Five Years After CatastropheFive years is a long time... long enough to arrive at an emotional perspective on disaster? Or perhaps in the case of a catastrophe that changes everything, no time period is “long enough” and your view of the event just keeps evolving year after year, forever. This week, however, the five-year span has come up in the case of two important disasters of our time: August 29 marks five years since Hurricane Katrina washed over New Orleans and thanks to Jim Finnegan’s  posting to the NewPoetry list, we can direct you to the best online reading for commemorating that awful anniversary: NPR’s selection of poems excerpted from Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith’s 2008 book of Katrina poems (Coffeehouse Press,  ). This is essential reading, both contemporaneous and timeless. It’s been nearly nine years since the terrible events of September 11, 2001, but former Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column last week distributed a poem by Tony Gloeggler called “Five Years Later,” pondering the lingering effects of the September 11 attack on a survivor. This is more essential reading, and its concise evocation of perspective and the intersection of large events in individual lives has prompted us to open our own contemporaneous September 11 anthology to additional submissions—we’re seeking poems looking back on the events of September 11, 2001 from years later, and invite your submissions. More on Poetry and Hurricane Katrina:
Poets for Hurricane Katrina relief (2005)
Stormy Words: Poets on Hurricane Katrina (2006)
Three Years After — Katrina-inspired Poems (2008) More on Poetry and September 11:
“Poems After the Attack,” our September 11 anthology
Submit Your Poem for our anthology Five Years After Catastrophe originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 00:33:38. Permalink | Comment | Email this
InterBoard Poetry Competition UpdateThere’s been a lot of rancorous hullaballoo lately in the InterBoard Poetry Community—the sort of thing that occasionally happens in groups linked only by email, where misunderstandings meet severe judgment, the emails flare back and forth and the arguments harden, so that an email exchange escalates into a war fueled by wounded egos. I won’t comment on the merits of any of the arguments—to do so would only fan the flames. I will simply report the end results: - It has been reiterated that, in keeping with the IBPC’s protocols assuring that poems are judged anonymously, no member of a participating forum should directly contact a sitting IBPC judge during his/her term as judge.
- Any poet who fears that his/her poem entered in the competition may suffer from a judge’s misreading may prevent misunderstanding by attaching an explanatory footnote to the poem, and if the poem is chosen as a winner, the poet may then decide whether or not the footnote will be published with the poem.
- The Poets’ Graves Workshop has resigned from participation in the IBPC.
And now, on to the more interesting IBPC news—the poems themselves! Winning July Poems
In her first month as IBPC judge, Ruth Ellen Kocher selected three winners from the July entries—none of them from our Forum: - In first place, she chose “Dreams: mobile” by Petra Klein, a long poem “tackled by a poet who works in a minimalist style” that she admired “for its razor edge handling of lyric, innovation, and tradition.”
- Second place went to “Pantone 1665 C.” by Ben Johnson, which she cited as “a sort of imagistic causal chain that exists primarily as a series of isolated utterances.”
- Her third place choice was “Bone-Song” by Laurie Byro, whose “lyric subtlety” “draw[s] the reader into an ending that arrives through implication rather than assertion.”
Winning August Poems
IRuth Ellen Kocher also chose three winners and no honorable mentions from the August entries—once again skipping over our Forum’s entries: - In first place, “The Catch” by C.J. Costello, a short poem that “wastes no language#8221; in “ushering the reader through the poem, quietly, yet assuredly.”
- In second place, “A Quieting” by Michael Harty, in which “the marriage of disparate objects and references serves the magical feeling of the poem and allows it to hover between a moment of true recollection and a moment of dream.”
- In third place, “Natural Selections” by Mary Beth Cronk, a poem whose “slowly building and subtle dynamic... transcend[s] into an resolute, definitive quietude.”
