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May was packed full of exciting book events, a number linked to the Sydney Writers' Festival. My SWF week began with the evening announcement of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards at the Mitchell Library. It was a great opportunity to catch up with people and meet new authors. The other awards evening I attended was […]Add a Comment
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Blog: Perpetually Adolescent (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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The 2014 November PAD (Poem-A-Day) Chapbook Challenge results are in, and I can't wait to share the winner. I always shoot for Groundhog Day to make the big announcement, but I don't always hit that mark. The only reason I'm a day off this time around is that the competition was so fierce.
A little more than 100 chapbook manuscripts were entered, and many of them would've been in the running as a finalist in previous years. It made for great reading, but it also made for great anxiety in figuring out finalists–let alone a winner!
Publish your poetry!
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Edited by Robert Lee Brewer, this edition of Poet's Market includes articles on the craft of poetry, business of poetry, and promotion of poetry. Plus, interviews with poets and original contemporary poems. Oh yeah, and hundreds of poetry publishing opportunities, including book publishers, chapbook publishers, magazines, journals, online publications, contests, and so much more!
It was tough to pick a winner, but pick a winner I did: A Good Passion, by Barbara Young.
Congratulations, Barbara!
Here are a few poems from A Good Passion:
"About the Language and Inevitable Death," by Barbara Young
Once upon a time
and this is before you
or I or your mother or
the dry disappearing women
who live under bridges
were born, words –some
words– had different meanings
than today's.
Night, for instance.
And Alone. Alone, alone
could fill all the space between all the yellow cities
on the map with
hollow, a hollow more empty than the echo
of the emptiest of moved from homes, dust
where the dresser was, a penny, half a toothpick.
But we use ancestors' words
to name the things we know. And call the yellow
night sky black. And say he died
and went to hell.
"Jericho Road," by Barbara Young
Blind Bartimaus, they called him
before the miracle.
What was he, to himself, after?
I lost weight once.
Never in my own mind, though.
Gained back more.
And never became that person,
revised, either. Tell me
Blind man, about the aftermath
of your miracle.
"XX," by Barbara Young
A kiss
so sweet I
Again, congratulations, Barbara!
But wait! There's more!
I have, of course, picked a few other chapbooks to recognize as well. While I could list more than a dozen that gave A Good Passion a run for its money, here are the Top 5 chapbooks, including the winner:
- A Good Passion, by Barbara Young
- A Nest of Shadormas, by William Preston
- The Staircase Before You, by Jess(i)e Marino
- Lives Other Than Our Own, by James Von Hendy
- 1991 Winter, by Marilyn Braendeholm
Congratulations to all the finalists! And to everyone who entered!
I often receive notes of success from poets who've entered these challenges and found success with their poems–both individually and as collections–elsewhere. I expect great things from the poems and collections submitted this year!
And remember: the 2015 April PAD Challenge is just around the corner!
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of the poetry collection, Solving the World's Problems (Press 53). He edits Poet's Market, Writer's Market, and Guide to Self-Publishing, in addition to writing a free weekly WritersMarket.com newsletter and poetry column for Writer's Digest magazine.
He enjoyed the 2014 November PAD Chapbook Challenge, and he is looking forward to the 2015 April PAD Challenge!
Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
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This is part two of a three-part series on nature and poetry by guest Daniel Roessler. If you'd like the opportunity to be a guest on this blog, send your ideas (and a little about yourself) to email@example.com.
In my first post of this series, we investigated how to freshen up nature themes in our poetry by focusing on the changing role of nature in our lives and world. Another way to bring a unique perspective to our nature poems is by considering parallels with human, social and urban themes.
For example, have you ever had a boss who slithered into your office like a snake and spewed venom your way? Okay, maybe that example isn't the most pleasant, but it gets the point across that nature offers great material for us to compare with other aspects of our life experiences.
Nature and Human Emotion
One of the most obvious examples is human emotion. Who hasn't felt the joy of a sunny day warming their heart? Or been angry and lashed out with the fury of a thunderstorm? Or after a long week at work felt as free as an eagle soaring across a cloudless sky when quitting time arrives on Friday?
Even if we haven't felt these specific things ourselves, we can still see how they make sense. While these may be simplistic examples, they highlight the point that many elements of nature are easily relatable on a basic human emotional level.
Nature and Social Interaction
This is also true of how we as humans relate to one another in social interactions. For example, we might describe a schoolyard bully as a tiger stalking his prey. Or we may compare a parent's love to fertile soil that allows a child to take root and grow like a Redwood.
The possibilities are endless and our relationships with others often mimic connections that occur in nature.
Nature and Urban Themes
In a similar vein, urban themes can bring distinct elements to our nature poems. Maybe we liken a salmon swimming upstream to a man racing against the flow of sidewalk traffic in New York City. Rather than a simple comparison, we might even consider writing a poem with a back and forth exchange between an urban component and the natural environment.
For instance, we might live in a small studio apartment that has no windows, which we describe in one quatrain, then depict a natural cavern in the next, and so on. This method allows our readers to alternate between an urban and nature world, empowering and compelling them to draw the comparisons and contrasts themselves.
We have discussed a few methods and examples here but there are many more. Nature topics are not limited to natural resources but also include topics like weather, wild animals, etc. The wonderful thing about nature is that it is a tremendously broad canvas.
However, bringing human, social and urban themes into our nature poems can infinitely expand the boundaries of our work to create something wonderfully unique.
Daniel Roessler is an author and poet who recently placed 4th in our Writers Digest SIJO competition with "Drowning" and 5th in our Triversen competition with "The Eulogy". He is also the author of one non-fiction book, seeking representation for his recently completed novel, and has two poetry chapbooks in progress. For more information on Daniel, visit his website at www.danielroessler.com.
Find more poetic posts here:
- Contemplating Nature's Changing Role in Poetry.
- Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 270.
- WD Poetic Form Challenge: Golden Shovel.
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Earlier this month, Daniel Roessler shared a three-part series on nature and poetry. I'm hoping to continue sharing both guest posts on various topics on Thursdays (missed last week because of illness and deadlines). If you have an idea, send it my way at email@example.com, and we'll work to flesh it out.
This guest post comes from Ian Chandler, who was a Top 25 Poet in the 2013 April PAD Challenge (click here to read an interview).
Greetings, poets! Robert has been kind enough to give me a guest post on this wonderful blog, so I'll do my best not to mess it up. I'm writing on one of my favorite aspects of poetry (and all writing, for that matter): the urban sketch.
I first learned about the concept while studying Arthur Morrison's book A Child of the Jago, which tells the tale of a London slum in the 1890s. I didn't care so much for the book, but I came across a unique connection between the text and Japanese art. Morrison had a special fondness for a woodcutting technique called ukiyo-e. It depicted mostly city life, which eventually gave way to the modern urban sketch. At its core, the urban sketch is taking a vignette of or situation in daily urban life and using it as the basis for a written work.
While it may seem like a widely used (and even obvious) concept, deliberate urban sketching provides some unique perspectives to all poets. For those who already focus on modern life, you'll get a defined sense of place using the technique. For those who don't, you'll discover a litany of marvelous things about everyday life.
Urbanity as Action
A great example is Anthony Hecht's masterful "Third Avenue in Sunlight," where he ends with the cutting quatrain:
Daily the prowling sunlight whets its knife
Along the sidewalk. We almost never meet.
In the Rembrandt dark he lifts his amber life.
My bar is somewhat further down the street.
Throughout the poem, Hecht weaves a narrative in between descriptions of the city and places the action in urbanity itself. The closer is an intense picture of the affected view of the titular avenue that truly clinches.
Nature of the City
For another example, take the appropriately titled "City Elegies" by Robert Pinsky:
All day all over the city every person
Wanders a different city, sealed intact
And haunted as the abandoned subway stations
Under the city. Where is my alley doorway?
This part in particular centers on the nature of the city itself rather than what is within it, and it does so tastefully.
Culture of the City
Lastly, a small self-plug for good measure. I used urban sketching in "tuesday," which highlights millennial culture and focuses on small things some people might not see:
wet chainlink benchbacks
that are wooden and resolute
and my soy latte
a sketch of the counter with a found pen
The next time you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard/screen), try using the urban sketch. Besides being a whole lot of fun, it's a good way to train your mind. Who knows––that parked motorcycle next to a campus bookstore and an ant-line of cars on Main Street might be the stars of your next poem.
Ian Chandler is a poet and freelance writer based in Kent, Ohio. He is currently attending Kent State University studying English. He has been awarded the 2014 Malone Writers Prize in Poetry, and he has been published three times in A Celebration of Young Poets.
He also reviews albums for Surviving the Golden Age. Other hobbies of his include coffeemaking, cardistry, and music.
Read more at his blog: http://ianchandler.wordpress.com.
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A pantheon of eminent Australian poets descended onto a marquee slated on a grassy tennis court in leafy Sydney. The canapés, wine and congenial company were to celebrate the launch of esteemed poet, Geoffrey Lehmann's new book, Poems 1957-2013 (UWA Publishing). Geoffrey and his vivacious wife, Gail Pearson, hosted a large but attentive group of […]Add a Comment
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Poets, save this post! It just may be the most incredible, informational, controversial, and blah-blah-blah poetry-related post you ever read! Ever!!!!
After saving the post, be sure to share it with everyone–whether they like poetry or not. Because this post is about uncover the wide world of poetry by using the…wait for it…alphabet! Spectacular, I know, and yes, I'm being silly right now.
But let's get serious for a moment: When I first started writing poetry, I knew nothing about the world I was entering. I didn't know the big players, the little players, any players. So one of the things I try to accomplish with this blog is to at least connect people and ideas. While I know this list is not comprehensive and more than a little U.S.-centric, I think it's a good starting point for poets who want to know more about what's happening.
This list includes poets, events, publishers, and more. Any and all omissions were either made intentionally (because I'm a snob) or more likely through pure ignorance (because I don't know everything–that's why blog posts have comments). If you see any glaring omissions, please don't keep it all to yourself; share in the comments below.
The Poetry World A-E
A is for AWP (or Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, an annual event that drew 13,000+ writers and readers in 2014. It's also for AIPF (Austin International Poetry Festival–or largest non-juried international poetry festival in the world), Academy of American Poets, Amazon (yes, the online retailer), and Ashbery, John.
