LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE POETS - PREVIEWING THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2010

Here’s the odds-on list for who is likely to be the recipient for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature

http://gawker.com/5653990/your-betting-guide-to-the-2010-nobel-prize-in-literature

Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet, is the most favored….Transtromer writes poetry in which there is much beneath the surface….Adam Zagajewski another poet from Poland is fifth on the list….His style is somewhat similar to Transtromer’s….If anything, Zagajewski’s style is even more spare and powerful.

The poetry collection TEN THOUSAND LIVES by Ko Un(second place on the prospective Nobel List) is an attempt to record the people this South Korean poet has met in his life….Considering this collection of poetry was started in jail where Ko Un had been sentenced at the time due to criticizing the government(he was later released), there is a level of detail that one would expect from someone with time to spend searching their mind for every small detail and this level of detail is very skillfully put to use-classic descriptive verse.

An Australian poet, Les Murray, is also on the list….His poems are messy, overflowing with detail.

I don’t care much for the prose writers on the list-Don DeLillo is an awful, mechanical writer, Cormac McCarthy writes potboilers somebody has mistaken for literature,  and Phillip Roth is the written equivalent of a Woody Allen film-the East Coast elitist (often Jewish) as narrator….All three stink IMO.

There are many great Japanese writers….However, Haruki Murakami is not one of them….He is very western in his obviousness – A wannabe Kurt Vonnegut.

I’m a fan of Thomas Pynchon especially GRAVITY’S RAINBOW-An amazing book….William Burroughs but with an actual story and less drug dreaming….However, I think he’s too far outside what the judges are used to….Hard to imagine him winning the Nobel lit prize

So the poets are it this year….Good luck to all of them