That’s us all caught up to date for now! We’ll be putting together our Poetry Forum’s September entries just one week from now, so get on over to the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder and nominate the poems you think should be our representatives. Be sure to address your post to the poet whose work you are nominating, so that the poet will be notified and can post the required permission and information before Poetry Guide Margy Snyder selects the next month’s two entries. 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 page on July-September 2010 judge Ruth Ellen Kocher InterBoard Poetry Competition Update originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 02:23:04. Permalink | Comment | Email this
Poems in Memory of 9.11.2001It’s difficult to believe, but it’s been nearly nine years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America. Remembering that day and contemplating the echoing horror of attacks since then around the world, we are invoking the commemorative function of poems by republishing our “contemporaneous” 9.11 anthology: Poems After the Attack. This collection comes to you now, nearly a decade later, accompanied by the same wish it has carried since we first put it together: In grief, anger, consternation, confusion or resolve, we hope these poems offer you comfort, clarity or grace. Poems in Memory of 9.11.2001 originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 02:38:51. Permalink | Comment | Email this
InterBoard Poetry Competition Poems of the YearThis year marked the 10th anniversary of the InterBoard Poetry Competition and once again the IBPC has asked a distinguished judge to look back over all the winning poems from the past year and choose the IPBC Poems of the Year. Dana Goodyear, the author of Honey and Junk who is a New Yorker staff writer and a board member at Red Hen Press, was asked to select the best of the poems that were awarded first, second, or third place from May 2009 through April 2010. All three of the poems she chose came from the more recent months of this period—two from the winners selected by Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar and one from Fiona Sampson’s tenure as judge. We’ve added Goodyear’s commentary to the winning poems, which all repay further study: - First Place: “Ouija,” by Lois P. Jones (which originally placed 2nd in April 2010)
- Second Place: “Eureka Springs,” by Jude Goodwin (which originally placed 1st in January 2010)
- Third Place: “Eden in Winter,” by Russel Smith (which originally placed 1st in March 2010)
InterBoard Poetry Competition Poems of the Year originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 14:45:15. Permalink | Comment | Email this
The Wedding Poem Is a Cipher with a Hidden HistoryMuch has been made of the simple eloquence of Leo Marks’ poem recited at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to Mark Mezvinsky last week: The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
And yours But the story of the poem is not simple at all. It is clearly a love poem, but it is a love poem of yearning and loss, written after the death of the beloved—Marks wrote it the night he received the news that his girlfriend Ruth had been killed in an airplane accident. Because the poet was also a World War II cryptographer working in Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, his poem took on another life when it was given to an undercover agent for her ciphers. That was Violette Szabo, whose story was told in the 1958 film, Carve Her Name With Pride. (You can hear the poem recited in these two clips from the film at YouTube: here by Violette’s husband, who was killed before she volunteered for undercover work and who is fictionally named the poem’s author in the movie, and here by Violette herself, after she has presumably taken the poem for her cipher. from Forbes’ “Booked” Blog:
“Breaking the Code: Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding Poem,” by Richard Hyfler
“The poem read at the wedding... wasn’t written for intelligence purposes but in memory of Marks’ girlfriend, Ruth, who died in a plane crash in Canada in 1943. Marks received the news from her father on Christmas Eve and wrote the poem, addressed to Ruth, that evening. ‘I transmitted,’ he writes in Between Silk and Cyanide, ‘a message to her which I’d failed to deliver when I’d had the chance.’” Because Marks adhered to “the code-poem rules”—“an imperfect rhyming scheme and the absence of the high-value Scrabble letters like z and x or words with double letters that make code easier to decipher”—he was later able “to pass along the poem a few months later to Violette Szabo, a half-French, half-cockney agent about to return to France,” to use as the basis of her ciphers. from The Huffington Post:
“The Tragic History Of Chelsea’s Wedding Poem,” by John Lundberg
“Leo Marks‘s poem ‘The Life That I Have,’ read as part of the Chelsea Clinton and Mark Mezvinsky wedding ceremony, seems on the surface to be the perfect wedding poem. It’s straightforward and employs simple language—easy for the guests to understand and appreciate with one listen.... The emotion behind the poem, it turns out, was genuine and intense.... There’s something beautiful and uplifting in seeing Marks’ poem freed from its tragic context and put to its original use as a statement of love and devotion in such a public forum.” More on Poem-Codes:
Acrostic Poems
Abecedarian Poems
Hidden Meaning Encoded in a Poem Sends the Poet to Jail (2008) The Wedding Poem Is a Cipher with a Hidden History originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 23:01:49. Permalink | Comment | Email this
InterBoard Poetry Competition UpdateThe latest news from the monthly IBPC: Winning June Poems
Judge Fiona Sampson chose four winners and five honorable mentions from the June entries—none of them from our Forum, but as usual an interesting gathering of poems and well worth reading: - In first place, she chose “A lesson on multiplication” by Judy Kaber, “a deft, never cautious, astonishing poem” that “makes us think differently about girls and their daydreams, about classrooms—and above all about babies.”