B is for BAP (or Best American Poetry) anthology, which always sparks a debate over whether poets should be recognized by a small group of writers and readers or be completely ignored by everyone (in case you're wondering, my vote is for BAP). B is also for Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop (the only all-poetry bookstore in NYC), Bowery Poetry Club (also in NYC), Broadsided Press (putting lit & art on the streets), Boston Review (great sounding board for poets and poetry), and Bly, Robert.
C is for Collins, Billy, the poet so many readers love and so many poets wish they could be, though many wouldn't admit it. While Cookie Monster might claim C is for cookie (and it is!), C is also for Coldfront (a great poetry-related website), Cowboy Poetry, and Copper Canyon Press.
D is for Dodge Poetry Festival, which has drawn more than 150,000 folks to its 14 total events–all for poetry! D is also for Decatur Book Festival (the ginormous book festival outside Atlanta, GA) and poets Dove, Rita, and Doty, Mark.
E is for Ecco (the HarperCollins imprint that publishes poetry). It's also for Elegy Owed, by Bob Hicok. Okay, okay; E was a lean letter for me and this list.
Win $1,000 for Your Poetry!
Writer's Digest is offering a contest strictly for poets with a top prize of $1,000, publication in Writer's Digest magazine, and a copy of the 2015 Poet's Market. There are cash prizes for Second ($250) and Third ($100) Prizes, as well as prizes for the Top 25 poems.
The deadline is October 31.
The Poetry World F-K
F is for Finishing Line Press, the chapbook publisher who every poet seems to have published a chapbook with (except me–cue Charlie Brown music). F is also for Favorite Poem Project, FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Flarf, and Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. And just to rile people up: Franco, James.
G is for Genius Grants, those beautiful $625,000 over the course of 5 years grants awarded to poets and other geniuses. It's also for Graywolf Press (the publisher of James Franco and other poets) and Gluck, Louise.
H is for Haiku Society of America, because the haiku contingent is fierce and motivated. Beyond those tiny gems, H is also for Hayes, Terrance, Hass, Robert, Hall, Donald, and Hejinian, Lyn–an "H-bomb" of poets (haha, why am I the only one laughing at that bad joke?). One more "H-bomb": Hickory, as in Hickory, North Carolina, site of the monthly Poetry Hickory event hosted by Scott Owens.
I is for Innisfree Poetry Bookstore & Cafe, a poetry-only bookstore in Boulder, Colorado.
J is for Alice James Books (there's a "J" in there somewhere, right?)–publishing poetry since 1973.
K is for Kooser, Ted (former Poet Laureate), and Keillor, Garrison, who supports poetry in his own little (big) ways.
Blogging is a powerful way to develop ideas, share ideas, and find an audience that cares about your ideas. If you're new to blogging, learn how easy it is to get started. If you've been blogging but not getting the results you'd like, learn how easy it is to take your efforts to a whole new level with the Blog Your Way to Success bundle.
Whether your goal is to blog a book, increase blog traffic, build an author platform, or just express yourself, learn how to do it and do it right here.
The Poetry World L-P
L is for Linebreak, the online poetry journal. Two more big names Levine, Philip, and Lehman, David (series editor of BAP).
M is for Motionpoems, which puts poetry into motion with animation. M is also for Merwin, W.S., McClatchy, J.D., and McHugh, Heather. I guess MFAs would fit under here too, though I'm not going to single out any particular programs.
N is for New Directions, which is one of the most important poetry presses out there. But N is a big letter in the world of poetry that includes National Endowment for the Arts, National Book Award, Nobel Prize in Literature (a poet doesn't always win, but it's cool when it happens), National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Norton, and even the New Yorker.
O is for Open Books, one more poetry-only bookstore (based in Seattle) that sells books by big-time poets Olds, Sharon, and Oliver, Mary–maybe the two most popular poets in the country. O is also for Outlaw Poets.
P is for Poet's Market, which is like this list–only so much more involved. Actually, P has so much to offer that it could be a list all its own, so I went with the book that I personally edit to kick things off. P is also for The Poetry Foundation (and Poetry magazine), Poetry Society of America, Pulitzer, Poets & Writers, Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Pedestal, and Pinsky, Robert.
Get your poetry published!
Poet's Market really is a special guide to the poetry universe that is updated every single year with hundreds of poetry publishing opportunities for book and chapbook publishers, journals and magazines, contests and awards, grants, and so much more!
Plus, there are new poet interviews, new poems by contemporary poets, articles on the craft of poetry, articles on the business of poetry, articles on the promotion of poetry, and an exclusive webinar. It's the most power-packed resource for poets on the planet!
The Poetry World Q-Z
Q is for Queyras, Sina, aka Lemon Hound.
R is for Rattle, which is one of the top poetry-only publications today. R is also for Red Hen Press, Ryan, Kay, and "Rape Joke," by Patricia Lockwood, which is not the only poem to ever go viral, but an important one nonetheless.
S is for Silliman's blog, which is run by Ron Silliman; it's a daily must visit. S can also be for Simic, Charles, Strand, Mark, Smith, William Jay, and a whole gang of Slam Poets.
T is for Trethewey, Natasha, former Poet Laureate and author of Native Guard and Thrall.
U is for University of Pittsburgh Press, which is one of the top poetry presses around, publishing books by the likes of Bob Hicok, Denise Duhamel, Dean Young, and more.
V is for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, which has helped open up a dialogue about the place of women in the literary arts. V also stands for Verse Daily, "Vowels," by Christian Bok, and Valentine, Jean.
W is for "What Teachers Make," by Taylor Mali (just click the link and watch if you haven't before). It's also for Writer's Digest (which hosts this blog), Wright, Charles, and Wilbur, Richard.
X is for X.J. Kennedy. I know, I know; this totally breaks the alphabetical rules I've established up to this point (he should be under "K," you may say), but what the hey; since when do poets NOT bend the rules?!?
Y is for Young–both Dean Young and Kevin Young.
Z is for Zapruder, Matthew. And so ends the greatest A-Z post ever!
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of the poetry collection, Solving the World's Problems (Press 53). He edits Poet's Market, Writer's Market, and Guide to Self-Publishing, in addition to writing a free weekly WritersMarket.com newsletter and poetry column for Writer's Digest magazine.
He does not claim to know everything about poetry. In fact, I'm sure if you stick around and read the comments, you'll find that he's omitted quite a bit. But his ignorance aside, Robert does love poetry, the whole poetry season, which never ends for him. He loves discovering new (to him) poets, poetic forms, poems, books, and so on–and then, sharing all that on this blog!
Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
Find recent poetic posts here:
- Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 282. Every Wednesday, a prompt and poems (lots of poems).
- 2014 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Guidelines. Write a poem a day in November, put a chapbook together in December.
- Solving the World's Problems: Year One. Learn what worked, didn't work, lessons learned, etc., from first year as a published author of a poetry collection.
Blog: my juicy little universe (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Readers, I have now become a woman d'un certain âge. Many would say that with age comes wisdom; I maintain that my main function in the world is to be enthusiastic, not wise. And yet I do have some recent discoveries to share with you--a sort of public service announcement, a list of birthday discoveries that you might not want to miss. (And, as various Documentations of Interventions must be completed for various students exhibiting various needs for intervention, my PSA will be merely a list of thanks with links.)
0) Thanks to Mary Lee: reading must be risked (see number 11 at link) despite and because of that gone feeling you get from the ideal book for the moment.
1) Thanks to the Wyngate Arts Exhibition: "The Cup Song" is a perfect variety show number for elementary school girls--far more appropriate than, say, "Please Don't Stop the Music."
2) Thanks to Mark and Kim at Baltimore's Area 405's Supper and a Movie: Paris, Texas is a film worth returning to 1984 for.
3) Thanks to DJ Ivan and lots of my friends: dance party knows no age, and the "tea dance" is a concept that deserves a popular general update!
4) Thanks to my mom, personal shopper: a bright new fruit bowl can just transform one's attitude in the kitchen.
5) Thanks to my own good sense: on the first sunny warm afternoon of nominal spring, three spa treatments is plenty and four is just excessive.
6) Thanks to writerly friends Tabatha Yeatts and Laura Shovan: virtual is very fine, but you can't beat lunch with Pisces persons at a nice vegan restaurant with gifties from Robyn Hood Black's artsyletters shop.
7) Thanks to British in-laws Teresa O'Brien and John White: poets Liz Cashdan, Gillian Clarke, Rebecca Elson, Beatrice Garland, Christopher Reid. Golly.
8) Thanks to creative, clever, caring offspring: coupons for fancy meals, ten-minute massages, and happy playlists. Something to look forward to is a great gift. (And unlinkable children is probably also a great gift.)
9) Thanks to beloved spouse: Sonos upstairs, Sonos downstairs, Sonos all around! Please don't stop the music. And also The Flavour Thesaurus, a synaesthetizing thing of joy.
10) Thanks to my juicy little universe: gratitude is good medicine.
Today's Poetry Friday round-up is hosted by Kara at the intriguingly-named blog Rogue Anthropologist. Wishing you all some of this same birthday enthusiasm this week, birthday or not!
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Jane Shlensky likely doesn't need an introduction on the Poetic Asides blog, but I'm going to give her one anyway, because she deserves it. Not only is Jane a fine poet (read her Top 10 sijo here), but she's also one of the "encouragers" on this blog.
Jane is also part of a faction of poets I like to refer to as the "Hickory Poets" (of North Carolina), along with the likes of Nancy Posey, Scott Owens, Helen Losse, Jessie Carty, and others. I've seen her read in person, and it made me appreciate her poetry even more.
Without further ado, here's her Top 25 poem from the 2013 April PAD Challenge:
Storm-taught, by Jane Shlensky
A streak of yellow sky laid under
blue-black clouds, distant thunder,
and high wind bodes a reckoning.
Whatever tender plant or flower
newly born but for an hour
faces a beating April sting.
Old women learn to read such skies
like three-day bruises, alibis
for mischief loosed across the earth.
They think to harbor things they love
from hail and downpours from above,
knowing the scars from one outburst
can wreck a garden's trust in good.
Old women know it's understood
that heaven will have its way below.
Whatever power we think we own
is blasted by skies hard as stone.
We're humbled by what we can't know.
Bullying clouds with angry fists
prove some old women optimists
searching for spectrums arced in blue.
Old women know that broken plants
survive the direst circumstance.
