Yesterday when I went to pick Kweli up from doggie school, they asked me if I had ever considered “putting him medication.” Apparently his anxiety is inhibiting his ability to learn, and they think adding medication (for a short period of time) with his training may help him become a more productive canine member of society. I wasn’t offended at the suggestion and I’ve been mulling it over in my mind but (and you knew there was going to be a but) here’s the thing…
He’s an anxious dog. I know this and I know it causes him to loose focus, which makes getting him to do anything difficult. However, because he needs so much structure, it would make sense that these daily trips to doggie school are stressing him out. It isn’t that I’m not open to medicating him, but I guess I have a similiar reaction to most parents when the school nurse calls saying your child may have ADHD and we want to put them on ritalin. Let’s give it just a little more time…
So low in behold when I arrive today to pick him up, Megan, his trainer, informs me that he was much calmer and overall less stressed. In her words “he was like a whole other dog.” So I’m confident that he may not have to go on doggie prozac just yet.
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Henri Cole Receives the Lenore Marshall Prize$25,000 for the year’s most outstanding book of poetry
New York, October 1—The Academy of American Poets announced today that Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was chosen by poets Lucie Brock-Broido, B. H. Fairchild, and John Koethe to receive the 2008 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year.
About Cole’s winning book, judge John Koethe remarked:
Henri Cole has become one of his generation’s most assured and accomplished poets, and Blackbird and Wolf is a powerful and masterful book: powerful in the psychological directness of its self-scrutiny, and masterful in its achievement of a poetry so artful it almost seems artless.
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956 and raised in Virginia. His volumes of poetry include: Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Middle Earth, which received the 2004 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Visible Man; The Look of Things; The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge; and The Marble Queen. He has held many teaching positions and been the artist-in-residence at various institutions, including Smith College, Reed College, Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities. He currently teaches at Ohio State University.
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Great E-panel on Upstart Publishers on Emerging Writers…
Brianna Pike 