- Second place was a tie between “history of the kite riff” by Steve Parker, a prose poem Sampson labeled “Stunning, vivid, exact and taking no hostages,” and “Weasel” by Laurie Byro, which she called “elegant and thoughtful.”
- Third place went to “Glass” by David Callin, a “meditation on the Welsh word glas [that] manages wonderfully to be intelligent and think-ey and not to lapse into Anglo-Welsh twee.”
- Sampson also selected five honorable mentions, commenting on all of them.
Our August EntriesThese two poems represented our Poetry Forum in this month’s competition: - “A Woman of Few Words” by Christine J. Schiff (cumin)—spare and lovely as its title suggests.
- “The Departure Lounge” by Eric Ashford (SparkyDashforth)—an eloquent evocation of uneasy nostalgia in an ultra-modern setting.
We understand the July winners chosen by new judge Ruth Ellen Kocher have already come back to the IBPC editors and will be announced soon. In the meantime, keep those nominations coming! 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 page on July-September 2010 judge Ruth Ellen Kocher InterBoard Poetry Competition Update originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 21:00:00. Permalink | Comment | Email this
Poems Mangled in the Move from Page to ScreenWe’ve long been concerned about what e-publishing does to poetry. The Web and e-books grant a wonderful flexibility of visual presentation to their readers, but this gift comes at the expense of the typographical control that used to belong to the publisher and author—control that is peculiarly important in poetry, where the placement of a single letter, line break or piece of punctuation is often crucial to a poem’s meaning or effect. Because we’re acutely aware of what computers can do to poems, your Poetry Guides have taken special care in posting poem texts here at About Poetry, to make sure their HTML incarnations accurately convey the poets’ intentions. And we’ve cautioned poets submitting poems for our anthologies that the text box on our submission page doesn’t convey line breaks when you type a poem into it—so submitters need to use slashes (“/”) to indicate line breaks and double slashes (“//”) to indicate stanzas. We’re not the only ones concerned that poems may be deformed by electronic publication: from Associated Press:
“Breaking up is hard: Poems a tough fit in e-form,” by Hillel Italie
“Billy Collins, one of the country’s most popular poets, had never seen his work in e-book form until he recently downloaded his latest collection on his Kindle.... He was unpleasantly surprised.... ‘The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break,’ Collins says.” from The Huffington Post:
“The E-Book Ugly Stick,” by Travis Nichols
“As sales of e-books on various platforms continue to rise—Publisher’s Weekly reported a 176% increase over the past year—poetry appears to be getting lost in the shuffle.... Obviously, the ideal situation would be for the e-book conversions to go smoothly and preserve the layout of the published books, but all reports seem to indicate what we've got now (ugly and sparse) is what we’ll have for at least a year or two.” So what do you think, dear Readers? Do you care what happens to poems as they move from page to screen? Will you read poems in e-form, or do you still prefer old-fashioned books? Please share your thoughts by commenting below. More on Poetry and E-Typography:
“Misprints—Are They Serendipity, Inspiration or Embarrassment?” (2008)
“Typos Are Like Viruses.... They Replicate on the Net” (2007)
Poems Mangled in the Move from Page to Screen originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 09:56:49. Permalink | Comment | Email this
Emily Dickinson: Her Rhymes, Her Dashes, Her Flowers, Her Fits?Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are the binary stars at the center of the American poetry galaxy—as readers, we orbit around them like comets, dipping into the poems of one or the other and then wheeling back through the lesser poets further out. This summer, it seems many readers’ orbits have passed through a Dickinson perihelion, as radio listeners have surely noticed: from Fresh Air (NPR):