Storms break, and sun shines through.
Where are you located?
I live in a village a few miles north of Durham, NC
Who are your favorite poets?
My tastes in poetry are eclectic, a sort of revolving favoritism based on whoever has my attention at the moment. (You might be interested to know I've been Solving the World's Problemslately with some young guy from Georgia). Sometimes I'll see something that recalls a line from Wordsworth or Whitman, Rilke or Keats, Tu Fu or Hopkins or Frost or Kooser.
I read widely and so appreciate widely. Teaching poetry and literature for so many years helped me read with an ear for form but a heart for truth. Reading fellow writers on my favorite blogs and in magazines has added to my list of poets to watch.
As a reader, what do you like most in poems?
I like beautiful language that is at once precise, clear, meaningful, and jagged—words that in their utter simplicity are dazzling and touching, that ring true to human experience. I want a phrase or line to snag me like a good fish hook, make me read again, make me wish I'd written that.
Sometimes, I feel compelled to say, "Damn, that's a good poem" because it is. Naturally, what I love in poetry is not necessarily what I do every time, but poems that get my attention and reel me in are good models to consider as I write.
What were your goals for 2013 Poetry Challenge?
On blogs like Poetic Asides, I've paid heed to what my fellows find worthwhile in my poetry. Southerner to the bone, I cannot avoid story. I've been encouraged by comments about my narrative work, a particular character, event, or slice of life that engaged me.
During the April challenge, I decided to see if it would be possible to write mostly narrative poems, to explore a character's plight using the prompts. While I was not always able to do that well, I did manage 27 days to do so, some days writing more than one poem for a prompt. I have a growing village of narrative poems, like Robinson's Tilbury Town or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
What is next for you?
My mother believed that whatever a person learned was to be used for the benefit of others. With writing as well as with playing piano, she would chide me if I wanted to learn a thing just for myself. I guess I could say I've been raised to find a use for things, including the poems I write every day.
Words are written to be read, so I'm tinkering with a collection, still sending out a few poems to magazines now and then, entering challenges and contests sometimes. Maybe all these little narrative lives will coalesce into a volume.
Nancy Posey and I are flirting with a joint project we've discussed for a while.
What's next? Like West Side Story's song, "Something's Coming," "…I don't know what it is but it is gonna be great." Or, at least, I hope so.
To read a little more about Jane, check out this
Poetic Creative Bloomings interview
Write better poetry!
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World's Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
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That's right; I said guest judges!
I'm still finalizing the list, but more than 20 judges have already signed on to be guest judges for the 2014 April PAD Challenge!
Here's how it will work:
- Each day, there will be a new prompt (like usual).
- After a few days have passed, I'll take all the poems attached to that day's prompt (in the comments) and winnow down the list for a specific guest judge…
- Who will then pick his or her favorite poem for the day…
- And that poem will be included in the Poem Your Heart Out
In other words, it's going to be a big-time poetic party on this blog during the month of April.
Who are these special guest judges?
Here's the list, which will not be complete until we have 30 listed below, in no particular order:
Thomas Lux is the author of several poetry collections, including Child Made of Sand, The Cradle Place, and God Particles. He is also the author of From the Southland, a book of literary nonfiction.
He holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded multiple NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow.
Traci Brimhall
Traci is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins(W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014.
She's received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Learn more at tracibrimhall.com.
Andrew Hudgins
Andrew is the author of seven books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, The Glass Hammer, and Ecstatic in the Poison. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award. He currently teaches in the Department of English at Ohio State University.
His most recent books are A Clown at Midnight(poems) and The Joker: A Memoir.
Barbara Hamby
Barbara is the author of five books of poems, most recently On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems(2014) published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award.
She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.
Learn more at: www.barbarahamby.com
Amy King
Amy is the author of several poetry collections, including I'm the Man Who Loves You, I Want to Make You Safe, and Antidotes for an Alibi. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and is a professor of English and creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
Mary Biddinger
Mary is the author of multiple collections, including Saint Monica and O Holy Insurgency. Her collection A Sunny Place With Adequate Wateris due out in May. She's also the founder of Barn Owl Review.
Learn more here: http://www.marybiddinger.com/.
Jericho Brown
Jericho is the author of Please and the forthcoming The New Testament.
Learn more here: http://www.jerichobrown.com/.
Kelli Russell Agodon
Kelli is a poet, writer, and editor from the Northwest. She's the author of the newly released, Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014) and The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, which she coauthored with Martha Silano. Her other books include Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, Small Knots, Geography, and Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry, which she edited with Annette Spaulding-Convy. Kelli is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press and was the editor of Crab Creek Review for the last six years. She lives in a small seaside town where she is an avid mountain biker, paddleboarder, and hiker. She loves dessert, museums, and typewriters.
Learn more about her at her website: www.agodon.com. She also blogs at Book of Kells: www.ofkells.blogspot.com. She can be found on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/agodon.
Her press, Two Sylvias Press, recently launched a Kickstarter Campaign for The Poet Tarot: A Deck & Guidebook into Creative Exploration, which you can learn about and support here: http://bit.ly/PoetTarotKickstarter.
Nate Pritts
Nate Pritts is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Right Now More Than Ever. His poems, and writings about poetry, can be found in American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Poets & Writers and the annual Poet's Market.
He founded H_NGM_N, an online journal and small press, and continues to serve as Director. Nate lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Learn more here: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/nate-pritts/
Jillian Weise
Jillian is the author of The Amputee's Guide to Sex, the novel The Colony, and The Book of Goodbyes, which won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, The New York Times and Tin House.
After fellowships from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Fulbright Program, she joined the faculty at Clemson University.
She identifies as a cyborg.
Learn more here: https://www.boaeditions.org/bookstore/the-book-of-goodbyes.html
Scott Owens
Scott is the author of Something Knows the Moment, Eye of the Beholder, For One Who Knows How to Own Land, and other collections. He's very involved in North Carolina poetry and runs a monthly reading series in Hickory, North Carolina.
Learn more here: http://www.scottowenspoet.com/.
Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina is the author of more than a dozen books.
Click here to read a recent interview with her and Carol Guess.
Shaindel Beers
Shaindel is the author of two full-length poetry collections, A Brief History of Time (2009) and The Children's War and Other Poems (2013), both from Salt Publishing.
She's also the poetry editor for Contrary Magazine (www.contrarymagazine.com).
Find her online here: http://shaindelbeers.com.
Erica Wright
Erica is the author of Instructions for Killing the Jackal(Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and the chapbook Silt (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Her debut crime novel, The Red Chameleon, will be published this year by Pegasus Books. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere.
She is the Poetry Editor at Guernica Magazine and has taught creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College and New York University's continuing studies program.
Learn more at http://www.blacklawrence.com/author/erica-wright/.
Deborah Ager
Deborah recently co-edited The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013) and Old Flame: Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine (2013).
The latter is a finalist for the Forward Book of the Year prize.
Learn more at: http://www.deborahager.com.
Neil Aitken
Neil is the author of The Lost Country of Sight and editor of Boxcar Poetry Review.
Learn more here: http://www.neil-aitken.com/.
Patricia Fargnoli
Patricia is the author of Then, Something, Winter, and other collections. She's also a former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire.
Learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Fargnoli.
Nin Andrews
Nin is the author of several poetry collections, including Why They Grow Wings, Sleeping With Houdini, and Southern Comfort.
Learn more here: http://www.ninandrews.com/.
Lawrence Schimel
Lawrence is the author of Deleted Namesand several other books (often as co-author).
Learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Schimel.
January Gill O'Neil
January is the author of Underlife. She's also the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
Learn more here: http://poetmom.blogspot.com/.
Sandra Beasley
Sandra is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Recent honors for her work include the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, Cornell College's Distinguished Writer fellowship, Lenoir-Rhyne University's Writer in Residence position, and two DCCAH Artist Fellowships.
Her most recent book is Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir and cultural history of food allergy. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.
Learn more here: sandrabeasley.com.
And here: sbeasley.blogspot.com.
Vince Gotera
Vince is the author of Fighting Kite, Ghost Wars, and other poetry collections. He's also the poetry editor of North American Review.
Click here to learn more: http://vincegotera.blogspot.com/.
Victoria Chang
Victoria's third book of poems, The Boss, was published by McSweeney's Poetry Series in 2013. Her other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle.
Her poems have been published in Kenyon Review, POETRY, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, The Washington Post, Best American Poetry, and other places.
You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.comor @VChangpoet.
More to come!
Which poets will judge for which days?
That will be released on each day. The guest judge will be announced along with the prompt. So you'll need to show up and be ready to poem every day!
The 2014 Poet's Market includes articles and advice on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry, in addition to new poems and poet interviews. Plus, this book lists of hundreds of poetry publishing opportunities, including listings for book (and chapbook) publishers, magazines (and journals), contests (and awards), and so much more!
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World's Problems(Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
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By Andrew Epstein
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño is of course best-known as a novelist, the author of ambitious, sprawling novels like The Savage Detectives and 2666. But before turning to prose, Bolaño started out as a poet; in fact, he often said he valued poetry more highly than fiction and sometimes claimed he was a better poet than novelist. His work is marked by a deep and abiding fascination with poetry and the people who write, read, and teach it. As Ben Ehrenreich wrote several years ago in an essay for the Poetry Foundation, "through his legions of fictional poets (some more fictional than others), through their political compromises, their self-betrayals, their struggles and feuds both petty and grand, Bolaño built a world."
Ehrenreich is surely right about the importance of poetry, and fictional poets, to Bolaño's oeuvre, but the critical discussion of this element of Bolaño's work thus far has mostly remained on a general plane, instead of connecting his writing to particular poets and poetry movements. However, with the recent publication of his unfinished novel Woes of the True Policeman and of his complete poetry in The Unknown University, Bolaño's rather surprising links to a specific poetry movement — the New York School of poetry — have come into sharper focus.
It is common for readers to link Bolaño to Latin American and Spanish literary influences, to European avant-garde movements, or to other fiction writers. But Bolaño clearly read and absorbed the New York School of poetry and painting, along with a truly astonishing range of other sources. Although commentators on his work have barely mentioned it thus far, the New York School plays an important role in his work. It flickers just on the margins of Bolaño's fictional universe, a ghostly example of the kind of poetry — as well as the type of intimate avant-garde community of like-minded others — that continually beckons and frustrates Bolaño and his characters.
