Bob & Margery's Poetry Blog

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, traditionally marks the end of the summer school holidays in the United States — and it’s early this year, the very first day of the month. But summer’s end doesn’t really arrive until the equinox on the 22nd, so we’ve added a few more poems to our Poems for Summer collection for your lingering late-summer pleasure...

We’re beginning a new seasonal anthology of Autumn Poems, to be posted on the equinox, and we invite you to submit your own poems or suggest your favorite classics in the next three weeks. (Please take note of one caution: the text box on our submission page doesn’t convey your format accurately when you type a poem into it — so we ask you to use slashes (“/”) to indicate line breaks and double slashes (“//”) to indicate stanzas.)

Poets are not only “the first responders of the imagination when a community is faced with catastrophic events” — they are the artists who put collective experience into words from the longer perspective of years later, shaping the communal memory. That is what is happening in New Orleans now, three years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina:

from The Times-Picayune (New Orleans):
“Three years later, poems are still putting the impact of Hurricane Katrina into words,” by Susan Larson
“Poets writing in response to Hurricane Katrina and the flood in New Orleans have risen to that terrible muse in virtually every way imaginable — some with humor, most with deep seriousness, all with a sense of responsibility. From the 2006 benefit anthology Hurricane Blues, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swartwout, to impassioned small-press efforts such as Katrina-Ku, published by the New Orleans Haiku Society in 2006, to Dave Brinks’ Caveat Onus, an intricate, three-part epic published over several months in 2006, the waves of poetry are still hitting this shore.”

Book editor Susan Larson’s survey of Katrina-inspired poetry also covers Andrei Codrescu’s new book from Coffee House Press, Jealous Witness, which comes with a CD of performances based on his Katrina poems by the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars, as well as Gabriel Gomez’ Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize-winning The Outer Bands (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008) — a very fine reading/listening list.

Our earlier postings on poets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:
The Corpse Comes Back to Life in Louisiana
Stormy Words: Poets on Hurricane Katrina (April 2006, PBS NewsHour)
In the Arms of Words (January 2006, Sherman Asher book publication, poems for disaster relief)
If you believe books are a necessity, send some to the poets of New Orleans (December 2005, book collection project)
Tracking poets displaced by the storms (September 2005, Hurricane Poets Check-In blog)
Poets for Hurricane Katrina relief (September 2005, benefit readings)

Getting your poems published and read isn’t easy. The big commercial publishing houses devote most of their efforts to books that sell better than poetry collections, and a writer may have to develop some leverage by producing a novel or non-fiction work that generates income for the publisher before asking them to publish a book of poems. Poets will find it difficult to navigate among the vast array of small-press poetry publishers, some of whom do very good work, while others prey on poets’ hopes by offering substandard quality, expensive vanity publishing, or publication sans distribution. Many small presses use contests to generate submissions, in which the entry fees pay the prize money and sometimes there is enough left over to subsidize the publication of the award-winner or support the press’ other offerings. So poets end up having to choose between submitting to many such contests in the hopes of getting a book published, or spending the money on self-publication instead.

Just this week, we’ve seen a cautionary tale about poetry contest publication, in the experience of Stacey Lynn Brown, whose manuscript was chosen for the Cider Press Book Award and then withdrawn by the publisher. What do you think?

A couple of weeks ago I was captivated by The Source, Chuck Workman’s documentary in which you can see and hear the Beat generation writers and their poems on film. Then last week Amy King gathered together a huge list of Movies with Poetry, suggested by readers of her blog — I’m keeping her list close at hand, searching out titles to add to my Netflix subscription. And this week we got the call from Heather Haley for poetry film entries to Visible Verse, the newest reincarnation of the Vancouver Videopoem Festival. All reminders of the affinity of poems and film images, poets and movies.

More on Film and Video Poetry:
Why I Love Making, a meditation on media with poems, by Mike Hazard aka Media Mike
Links to online video poetry archives
Our articles on films about poets and poetry

If you’ve spent the summer polishing a poem or a chapbook manuscript or even a full-length collection, now’s the time to pack it up & send it off to one of the many award competitions that do their reading in the fall:

• Poetry Super Highway Poetry Contest (email entries only, fee postmark deadline September 20)
• Pudding House Chapbook Competition (postmark deadline September 30)
• May Swenson Poetry Award from Utah State University Press (postmark deadline September 30)
• Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press (postmark deadline September 30)
• New Criterion Poetry Prize (postmark deadline September 30)
• Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books (postmark deadline October 1)
• Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review (postmark deadline October 1)
• Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press (postmark deadline October 31)
• The T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press (postmark deadline October 31)
• The Ledge Poetry Chapbook Competition (postmark deadline October 31)
• Bakeless Literary Prize in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (postmark deadline November 1)
• CBC Literary Awards for Canadian citizens & residents (postmark deadline November 1)
• Chautauqua Literary Journal Annual Poetry Contest (postmark deadline November 15)
• Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for poets 40 or younger (postmark deadline November 15)
• Perugia Press Prize for a first or second book by a woman (postmark deadline November 15)
• Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (postmark deadline November 15)
• Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards (postmark deadline November 17)
• Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition (postmark deadline November 29)
• A. Poulin, Jr. Prize from BOA Editions (postmark deadline November 30)
• The Missouri Review Audio & Video Competitions (postmark deadline December 1)
• Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books (postmark deadline December 1)
• Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from Waywiser Press (postmark deadline December 1)

Required reading before you submit to any contests:
How to put together a poetry manuscript for publication
“A Word To the Wise: On entering your poems in competition,” by Kurt Heintz
“You Do It Because You Love It,” by S.A. Griffin

