzen [a few here listed among a great many more who are not only teachers in my life but literally operatives of my life support systems], have not gotten this honor, still & yet the great antipoet parra, who was often on the nobel prize shortlist, opted for another kind of prize from the swedish academy, a prize that i yearn for too, one that might never be created by awarding boards & their trustees, but without it literature simply fails as an art, thus i give you parra's request:

for without readers literature is simply noise, take from parra's antipoem what you will, & in the awarding of the nobel prize in literature in re the spirit of bob dylan's laureateship perhaps next year the swedish academy might consider one of our great filmmakers as a laurate for cinema is literature too