Bolaño's preoccupation with poetry can perhaps be seen best in his wonderful novel The Savage Detectives, which is actually a novel about poets. At its heart is a semi-fictional movement of young poets Bolaño calls the "Visceral Realists" (loosely based upon his own youthful involvement in a coterie called the Infrarealists). Throughout the remarkable opening section of the novel, this group — with all of its subversive energy, its iconoclasm and playfulness, its goofy, idealistic naivete, romanticism, and tragic flaws — reminds one of a host of other avant-garde communities, including the Surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School.
But it is more than just a novel about poets. The Savage Detectives is a moving meditation on poetry as a horizon of possibility and disillusionment. In fact, it's one of the most exhilarating, devastating, exhausting, and revealing accounts of avant-garde poetry — and the movements and social worlds that sustain it — that I have encountered. It portrays the avant-garde as dream, as tragedy, as farce, as inspiring coterie and impossible community, tantalizing potential and heart-breaking, inevitable failure. In this, Bolaño echoes one of the hallmarks of the New York School itself: an intense, often ironic awareness of the paradoxes inherent in any avant-garde community, both its allure and its limitations.
However, The Savage Detectives contains few direct references to the New York poets themselves (except for a passing reference to poets Ted Berrigan and John Giorno). Traces of the New York School stand out more prominently in the recently published book Woes of the True Policeman, one of the many (and perhaps the last) of Bolaño's posthumous works that have appeared in recent years. At the novel's center is a Chilean university professor named Óscar Amalfitano who falls in love with a young Mexican artist whose specialty is making forgeries of paintings by … Larry Rivers, of all people. Rivers, of course, was Frank O'Hara's close friend, collaborator, and sometime lover, and the painter who is perhaps most closely allied, both socially and aesthetically, with the New York poets. This unusual detail — and the figure of Rivers himself — becomes a significant thread in Bolaño's novel. The young artist, Castillo, explains that he sells the forgeries to a Texan who "then sells them to other filthy rich Texans." When Castillo informs Amalfitano that Rivers is "an artist from New York," he replies "I know Larry Rivers. I know Frank O'Hara, so I know Larry Rivers."
Soon after, as Amalfitano meditates on the strangeness of this situation — the amateurish Rivers' forgeries, the Texans who buy them, and the art market in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas — Bolaño writes:
"he immediately pictured those fake Berdies, those fake camels, and those extremely fake Primo Levis (some of the faces undeniably Mexican) in the private salons and galleries, the living rooms and libraries of modestly prosperous citizens… And then he imagined himself strolling around Castillo's nearly empty studio, naked like Frank O'Hara, a cup of coffee in his right hand and a whiskey in his left, his heart untroubled, at peace with himself, moving trustingly into the arms of his new lover" (58).
Near the end of the book, the Rivers plot culminates with a strange and funny anecdote about running into Larry Rivers himself at an exhibition of his work.
The novel also features an amusing collection of Amalfitano's "Notes for a Class in Contemporary Literature: The Role of the Poet." This takes the form of an almost Buzzfeed-ready list that consists of items like "Happiest: Garcia Lorca," "Banker of the soul: T.S. Eliot," and "Strangest wrinkles: Auden." Among other names cited in this rather crazy, irreverent list, one finds several important figures of the New York School – Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Diane Di Prima — getting top honors in some strange categories: "Biggest cock: Frank O'Hara," "Best movie companion: Elizabeth Bishop, Berrigan, Ted Hughes, José Emilio Pacheco," and under "Biggest nervous wreck: Diane Di Prima".
Signs of Bolaño's interest in poets of the New York School can be found elsewhere across the body of his work, as when Frank O'Hara pops up in a short story collected in Last Evenings on Earth in which two poets meet, share poems with one another, and discuss their influences: "We talked a while longer, about Sanguinetti and Frank O'Hara (I still like Frank O'Hara but I haven't read Sanguinetti for ages)." In the newly published collection of his complete poetry, The Unknown University, Bolaño's connection to O'Hara is considerably more substantial. He not only uses a passage by Frank O'Hara as an epigraph to a poem, but the (untitled) poem itself closely echoes O'Hara's work:
I listen to Barney Kessel
and smoke smoke smoke and drink tea
and try to make myself some toast
with butter and jam
but discover I have no bread and
it's already twelve thirty at night
and the only thing to eat
is a nearly full bottle
of chicken broth bought this
morning and five eggs and a little
muscatel and Barney Kessel plays
guitar stuck between a
rock and an open socket
I think I'll make some consommé and
then get into bed
to re-read The Invention of Morel
and think about a blond girl
until I fall asleep and
start dreaming.
(translated by Laura Healey)
With its "I do this, I do that" narrative conjuring up an ordinary but melancholy-tinged everyday moment, its references to listening to music, and jazz at that (Barney Kessel), its intimate and conversational tone, its lack of punctuation and its headlong rush, Bolaño's poem seems to intentionally evoke O'Hara's signature style.
In another poem in The Unknown University, Bolaño chronicles his experience of reading Ted Berrigan's 1963 book The Sonnets.
A Sonnet
16 years ago Ted Berrigan published
his Sonnets. Mario passed the book around
the leprosaria of Paris. Now Mario
is in Mexico and The Sonnets on
a bookshelf I built with my own
hands. I think I found the wood
near Montealegre nursing home
and I built the shelf with Lola. In
the winter of '78, in Barcelona, when
I still lived with Lola! And now it's been 16 years
since Ted Berrigan published his book
and maybe 17 or 18 since he wrote it
and some mornings, some afternoons,
lost in a local theatre I try reading it,
when the film ends and they turn on the light.
(translated by Laura Healey)
The poem portrays the speaker's formative encounter with Berrigan's ground-breaking collection of experimental sonnets, but also hints at the frustrations or limitations of his exposure to it: the "lost" speaker, who may also have recently lost his lover (Lola), merely tries to read the book. He seems to long for the energy he seems convinced Berrigan must have had so many years ago when he wrote those poems. The poem also underscores both the cosmopolitan nature of Bolaño's imagination and the international reach of the New York School of poets. Berrigan's book The Sonnets, like this sonnet itself, crosses time and space, speaking across 16 years, and sliding across boundaries and nationalities: written in New York, circulated around Paris by a Latin American poet who is now in Mexico, read by a young 26 year old Chilean poet in a movie theater in Barcelona.
Bolaño of course read voraciously, immersing himself fully in a wide range of 20th century avant-garde writing and art, but as the final pieces of his work appear in translation, it has become clearer than ever that he seems to have had a special connection to a poetry movement that sprouted from a place far from Santiago, Mexico City, Barcelona, and other key points in his own geography — the world of Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, Ted Berrigan, and other New York poets.
Poetry — especially the kind of poetry the New York School produced, and even more so, embodied, in its example and its ambivalent attitudes about community — seemed to exemplify Bolaño's guiding belief about art in general: that it always promises us shimmering possibilities and perpetual disappointment at the same time.
Andrew Epstein is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry.
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In the opening poem ("matters of great importance") of my collection, Solving the World's Problems, I ask a simple question: what's more important / writing a poem / or building a bridge…
At least, the question starts off simple enough, but then it continues to spiral out into giving thanks, stocking chairs, delivering chairs, managing systems, and so on. But there are times when I waste time worrying about which really is more important. There are times when I wonder, "What am I doing here?"
Here being writing poems and devoting a tremendous amount of time and energy to a poetry blog. After all, there's not a lot of money in writing poetry–even for a publisher like Writer's Digest Books. But there's more to measuring value than dollars and cents, isn't there?
Why Am I Saying Any of This?
Every so often, there's some kind of "death or uselessness of poetry" post or article that runs all viral on the Internet. So I've been meaning to write a post on why I think there's value in poetry for a long while, but it was still simmering in me until I received this message on Facebook from Aleathia Drehmer, a poetry advocate who lives in New York:
I just wanted to say thank you for everything you do with the PAD challenges. The one in November helped me get over the death of my cousin and brought me back to writing after a year of near silence. This challenge is helping me get over the death of my mother. She passed in January and this is her birth month.
I actually don't care if I ever get published again. Life has taken on a new meaning now and I honestly am getting back to the roots of writing when I was a little girl. Just writing because my heart says so, because it is a way I can communicate my little slice of the world with my dad and any friends that care to read.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me back something I had lost and thought I would not find again. Grief can be a great eraser sometimes. I'm just glad it hasn't erased me yet.
Have a great day.
Aleathia is not the first person to send me a message like this, and I know she won't be the last. But for me, this displays exactly what the value of poetry is, and it's something more important and primal than shelf space at a brick-and-mortar bookstore or an online sales ranking.
Poetry is something deeply human.
What Does Poetry Mean to My Life?
Anyone who's read this blog for a significant period of time knows that I'm not afraid to get personal, but let me get really personal. Poetry has helped me get into relationships, deal with break ups, absorb deaths, and other feelings. For instance, I was sexually abused over the course of two years as a child, and poetry helped me unbottle all those emotions and feelings that I had bottled up from that period of my life.
In college, I went so crazy on poetry that I burned out on it. In fact, I'd convinced myself that I was a horrible poet and that I should just focus on fiction, a genre in which I was actually winning some awards (and money). So I kinda wrote some poetry, but mostly I didn't. That part of me fell dormant, and I thought I'd never get it back.
Then, I separated from my wife and my uncle died, and I had these huge gaping holes in my soul. I tried running some of the emotions out of me, but what ultimately helped me conquer these developments was poetry. The act of writing poems helps me tap into parts of myself that often don't make sense until they're down on paper.
What Does Poetry Mean to YOU?
I've shared what poetry means to me. It's helped me deal with anger, frustration, heartbreak, headache, hopelessness, isolation, depression, and more. It's helped me be human. That's the true value of poetry as far as I'm concerned. Everything else is icing.
What does poetry mean to you?
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World's Problems. In addition to editing Poet's Market, he manages the Poetic Asides blog, writes a poetry column for Writer's Digest magazine, edits a free weekly WritersMarket.com newsletter, and more. He's married to poet Tammy Foster Brewer, who helps him keep track of their five little poets (four boys and one princess). He's given up trying to figure out which is more important between writing a poem and building a chair; it's really a chicken-egg argument, because both are necessary and valuable. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
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Learn how to get your poetry published with the latest edition of Poet's Market. It's filled with articles on the craft and business of poetry. Plus, it contains hundreds of listings for book publishers, online and print publications, contests, and more!