Related resources:
More contest links

A great deal of attention is being paid to Dylan Thomas these days... His daughter Aeronwy recently completed a U.S. tour during which she gave readings of her father’s and her own poetry and guided the first Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of his favorite haunts in Greenwich Village, New York. Now a treasure trove of Thomas books, manuscripts and letters has been put up for sale in London by its collector, “an anonymous New York literature collector.” The collection includes a secret diary kept by Dylan’s wife Caitlin -- fascinating stuff. And there’s a new film out, The Edge of Love, chronicling “the second world war antics of... the rambunctious Welsh poet Dylan Thomas”

from Wales Online:
“Caitlin’s feelings for Dylan revealed in diary,” by Andrew Dagnell, Western Mail

from The Telegraph (UK):
“Dylan Thomas's widow Caitlin Macnamara did miss him after his death, journal reveals,” by Stephen Adams

from The Sunday Times (UK):
“Aeronwy Thomas on The Edge of Love and her father, Dylan Thomas”

More on Allen Ginsberg:
Allen Ginsberg, Beat American Buddha Bard, by Bob Holman
Our profile of Ginsberg
The Bard His Own Self: Allen Ginsberg says “That’s all Goodnight”
Encounters with Allen Ginsberg, by Bart Plantenga

On Ginsberg’s poetry:
Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, An introduction to his variation on haiku
Chorus of Poets Gather for “Howl” Celebration: the 50th anniversary, an account by Teresa Conboy
You can read the poem in print or listen to it on the Internet -- but you won’t hear it on the radio -- “Howl”
Hear Ginsberg’s first “Howl”

Once again there was only a single nomination posted in the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder, so Poetry Guide Margy Snyder has chosen a couple of her favorite poems from those recently posted in our Forum to round out our set of three entries in this month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition. The poems chosen to represent the About Poetry Forum are:

• “Thanking the Devil” by Radhamani, cited as “superb writing” by its nominator, pallasite, and as “nicely chanted” by another reader, Elianah.
• “Emily and Me in New York,” by Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett), whose rhyming quatrains beautifully echo Miss Dickinson’s poems–hesitation-dashes, transcendental language and all–in a contemporary ode to his muse-city.
• “Unnoticed,” a spooky and captivating sequence of images “just on the edge of familiarity” by Tim J. Brennan (68degrees).

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information, poem links and book-buying links for current IBPC judge Tony Barnstone

Patricia Smith has chosen a very interesting set of five poems as winners in her last month as IBPC judge (none of them from our Poetry Forum, but all worth your attention):

• In first place, “The Length of Never,” by dublinsteve, which Smith found “a dark and engaging mystery... mesmerizing and crammed with color and heat.”
• In second place, “A Fall from Grace,” by S. Thomas Summers, “a gift on the open air” that repays multiple rereadings.
• In third place, “Outwitting Your Angels,” by Dave Mehler, a tumble of words whose “relentless meter... urgency... unyielding pulse... was immediately addictive.”

Related resources:
About the IBPC
Just-past IBPC judge Patricia Smith
Current IBPC judge Tony Barnstone
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of winning poems
Archive of poems entered from our Poetry Forum

I never cease to marvel at how apropo the words of Emily Dickinson are to the thoughts and events of my life, even though I live it in a different century, a different world from hers. She is so strange, yet so on point—the best example I know of the poet’s integration of the most particular individuality and the widest universality. I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so. Every week, reading around the Web, I come across writers quoting her lines, struck by their uncanny resonance in many aspects of modern life. Here are a couple of pieces I’ve recently discovered that highlight both her oddity and her wide-ranging appeal:

from The New Yorker:
“Her Own Society: A new reading of Emily Dickinson,” by Judith Thurman
Thurman’s essay is a fascinating exploration of the interaction between ED’s strange life and stranger poems. Her new reading of Dickinson’s work was inspired by White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple, to be published August 12 by Knopf ().

Higginson “had doubts about the wisdom of exposing to the world the runes of a protégée whom he had described as ‘my partially cracked poetess....’ Dickinson’s life has a before and an after, separated by an invisible catastrophe, or perhaps by a critical mass of cumulative blows—spiritual concussions that contributed to her fragility, but also to the release of her creative powers, which came in a tremendous gush in her late twenties. She corresponded with a wide and diverse circle of friends—some ninety people we know of—but as she aged her world contracted like the footage of a blast rewound.... Her studied unworldliness—the virginal or bridal habit of a white dress; the lily proffered breathlessly to an exceptional visitor; the elfin figure fleeing at the sound of a doorbell; the pretense of ‘insignificance’—was also a form of camouflage:

The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—”

from The Guardian:
“The Sound of Startled Grass: How did quiet, introspective Emily Dickinson become the darling of modern composers?,” by Valentine Cunningham
On the occasion of the 2002 performance of the last of five parts of English composer Simon Holt’s musical sequence based on Dickinson’s poems, “The River of Time,” Cunningham wrote this interesting analysis of “...her appeal for composers? I think it is the rich musicality of her address to these modernist preoccupations. It makes her wonderfully adaptable, to music of all kinds. While her bareness, spareness and rhythmic variety make her specially attractive to musical modernists, minimalists and atonalists, there have also been madrigals, rags and even sub-Wagnerianisms in her name.” Reading it is a wonderful reminder of the music and the noises of life that ring throughout Dickinson’s spare lines.

More on Emily Dickinson:
Biographical profile of Emily Dickinson
Our Library: Poems by Emily Dickinson
“Emily’s Pearls Still Shine in the 21st Century”
“What Would Emily Say? An Indeath Interview,” by Robyn Sue Millerz
“Emily Dickinson: Continuing Enigma,” by Jone Johnson Lewis