“Billy Collins: A Poet’s Affection For Emily Dickinson”
In this radio interview, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has a number of interesting things to say about Dickinson’s poems. Of her consistent use of “common meter” (a ballad meter, alternating lines of four and three iambs), Collins says “It’s widely known that almost every one of her poems can be sung whether you like it or not to the tune of ‘A Yellow Rose from Texas’”—anybody want to test that out? Of her “obsessive use of dashes,” he contrasts the “interruptive, strange dashes that don’t seem to do anything more than reveal her love of the dash” with the “other dashes to me that are indications of a leap of thought.... a sort of zigzag type of logic.” The entire interview is worth a listen, with Dickinson’s poems in your hand. also from Fresh Air (NPR):
“Biography Speculates Emily Dickinson Had Epilepsy”
This is an interview with Lyndall Gordon, whose new biography of Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, supposes that the reason she remained a recluse was a physical handicap—epileptic fits. “‘I think that we have no way of knowing for certain,’ Gordon says. ‘But if it’s true, it would explain everything. If there was this stigma associated with epilepsy, the best solution for her would have been for her to remain in what she called ‘my father’s house.’” and yet again from Fresh Air (NPR):
“A Flowering Tribute To Emily Dickinson”
This is a story about the New York Botanical Garden’s new exhibition, “Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers,” Evidently, during her lifetime, “Dickinson was better known as a gardener than as a poet,” although her neighbors did know she was a poet because she “used to tuck little poems into bouquets of flowers that she gave” to them. The curators have chosen topical poems from Dickinson’s oeuvre and posted them on a walk through the Botanical Garden “next to plants and trees and flowers that inspired them.... And inside the Botanical Garden’s glass-domed conservatory is a re-creation of Dickinson’s own garden.” What a lovely idea—a must if you visit New York City this summer! More on Emily Dickinson:
Biographical Profile of American Icon/“Belle of Amherst” Dickinson
Our Library: Poems by Emily Dickinson
“Circling Back to Emily Dickinson” (2008)
“Emily’s Pearls Still Shine in the 21st Century” (2008)
“What Would Emily Say? An Indeath Interview,” by Robyn Sue Millerz (2003)
“Emily Dickinson: Continuing Enigma,” by Jone Johnson Lewis More on Walt Whitman:
Biographical Profile of the American Bard of Liberation
Library: Selected Poems from Leaves of Grass More Poet Walks:
Wallace Stevens Walk (Hartford, Connecticut)
Dylan Thomas Walking Tour (Greenwich Village, New York City)
Poets Way (Boulder, Colorado) Emily Dickinson: Her Rhymes, Her Dashes, Her Flowers, Her Fits? originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 06:48:04. Permalink | Comment | Email this
Encounters with MerwinJust after the appointment of W.S. Merwin as the new U.S. Poet Laureate last week, we came across Millicent Borges Accardi’s story of “Having Breakfast With Merwin,” hidden in the conversations on the NewPoetry list, and thought.... now’s the time to be gathering these stories. Let’s not wait until the poets who’ve touched our hearts and minds are gone, before we share our experiences with them! Have you had an encounter with W.S. Merwin or his poems? Share your story with us, please. Encounters With Other Poets:
“A Student’s Memories of Richard Eberhart,” by David Graham
“RIP, Brother Man, Jack Micheline,” by Bob Holman and others
“Linda Dyer: Remembering a Bold Soul, by Terri Ford
“Remembering Marta Mitrovich,” by Victor Infante Encounters with Merwin originally appeared on About.com Poetry on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 06:46:20. Permalink | Comment | Email this
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