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By David Caplan
Hip hop has influenced a generation of poets coming to prominence, poets I call "The Inheritors of Hip Hop." Signaling how the music serves as a shared experience and inspiration, they mention performers and songs as well as anecdotes from the genre's development and the artists' lives, while epigraphs and titles quote songs. The influence of hip hop can be heard in the work of many poets including (but certainly not limited to): Kevin Coval, Erica Dawson, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Matthew Dickman, Major Jackson, Terrance Hayes, Dorothea Lasky, John Murillo, Eugene Ostashevsky, D.A. Powell, Roger Reeves, and Michael Robbins.
In no particular order, here are my five favorite hip hop references in poetry:
(1) Kevin Young, "Expecting"
To capture the experience of first hearing his child's heartbeat during a sonogram exam, Young develops a wildly inventive simile followed by metaphors borrowed from hip hop:
And there
it is: faint, an echo, faster and further
away than mother's, all beat box
and fuzzy feedback. You are like hearing
hip-hop for the first time–power
hijacked from the lamppost–all promise.
You couldn't sound better, break-
dancer, my favorite song bumping
from a passing car. You've snuck
into the club underage and stayed!
(2) Rowan Ricardo Phillips, "Mappa Mundi"
Describing his hometown of the Bronx, Phillips combines Wu Tang Clan's Raekwon's verse in "Triumph," "Aiyyo, that's amazing gun-in-your-mouth talk," and Samuel Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," "the redbreast sit and sing":
Whether red birds sit and sing from rooftops
Or rappers cypher deep into the night,
The gun-in-your-mouth talk of a ransomed
God, nature is a lapse in city life.
(3) Harryette Mullen, "Dim Lady"
Hip hop is nearly everywhere in Mullen's earlier collection, Muse and Drudge, but my single favorite reference in her work to hip hop appears in "Dim Lady," collected in Sleeping with the Dictionary. The prose poem rewrites and updates Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. In the place of Shakespeare's lines,
"I love to hear her speak, yet well I know / That music hath a far more pleasing sound,"
Mullen offers,
"I love to hear her rap, yet I'm aware that Muzak has a hipper beat."
(The poem's ending always makes me laugh, "And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief."
(4) A. Van Jordan, "R&B"
A subgenre of poems about hip hop criticizes the music. A rare exception to the ignorance such work typically show (see, for instance, Tony Hoagland's "Rap Music"), "R & B" offers a well-informed, thoughtful critique. "Listen long enough to the radio, and you'll think / maybe C. Dolores Tucker was right," the poem opens and an endnote reminds readers of Tucker's significant contributions to the black civil rights movement.
(5) Michael Cirelli, "Dead Ass"
"I am not afraid of dope lyrics," Michael Cirelli writes in "Dead Ass." Several poems in Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard retell moments from hip hop history. To describe teens grooving to the music, "Dead Ass" borrows from Oakland slang, "hyphy," meaning "crazy" in a good sense, "hyphy / music makes their bodies dip up and down / like oil drills." (My favorite line in the book, though, describes eighties pop, not hip hop, "We danced incestuously to Michael and Janet that night.")
Bonus Tracks
(6) Adrien Matejka, "Wheels of Steel"
"I got me two songs instead of eyes," the poem opens then swaggering quotes five songs in twenty-seven lines.
(7) Marcus Wicker, "Love Letter to Flavor Flav" tries to make sense of Public Enemy's most puzzling member:
How you've lived saying nothing
save the same words each day
is a kind of freedom or beauty.
Please, tell me I'm not lying to us.
David Caplan is Charles M. Weis Chair in English and Associate Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture. His previous books include Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form and the poetry collection In the World He Created According to His Will.
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Image credit: turntable spinning. Photo by Tengilorg, 2005. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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By Andrew Taylor
Whatever else we think of poets, we don't tend to see them as heroes.
There are exceptions, of course – Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon famously won the Military Cross, and some three hundred years earlier, Sir Philip Sidney was praised for his dash and gallantry at the Battle of Zutphen; then there's Keith Douglas from World War II, one of the few deserters ever to abandon his post to get into a battle, who was killed shortly after the D-Day invasion.
It's not a long list, and those on it performed their acts of heroism in, so to speak, their time off. They were heroes who happened to be poets as well. Poetry, by and large, is a solitary craft: it's not easy to perform acts of derring-do when you're hunched on your own over a desk. The greatest battle most poets fight is the unequal struggle against a blank sheet of paper.
But there's another sort of heroism that poets can achieve, in honour of their talent and their craft – the courage to stare death in the face, and to keep on writing, honestly and truthfully.
Vernon Scannell managed it. After months of illness, shuffling from room to room and from oxygen cylinder to oxygen cylinder, he gave up and took to his bed — often, in the sick and ailing, a sure sign that death is approaching. Instead, he started writing again, and produced Last Post, maybe the best volume of his life:
"There's something valedictory in the way
My books gaze down on me from where they stand
In disciplined disorder and display
The same goodwill that wellwishers on land
Convey to troops who sail away to where
Great danger waits …"
A couple of months later, he was dead.
And now there's Clive James. Poems like Sentenced to Life and Holding Court chart James's progress towards what he calls "dropping off the twig" with clear-eyed courage. There's sadness and regret, but not a shred of self-pity. Approaching death, he seems to say, brings its compensations:
"Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees."
The Daily Mirror, never far from the front of the pack in the race to find a crass and clumsy phrase, quotes James (inaccurately, as far as I can see) as saying that he has "lost his battle with cancer". Not so.
We all, as one of Shakespeare's less well known characters points out, owe God a death, and getting better from cancer can only ever put off the final reckoning. But facing it down, as Scannell did and as James is doing – sending back poems like dispatches from the last frontier any of us will ever cross – is the only battle we can win. Catching the tone of leaves as the world closes in is what a real poet does, and if it's not heroism, then I don't know what is.
This article originally appeared on andrewtaylor.uk.net.
Andrew Taylor is the author of ten books, including Walking Wounded: The Life and Poetry of Vernon Scanell, biographies of the Arabian traveller Charles Doughty and the 16th Century cartographer Gerard Mercator, as well as books on language, literature, poetry and, history. He studied English Literature at Oxford University and worked as a Fleet Street and BBC television journalist in London and the Middle East before returning to Britain in the 1990s to concentrate on his writing career.
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First off, the final results are not yet finalized for all the days. That's my fault. While I secured guest judges, I alone took on the burden of whittling down each day's poems to a short list. Next year, I plan to recruit a team of readers to help with that narrowing.
That said, I do have some final results to share and will update as the rest of the results are returned. I'm going to hold off on sharing Top 10 lists for days that still don't have a winner–since I want the guest judging to be completely blind.
Here are the April PAD Challenge results for each day:
The winner is highlighted; the top 10 is in no particular order; an asterisk (*) denotes a poem that "almost" won. If you notice any errors (including your byline), please send me an e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.com to get it corrected as soon as possible.
Day 1:
Prompt: Beginnings and/or Endings Poem
Guest Judge: Traci Brimhall
"cathedra," by Barton Smock
"Learning Italian," by emmaisanOwl
"When your domesticated coyote," by Lara Eckener
"Movement Through Spacetime," by Sara Doyle
"Taking My Time," by Cati Porter
"I cannot begin to tell you," by Taylor Mali
"The Truth Itself Takes Care to Make Eyes," by LGordon
"In Diminuendo," by Richard Fenwick
"Restoring Beauty," by James Von Hendy
"Thorn Bones," by Taylor Graham
Day 2:
Prompt: Voyage Poem
Guest Judge: Neil Aitken
"sedoka," by Stewart C Baker
"Canada Geese," by TheFlawlessWord
"Riding the ATV to the Mailbox in Early Spring," by Kit Cooley
"Midnight Voyage," by Margie Fuston
"as if the windshield wipers," by alotus_poetry
"Progress Takes Its Own Voyage," by Barb Peters
"Georgia O'Keefe Hitches a Ride to Abiquiu," by susanjer
"Here I Am Holding," by iris dunkle
"The Journey," by ehorowitz
"Between Neverland and Oz," by Walt Wojtanik
Day 3:
Prompt: Message Poem
Guest Judge: Shaindel Beers
"Belle Boyd, Confederate spy, imagines a letter from her Shadow Sister, by Kathryn Stripling Byer
"Message," by Eleanore D. Trupkiewicz
"Wish You Were Here," by shethra77
"Large Puddle in the Street…," by Hannah Gosselin
"The Post," by Sara Doyle
"for violet," by brandon speck
"Sticky Note," by James Brush
"Tell Me Again How Family Is So Important," by Kelly Ramsdell Fineman
"When Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," by Kimiko Martinez
"Written in the Wind," by Emma Hine
Day 4:
Prompt: "Since (blank)" Poem
Guest Judge: Vince Gotera
"Since I Am Taking a Break From Facebook," by k weber
"Since October," by Richard Fenwick*
"since you left," by drwasy
"since the last time i heard your voice," by Fatima Hirsi
"Since I Gave Myself Permission," by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider
"Since the pear I for days let ripen," by Genevieve Fitzgerald
"Since you split my lip," by PKP
"Since My Poems Broke Up With Me," by Jacqueline Hallenbeck
"Since the Last Snow," by Bruce Niedt
"Since Fukushima," by Tracy Davidson
Day 5:
Prompt: Discover Something Poem
Guest Judge: Patricia Fargnoli
"Hubris," by Sharon Fagan McDermott
"Discovery," by Carol J Carpenter
"Xox," by hohlwein
"The End of Things Before They Begin," by David Walker
"Divinum Mysterium," by Jane Shlensky
"An entomologist after an apocalypse," by amaranthe
"Attempt #4, Saturday morning," by Taylor Emily Copeland
"Agate Tides," by Mokosh28
"Found Alive (Berlin 1945)," by dianemdavis
"Discovery in the Woods," by Bucky Ignatius
Day 6:
Prompt: Night Poem
Guest Judge: Andrew Hudgins
"how to live in the country dark," by Barton Smock
"Summer Night," by mimzy13
"523.4," by ina
"We Are Brighter in the Dark," by Lydia Flores
"Night," by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider
"Of the Night," by Mark Windham
"Sea Monkeys Have an Expiration Date," by iris dunkle
"Moon Monologue," by David Walker
"Night of the Sea Monkeys," by Taylor Graham
"Good Night," by William Preston
Day 7:
Prompt: Self-Portrait Poem
Guest Judge: January Gill O'Neil
"Self-Portrait as the State of Minnesota," by susanjer
"A Look Inside," by Scott Jacobson
"In the Louvre with Rembrandt's Selfie," by Margie Fuston
"Self-Portrait," by Linda G Hatton
"My eyes are sunflowers," by P.A. Beyer
"Self-Portrait," by Cameron Steele
"April Self Portrait," by Eileen Moeller
"Self Portrait," by Roderick Bates
"51," by Brian Slusher
"I Am a Crazy Quilt," by Linda Voit
Day 8:
Prompt: Violent and/or Peaceful Poem
Guest Judge: Tom C. Hunley
"A Taste for Pain," by Yerma Skyflower
"To the Woman Who Called at 7:15 AM to Break Up With Her Man," by pamelaraw
"The Threat of Butterflies," by Mokosh28
"The Prisoner's Dilemma," by P.A. Beyer
"Broken," by iris dunkle
"Under A Box of Matches," by flood
"My Father Kicked Dogs," by Courtney O'Banion Smith
"This time, he didn't make it home," by Kendall A. Bell
"Unreported," by Taylor Emily Copeland
"Papers on Top of More Papers," by Bruce Niedt
Day 9:
Prompt: Shelter Poem
Guest Judge: Kelli Russell Agodon
"Shelter," by Cameron Steele
"Home Before the Tornado Hits," by drwasy*
"Ocean's Voice," by LCaramanna
"The Niche," by Linda Hatton
"Shelter," by Roderick Bates
"Surviving the Storm," by cam45237
"Thin Shelters," by carolecole66
"Snow Globe," by beale.alexis
"Sonnet for the Family Living in Their Car," by C. Lynn Shaffer
"House," by donaldillich
Day 10:
Prompt: Future Poem
Guest Judge: Nate Pritts
"What Comes," by alana sherman
"Intrada," by Khara House
"To shame the orphan," by J. Lynn Sheridan
"An Affair in Chicago," by hwerther
"Uneasy Laughter After Dessert," by Linda Voit
"Futuro," by Patrick J. Walsh
"Woman Hollering Creek," by Kathryn Stripling Byer
"kenning," by Barton Smock
"The Future Without Me," by C. Lynn Shaffer
"An Unfinished Sentence," by AleathiaD
Day 11:
Prompt: Make Statement Title of Poem
Guest Judge: Joseph Mills
Results to come.
