Monday Mailbag #15

Dear Tribal Hack:

How come you never give out prizes on your blog? No one cares about opinions, we just want the comp.

-- Okra Winfree



Dear Okra:

True. True. The first person to match all 26 authors with the correct quotes (number to letter is easiest to transmit as an answer) wins a sale of one of his or her books, to me, which I'd (eventually) blog-review (oh joy!). Contest closes next Monday at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time. If no one hits all 26 matches correctly, purchase-prize goes to the highest total. Anyone can enter. If the winner hasn't written a book, I'll post (and link, if applicable) to a poem of his or her choice, written by either that person or any other. No skill-testing questions necessary regarding what components make up kryptonite or who (other than Jimmy Hoffa) got swallowed up in the Bermuda Triangle. Multiple entries not allowed. Nor are hints entertained. Submit responses either in the comments section, or by back-channel mail. Winners not eligible for any additional prizes, e.g. subsidies, grants, job blurbs, book blurbs, character assessment, pre-burial beatification, or testimonials of any kind. No additonal prizes or perks to be granted. Bribing encouraged, though the site manager reserves the right to snigger uncontrollably at the presumption. In the event that the correct answer is submitted through private correspondence, and a later correct answer shows up on my unmoderated blog comment stream, the Ashton Kutcher (sp?) type readership numbers agree to accept my honesty in the early, unrevealed-by-verified-time revelation. This contest is open to all and sundry, and in no way discriminates between poetic schools, rivalries, utopian halls, seminar groups, or personality quirks and deficits.



a) Margaret Atwood

b) Irving Layton

c) Edmund Spenser

d) Raymond Souster

e) Miriam Waddington

f) J R R Tolkien

g) William Skakespeare

h) J M Synge

i) Evelyn Waugh

j) B K S Iyengar

k) Tennessee Williams

l) Sara Teasdale

m) Catullus

n) Leonard Cohen

0) Cesar Vallejo

p) Edna St Vincent Millay

q) Marianne Moore

r) Robert Lowell

s) Fulke Greville

t) John Berger

u) Gerardo Diego

v) Georg Trakl

w) Margaret Avison

x) Robert Graves

y) Sylvia Plath

z) Dorothy Livesay

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1) "The murderer drinks his wine wide-eyed"

2) "Well, are you alive or are you dead?"

3) "It was April when you came/the first time to me"

4) "To what purpose, April, do you return again?"

5) "Rednuhtetum!"

6) "Then woe, and woe, and everlasting woe"

7) "My life is a lemon/but my song is not yellow"

8) "Absence, the noble truce/Of Cupid's war,"

9) "Encased in the hard, bright shell of my dream"

10) "Old, rain-wrinkled, time-soiled, city-wise, morning man"

11) "Tony's as happy as a sandboy, isn't he?"

12) "Both of us married into society, Big Daddy"

13) "I walk through the old yellow sunlight"

14) "You'd do it handy, maybe, if I'd gold to steal"

15) " 'Mac went for a shit"

16) "You use the future to console yourself for the youth you never had"

17) "Your numbers, a hundred or so,/leave me undaunted"

18) "As carrots form mandrakes"

19) "Of course there's hope"

20) "Ash, ash -- /You poke and stir"

21) "Put a little water in a spoon"

22) "The dead lakes"

23) "If a person goes into a swoon, is that samadhi?"

24) "Taking the air rifle from my son's hand,"

25) "Thirsting for/the hierarchic privacy"

26) "Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame"

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edit: Silly me. Of course, in the interest of transparency, all answers must be submitted through the comments stream. In the event of a tie, first response wins. In the event that no answers are submitted, I'll instead buy and review a copy of "The Ectoplasm Diet For The Post-Green Revolution" by Rance & Sid Pistil.