Day 12:
Prompt: City Poem
Guest Judge: Victoria Chang
Results to come.
Day 13:
Prompt: Animal Poem
Guest Judge: Daniel Nester
Results to come.
Day 14:
Prompt: "If I Were (blank)" Poem
Guest Judge: Jericho Brown
Results to come.
Day 15:
Prompt: Love and/or Anti-Love Poem
Guest Judge: Barbara Hamby
Results to come.
Use the best all-around print publication on the planet for publishing your poetry, the 2014 Poet's Market, edited by Robert Lee Brewer. This annual book includes hundreds of listings for book publishers, magazines, contests, and more! Plus, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry, poet interviews, poetic forms explained, and new poems!
At the moment, this book can be had for more than 70% off retail in the Writer's Digest Shop for only $7.99!
Day 16:
Prompt: Elegy Poem
Guest Judge: Bob Hicok
Results to come.
Day 17:
Prompt: Pop Culture Poem
Guest Judge: Mary Biddinger
Results to come.
Day 18:
Prompt: Weather Poem
Guest Judge: Nin Andrews
Results to come.
Day 19:
Prompt: Pick Color, Make Title of Poem
Guest Judge: Thomas Lux
"Aubergine," by Sara Doyle
"Violet," by Julie Germain
"Orange," by Brian Slusher
"Prussian Blue," by Joanne M. Clarkson
"Vermilion," by Jerry Walraven
"White," by G. Smith
"Yellow," by susanjer
"Burnt Umber," by Eibhlin
"Mandarin Orange," by pamela raw
"Gray Matter," by James Von Hendy
Day 20:
Prompt: Family Poem
Guest Judge: Scott Owens
Results to come.
Day 21:
Prompt: Back to Basics Poem
Guest Judge: Deborah Ager
Results to come.
Day 22:
Prompt: Optimistic and/or Pessimistic Poem
Guest Judge: Lawrence Schimel
Results to come.
Day 23:
Prompt: Location Poem
Guest Judge: Erika Meitner
Results to come.
Day 24:
Prompt: "Tell It to the (blank)" Poem
Guest Judge: Kristina Marie Darling
Results to come.
Day 25:
Prompt: The Last Straw Poem
Guest Judge: Erica Wright
Results to come.
Day 26:
Prompt: Water Poem
Guest Judge: Amy King
"Fair Enough," by k weber
"Ice," by uneven steven*
"Housewife," by Amy
"Seasick," by Dana A. Campbell
"Swamp Water," by Daniel Roessler
"Thirst," by De Jackson
"Memento Mori," by carolecole66
"Water," by Daniel Paicopulos
"One Hydrogen, Two Oxygen," by Phil Boiarski
"Dirty laundry needs to soak," by Kimmy Sophia
Day 27:
Prompt: Monster Poem
Guest Judge: Jeannine Hall Gailey
Results to come.
Day 28:
Prompt: Settled Poem
Guest Judge: Sandra Beasley
Results to come.
Day 29:
Prompt: Realist and/or Magical Poem
Guest Judge: Adam Fitzgerald
Results to come.
Day 30:
Prompt: Calling It a Day Poem
Guest Judge: Jillian Weise
Results to come.
Whew! I know the results are still coming in, but the poets who've made those top 10 lists should be extremely happy with their work. I read through more than 21,000 comments and 5,600 pages of poems and encouragement.
Only 300 of those made the top 10 lists–or less than 1.4%. In other words, around 1 poem for every 100 comments. That's crazy!
To be named winner, of course, is barely one-tenth of one percent.
In other words, people who made the lists above should be happy-happy-happy. Poets who didn't make the lists should still feel happy as well. Beyond the subjectivity of the judges (especially me), there's just the sheer numbers.
Many great poems made it past the first cut only to be trimmed before the top 10 lists were finalized. And well, the goal of this challenge isn't making a list or being named winner: It's to create 30 new poems!
Congratulations to everyone who participated and worked toward the goal of creating new poems!
As many poets who've participated in the April PAD Challenge in the past know, I like to hand out a few extra awards, including the Poet Laureate of the Poetic Asides blog. So let's start with that…
This year's Poetic Asides Poet Laureate is the first ever repeat laureate. That's right, William Preston has been named to his second consecutive term as the Poetic Asides Poet Laureate. He's not only a wonderful poet, but he's a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in April and throughout the year. In fact, he was still commenting on April poems well into May after the dust had settled on the challenge.
Congratulations, William!
I want to award a Top April Poet award (separate of the Poet Laureate honor), but there are a few that seem to be leading the pack. So I'm going to wait for the final results to all make it in before naming one (or maybe even a tie).
Look for updates over the next couple weeks, and I'll be sure to publish a notification post when everything is set in stone.
Poems, Prompts & Room to Add Your Own for the 2014 April PAD Challenge!
Words Dance Publishing is offering 20% off pre-orders for the Poem Your Heart Out anthology until August 1st! If you'd like to learn a bit more about our vision for the book, when it will be published, among other details.
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer's Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World's Problems. Every day, he was amazed at the talent, creativity, and energy poets brought to the table in April. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
Find More Poetic Goodies Here:
- Contemplating Nature's Changing Role in Poetry.
- Jason Tandon: Poet Interview.
- WD Poetic Form Challenge: Golden Shovel.
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Blog: Jrpoulter's Weblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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How to Create a Website in 3 Steps (with 10 thumbs). This is good sense advice succinctly put from Jo Ann Carson. NOTE – you do not have to buy. Word Press, Yola, Weebly and Wix all provide excellent 'free' – yes, that's what I said, 'FREE' site templates, easy to assemble [if I can, anyone can] with lots of whizz-bang features!
Blog: Jrpoulter's Weblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: artists, children's writers, collaborations, illustrators, Musings A Mosaic, poets, writers, Writing, anthologies, Apocalypse for Kiddies, Add a tag
1. CHILDREN'S ANTHOLOGY – Collaboration opportunity for writers and illustrators
An opportunity for children's writers and illustrators to collaborate in an anthology of humorous stories has been created by bloggist Lyn Midnight [Violeta Nedkova]
2. POETRY ANTHOLOGY, Illustrated
Poets Corner is calling for submissions from poets and interest from artists for an anthology of illustrated verse to be called "Musings; A Mosaic".
from poets around the world !
"Poets Corner" is coming up with an anthology of English original poems complemented with illustrative sketches, real soon.
Title of the Book:
Musings : A Mosaic
About the Book:
Out of the entire submission best 45-50 poem will be selected and each one of them will be illustrated with a sketch by an artist .
Theme :
Format :
Submission Date :
April-13-2012 – April-20-2012
Send to :
firstname.lastname@example.com (Subject of the mail should be MUSINGS-YOUR NAME, Poems should be in the body of email as no attachment will be entertained)
Editor (Poetry) :
Dr.Madhumita Ghosh
Kavitha Rani
Editor (Art) :
Wajid Khan
Managing Editor:
Yaseen Anwer
Fouqia Wajid
Neha Srivastava
Please send ONE poem, of not more than 25 lines, and a brief note on the theme of the poem for the benefit of the artist. Please note that submission does not guarantee publication as the best 45-50 will be selected.
Blog: PS4K - Poems and Stories 4 Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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To Any Reader - Robert Louis Stevenson. Click READ MORE. As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear, he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.
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JacketFlap tags: Nuyorican, Latino Poetry, Puerto Rican, Bilingual Poetry, academia, poets, Latina authors, nationalism, LGBT, Latina, Add a tag
Lisa Alvarado - Interview with Luz Maria Umpierre
Luz Maria Umpierre has wrought a legacy, a challenge, a history, a love letter, a sinuous and sentient record of personal identity, revealing the crosshatched scars and singing victories of a warrior, the yielding body and the body politic in
"I'm still standing- 30 Years of Poetry -available through her website http://luzmaumpierre.com
"Luz Maria Umpierre is, quite simply, one of my heroes in a postmodern world that insists on ridding us of icons and pedestals in an attempt to level all people and institutions. Paradoxically, some institutions seem to merit such debasement when they never miss an opportunity to hound the historically marginalized and alternative voices out of the academy." Dr.Eric Pennington (Seton Hall)
She is an established scholar in the fields of Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Latina/o Studies, Poetry, and Gender Studies, with multiple publications in leading journals, including Hispania, Latin American Theatre Review, Revista do Estudios Hispánicos, Bilingual Review, Chasqui, Explicación do Textos Literarios, Chicana/Latina Studies and The Americas Review. Co-founder of the journal, Third Woman. Also published in internet journals, including La Acera, Diálogo Digital, Cruce and La Bloga.
Author of two books of literary criticism, ten collections of bilingual poetry, numerous book chapters and over 50 articles of literary criticism on Latin American scholars and writers from several generations, including a seminal article on writers and migration published in MELUS in 2002 and currently included in an anthology of essays in honor of Isabel Allende.
Her collected works and personal papers currently housed at De Paul University, Latina rare book collection housed at Bryn Mawr College.
She is recognized internationally as an authority on the interdisciplinary study of Literature, the Social Sciences, History and Language, especially regarding race, culture, gender identity and ethnicity. Complete list of publications available on request.
What do you believe is the purpose of poetry?
The purpose of poetry is to liberate the spirit, our soul, so that it has a concrete expression that is palpable. And as Julia Alvarez said in one of my favorite poems of all times, to be able to say "Whoever reads this poem, touches a woman." I am hoping that I am quoting her correctly because my copy of her book is at my rare book collection at Bryn Mawr. I can and will accept to be corrected in my quote but not in my idea. LOL
What do you consider to be "Latino/a" themes?
All themes are Latina themes. It is the vision or the approach we take as Latinas what gives them a sabor or authenticity that is ours. For example, many years ago I took Vanguardista poetry which was highly non-politicized and turned it into political poetry. From there, for example, emerged my Poemas Concretistas.
To say that there are Latina themes is to reduce us. Granted there are subject matters such as identity that we explore more than other groups of writers but I would not say that there are Latina themes and non Latina themes. All themes are human themes and that is overall the most important theme to me.
Describe the intersection of sexual identity and culture as it lives in your writing?
I learned from Audre Lorde years and years ago that I cannot be asked to divide my Self into separate pieces of identity and ignore some in favor of others. That to me would be mutilation. I refuse to mutilate my rich identity for the sake of pleasing the eye of a beholder or for an aesthetics of a political correctdness of beauty. Thus all aspects of my identity and culture live in harmony in my works.
What would you say to critics of your lesbian-identified work?
That they get a life and start living in the 21st. century. I never forced them to leave their heterosexist and nationalist macho agenda views through meanness, non inclusion or actual shuning. On the contrary, I questioned them publicly and made my dissenting opinions known to them. I did not go back stabbing them, making calls to bad mouth them into being denied jobs, I did not refuse to teach them in my classes. To the contrary, I included them because I wanted to have an open dialogue about difference. But "I'm Still Standing" as the only dancer on that inclusion floor because some of these people are so petty that they refuse to engage me in public and face to face or, as Lorraine Sutton marvelously said in one of her poems: "to cunt-front" me.
How has academia enhanced/impinged upon your creative process?
They have always wanted to deny me a claim to my poetry as an academic achievement. However, I have not allowed them to infringe on my freedom to write. I have used my academic struggles precisely to question antics and tactics in academia and make fun, mock and criticize their elitism and snobbery.
Who are some authors who move you and why?
Adrienne Rich, her book The Dream of A Common Language has been my Bible since the 1980s. Nemir Matos Cintron has poems in her collections A través del aire y del fuego pero no del cristal and in Aliens in NYC that have made me cry time and time again because of her portrayal of genuine human identity angst. I recently re/read a poem by Ana Castillo entitled: "I Ask The Impossible" and I am afraid that I ruined the Thai Lemon Tilapia dish that I was eating while reading it because I began to cry uncontrollably. I feel that we have all have wanted to be loved that way and her poem is a voicing of a human need that I had never read exposed in poetry. Lorde also moved me with some of her poems on women. Marge Piercy's book The Moon is Always Female has some of my favorite poems of all times because of her delving into what constitutes to be a strong woman. Julia de Burgos, of course she is part of our collective unconscious as Puerto Ricans. The theme of the river in her poetry and the sea attracts me.
What are some thoughts you would share with newer poetas/poetisas/Nuyorican poets?
To remember that many people paved a path for them and they should be honored, not bullied, harassed, shunned and most importantly, not disrespected.
I think Puerto Rican poets of the younger generation have no respect towards their elders, their sages, those who broke a path for them now to enjoy. They are not like other Latina groups. I am marveled by the respect of Mexican Americans towards their wiser older Latinas/Latinos something that is totally lacking among young poets be they Puerto Rican or Nuyorican.
I would like to let them know that one day they will inevitably be older and if they do not change their ways and attitudes, they too will be the subject of disrespect.
What sustains your creative and spiritual longevity?
The power to love, to find love, to see everything with fresh eyes, to be able to marvel at beauty and to be passionate about living. But also, as the poem says: "To be of use."
Thank you so much!
Gracias a Lisa y La Bloga por darme una manera de llegar al mundo amigo de California.
Phebe Karen Beiser: As a poet, woman, & lesbian, I am honored by all your contributions to the world. Brava!
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Blog: An Awfully Big Blog Adventure (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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|Robert Herrick
|Robert Bulwer Lytton
Fascinating blog, but my place is in Bogie Street! Oh dear!
We have a Coldharbour Lane, and Blowhorn Street, Patten Alley (the path by the church which would have been so muddy the women needed wooden 'pattens' on their feet to get through it)
But Treacle Bolley - who knows the story behind that!
What a lovely place to live. Sadly, Ackroyd Road isn't very inspirational!
I live on Nutters Close, so I'm sayaing nothing!
I live on Park Street, which I used to think was an ordinary sort of name until I found out that it marks the boundary of the park that once belonged to our local medieval manor house (now a hotel, but mentioned in the Domesday Book).
I was brought up in an area in Rugby called Shakespeare Gardens and lived in Tennyson Ave, there were all famous names for roads - Rupert Brook Rd, Southey Rd, Boswell Rd, Wordsworth Rd and Macaulay Rd, all poets and writers, no wonder I've written the words for some of my bands' songs over the years ( it must be catching) .Rob Tysall.
Thank you for your comments, I love Bogie Street and Nutters Close!
And isn't your erotic pseudonym meant to be the name of your road combined with your first pet...?
Fun post! I live at Gryms Dyke - referring to the nearby ancient Grims Ditch which once formed a boundary between tribes ... it stretches for miles and miles, although I've only walked along short bits ...
What a fascinating post, Ann. I live in Great Meadow, which I guess speaks for itself and in Worcester City Centre we have Friar Street, The Tithings and Bread Street. Not as inspirational as your street names but I bet there's some fascinating history behind them.
Thanks everyone for all the comments about the places where you live, so interesting. And Katherine, that makes my erotic pseudonym Toby Lytton. I quite like that!
Wow, this is stunning. Envision each of the reading through and also creating you could do this... Cold in winter however.
Blog: Guide to Literary Agents (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Okay, today is the final day of the poeming part of this challenge. Beginning tomorrow (if not already), you'll begin the process of revising and assembling a 10-20 page poetry chapbook manuscript. Click here to review the guidelines.
Today's prompt comes from Violet Nesdoly.
Here's Violet's prompt: Write a milk poem. This could be about the moo-juice kind of milk. Or it could explore milk metaphorically, as in the expression "milk of human kindness." Of course it could also be about the act of milking something. And no, it doesn't have to be nourishing.
Robert's attempt at a Milk Poem:
"The Final Poem"
The final prompt, the final day,
and here I am milking the situation
as if tomorrow won't come, as if
it won't bring more prompts, more
poems, more lines to break.
Thank you, Violet, for the great prompt! Click here to learn more about Violet.
Click here to share your poem on the WD Forum.
Follow me on Twitter @robertleebrewer
Write 21st Century Fiction! Click here to learn how.Add a Comment
Blog: Guide to Literary Agents (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Today's prompt comes from Bonita Jones Knott, a poet I met earlier this year in Colorado at a writing retreat.
Here's Bonita's prompt: Write a birth poem. Write a poem on the experience of giving birth or witnessing birth, or feeling reborn in anyway.
Robert's attempt at a Birth Poem:
"Good morning"
Every morning, I find myself next to you
or thinking of how I want to find myself
next to you. Every morning, like a blessing,
I'm reborn into my love for you, knowing
there's no one I'd rather find myself next
to in the morning and no one I'd rather
want to find myself next to in the morning.
Every morning, like magic, like hocus
pocus, I want to be the rabbit in your
magician's hat, the one you grab by
the ears to hold in front of the audience,
or, like a science experiment, I want
to be your hypothesis, the one you
constantly test to draw your conclusion.
Thank you, Bonita, for giving birth to this prompt! Click here to learn more about Bonita.
Click here to share your poems on the WD Forum.
Follow me on Twitter @robertleebrewer
Brainstorm and Develop Awesome Story Ideas!Add a Comment
Blog: Crazy Quilts (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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I'm quilting it all together today with Jimmy Santiago Baca. He's here on Male Monday this first Monday in April: Poetry month. From his biography:
Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.
Welcome April, month of poetry!
from Healing Earthquakes (1989)
If it does not feed the fire
of your creativity, then leave it.
If people and things do not
inspire your heart to dream,
then leave them.
If you are not crazily in love
and making a stupid fool of yourself,
then stop closer to the edge
of your heart and climb
where you've been forbidden to go.
Debts, accusations, assaults by enemies
mean nothing,
go where the fire feeds you.
Turn your attention to the magic of whores,
grief, addicts and drunks, until you stumble upon
that shining halo surrounding your heart
that will allow you to violate every fear happily,
be where you're not supposed to be,
the love of an angel who's caught your blood on fire
again, who's gulped all of you in one breath
to mix in her soul, to explode your brooding
and again, your words rush from the stones
like a river coursing down
from some motherly mountain source,
and if your life doesn't spill forth
unabashedly, recklessly, randomly
pushing in wonder at life,
then change, leave, quit, silence the idle chatter
and do away with useless acquaintances
who have forgotten how to dream,
bitch rudely in your dark mood at the mediocrity
of scholars who meddle in whimsy for academic trifles–
let you be their object of scorn,
let you be their object of mockery,
let you be their chilling symbol
of what they never had the courage to do, to complete, to follow,
let you be the flaming faith that makes them shield their eyes
as you burn from all sides,
taking a harmless topic and making of it a burning galaxy
or shooting stars in the dark of their souls,
illuminating your sadness, your aching joy for life,
your famished insistence for God and all that is creative
to attend you as a witness to your struggle,
let the useless banter and quick pleasures
belong to others, the merchants, computer analysts
and government workers;
you haven't been afraid
of rapture among thieves
bloody duels in drunken brawls,
denying yourself
the essence of your soul work
as poems rusted while you scratched
at your heart to see if it was a diamond
and not cheap pane of glass,
now, then, after returning form one more poet's journey
in the heart of the bear, the teeth of the wolf,
the legs of the wild horse,
sense what your experience tells you,
your ears ringing with deception and lies and foul tastes,
now that your memory is riddled with blank loss,
tyrants who wielded their boastful threats
to the sleeping dogs and old trees in the yards,
now that you've returned form men and women
who've abandoned their dreams and sit around
like corpses in the grave moldering with regret,
steady your heart now, my friend, with fortitude
long-lasting enduring hope, and hail the early dawn
like a ship off coast that's come for you,
spent and ragged and beggared,
if what you do and how you live does not feed the fire
in your heart and blossom into poems,
leave, quit, do not turn back,
move fast away from that which would mold your gift,
break it, disrespect it, kill it.
Guard it, nurture it, take your full-flung honorable
heart and plunge it into the fire
into the stars, into the trees, into the hearts of others
sorrow and love and restore the dream
by writing of its again-discovered wild beauty.
Filed under: male monday, poets Tagged: Jimmy Santiago Baca, Male Monday, poetry month
Thanks for reminding me to read Baca. My teachers loved him when I was in school.
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Blog: Teaching Authors (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Progressive Poem, poetry prompt, poem a day challenge, children's poems, National Poetry Month, April Halprin Wayland, poets, writing poetry, writing exercise, Add a tag
Howdy Campers!
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When I got the line by Denise Mortensen, it's such a great line, I thought I should just write THE END. Then I could talk about how a poet needs to know when to quit and when a good line's a good ending. That would be funny. If only I had the courage!
But I don't. So off we go!
Here is the list of the poets who each contributed a line (in this space, some appear to be a line and then some, but they are all really one line each), and below their names is the (yikes!) finished poem. Take a bow, poets!
2 Joy Acey
3 Matt Forrest Esenwine
4 Jone MacCulloch
5 Doraine Bennett
6 Gayle Krause
7 Janet Fagal
8 Julie Larios
9 Carrie Finison
10 Linda Baie
11 Margaret Simon
12 Linda Kulp
13 Catherine Johnson
14 Heidi Mordhorst
15 Mary Lee Hahn
16 Liz Steinglass
17 Renee LaTulippe
18 Penny Klostermann
19 Irene Latham
20 Buffy Silverman
21 Tabatha Yeatts
22 Laura Shovan
23 Joanna Marple
24 Katya Czaja
25 Diane Mayr
26 Robyn Hood Black
27 Ruth Hersey
28 Laura Purdie Salas
29 Denise Mortensen
30 April Halprin Wayland
by Thirty Poets on a mission in the Kidlitosphere...see list above
the words become music and
the rhythm that you're rapping gets your fingers tapping, too.
Your pen starts dancing across the page
a private pirouette, a solitary samba until
smiling, you're beguiling as your love comes shining through.
of the words, one dancer to another, saying
Listen, that's our cue! Mind your meter. Find your rhyme.
Ignore the trepidation while you jitterbug and jive.
Arm in arm, toe to toe, words begin to wiggle and flow
as your heart starts singing let your mind keep swinging
from life's trapeze, like a clown on the breeze.
Swinging upside down, throw and catch new sounds–
Take a risk, try a trick; break a sweat: safety net?
Don't check! You're soaring and exploring,
dangle high, blood rush; spiral down, crowd hush–
limb-by-line-by-limb envision, pyramidic penned precision.
And if you should topple, if you should flop
if your meter takes a beating; your rhyme runs out of steam—
know this tumbling and fumbling is all part of the act,
so get up with a flourish. Your pencil's still intact.
Snap those synapses! Feel the pulsing through your pen
Commit, measure by measure, to the coda's cadence.
You've got them now--in the palm of your hand!
Finger by finger you're reeling them in—
Big Top throng refrains from cheering, strains to hear the poem nearing…
Inky paws, uncaged, claw straw and sawdust
Until… CRACK! You're in the center ring, mind unleashed, your words take wing--
they circle, soar, then light in the lap of an open-mouthed child; the crowd goes wild.
* * * * * * *
* Barnum's circus was originally called "P.T. Barnum's Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome," which is pretty much what our poem is. ("Greatest Show on Earth" was added later...that's us, too!)
Posted by April Halprin Wayland
What a fabulous finale, April! And what a celebration.
Love that it ends in the lap of a child (subconscious connection to your doggy drafts?!?!)!!
Huzzah! What fun to have been a part of this creation!
Super ending! What a fun event this has been.
TA-DAAAAAH! I admit I rather loved your idea of writing THE END (ha!), but I'm so glad you didn't. This is the perfect ending, words twirling to a child, which is what we're here for.
THE CROWD GOES WILD! Yay, us!
Nice! Let's do it again next year!
Wow, we went from music and dancing to singing and dreaming to swinging and tumbling...the crowd does, indeed, go wild! Well done!
April, I love it!!! In the lap of a child, exactly where we want it to be. Love that wordy title too. Thank you THANK YOU, everyone who made this year so much fun. xo
What can I say? the crowd goes wild is a wonderful way to go out!
Bravo! Take a bow! With all of the action centered around the writer, it all comes to a fitting end in the lap of a child, which is just perfect! I can hear the blogosphere clapping!
I think at the end of a beautiful act, I should say 'encore', yet you've ended the poem so lovingly, April, right where it should be, with a child. Class act!
This poem came together so wonderfully well all along the way. Perfect ending, April!
Yes, Bravo, April! The perfect ending for an over-the-(big)-top creation, chronicling both secret musings and spectacle, is with a child reader. clap*clap*clap
Like others, I love that it ends in a child's lap, too. Great ending to a terrific poem! Congratulations to all the participants.
Wonderful ending, April! (I would not have wanted that knee-buckling responsibility.) Brava!
Yay for our whole pack--it truely takes a village!
It's already been said, but I'll say it again, the perfect ending in the lap of the child with the crowd going wild.
The crowd goes wild for your ending, April. Well done! I laughed at your impulse to write the end--just let those awesome words wing away. That would have been grand, but I'm glad you brought them to a child's lap.
Excellent! The ending couldn't be more perfect. Very nicely done!
Yay for us! Love the title. Let's twirl some words together again sometime. It's been fun!
Bravo! What fun. xoA
Best poem title ever!
STOMP STOMP CLAP! STOMP STOMP CLAP! Leave the whole show in a little kid's lap!
Somehow it all came together, and anchorwoman April did the heavy lifting. Thanks, Irene, for instigating, and to all who played along. Poetry improv indeed.
I'm sure you all felt this with each line: all I can say is, WHEW! ("It's just a POEM,Honey...")
Felt like I was in the March Madness Poetry Tournament all over again...
I loved watching this unfold! Couldn't believe how people could make the poem hang together, day after day, not only with meaning, but with meter. Like so many others, I love your ending. Also absolutely love the title! Perfect!
What a satisfying ending, April! And what an amazing team effort. It's a wonder I don't have a tummy ache from all the cotton candy, but what an awesome month at the circus!
This could not have been a better ending! I love it, and I loved this month. Thank you, poetry friends. xo, a.
I went over to Teaching Author's to read today's post and couldn't resist another run through the Progressive Poem. I saw that my comment didn't come through on the 30th! Weird! Anyway, I will just say again how perfectly you ended our poem I just love your line! In fact, I'm going wild over it!
Thank you, Penny and everyone for your comments! Now that Poetry Month is over and we're winding down, we can all actually read more poetry!
Blog: WORDS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: writing for children, food fight, fun poetry, Good night moon, Goodnight Moon, kids books, Margaret Wise Brown, mess, middle age, parodies, parodies of Good night moon, parody, parody of Goodnight Moon, picture book, poem, poems, poetry, poets, Add a tag
In the mess we call home, there was an iphone and a starbucks cup and a beanbag with a tired bloodhound pup and there was one teen girl, with wavy curls and two preteens making scenes and a daddy on the computer, a champion "tooter' and a fight with food – what manners.. how rude! […]
Thanks for opening up your home to us. It was real and humorous too. It was also comforting to see that you made time for prayer. I enjoyed it and I think Margaret Wise Brown would have too.
Love it! I hope you slept we'll sweetheart and I love you!
I'm offended.
heehee! Thank you, Mama. I love you, too!
Love you, Pookie Bear!
Thank you, Linda!
cute and very visual!
You always make me smile! And it's from ear to ear today! Love you!
Blog: WORDS (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: writing for children, autumn, ballet, dancing, fall, free verse, free verse autumn poetry, free2rhymeornot, freeverse, freeverse poetry, micropoetry, poems, poetry, poets, recital, winter, Add a tag
RECITAL Lightning strikes a chord and Autumn tap dances on a floor of encrusted gold and ruby… while Thunder claps in appreciation — and Winter waits in the wings. Filed under: writing for children Tagged: autumn, ballet, dancing, fall, free verse, free verse autumn poetry, free2rhymeornot, freeverse, freeverse poetry, micropoetry, poems, poetry, poets, recital, […]
Lovely! I needed an afternoon recital without having to get dressed up! Thank you!
so glad you liked it! I had to edit it a bit… had to many 'while' words in there!
Love these!!
Thank you, Carol!
Lovely, but light-hearted. I love this time of year and this poem makes me think you do, too.
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