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Poetry is all around you. Find a public place—a train station, a park bench, a street corner, a coffee shop, a bookstore, the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles—and listen to the people around you. Choose one quote from a stranger and use it as the first and last line of a new poem.
Independent poetry and fiction publisher Lynx House Press has extended the deadline for its seventeenth annual Blue Lynx Prize—which includes a cash award of two thousand dollars and publication for a poetry collection—to June 3.
The Blue Lynx Prize is awarded for a previously unpublished, full-length collection of poems by a U.S. author, including foreign nationals living and writing in the United States and U.S. citizens living abroad. Individual poems may have previously appeared in literary magazines or anthologies, but may not have appeared in a full-length, single-author collection.
Poets may submit a manuscript of at least forty-eight pages with a $25 entry fee by postal mail to Lynx House Press, P.O. Box 940, Spokane, WA 99210, or online via Submittable (with a $27.50 fee) by Monday, June 3.
Lynx House Press was founded in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1972 by Christopher Howell, David Lyon, and Helena Minton, and moved to Spokane in 1996. An independent nonprofit press, Lynx House publishes books by emerging and established poets and fiction writers. The editors look for “literary work that is highly resonant, work that, through the clarity of its vision and craft, results in a change in the emotional and intellectual temperature of whoever reads it.” The press has published books by Yusef Komunyakaa, Ray Amorosi, Margaret Robison, Carlos Reyes, Carolyn Miller, and Anthony Robbins, among many others. Recent prize winners have included Thomas Brush, Carolyne Wright, and Arianne Zwartjes.
The Blue Lynx Prize is typically open to submissions between January 15 and May 15 annually; open submissions are read between June 1 and August 1 each year.
For more information about the prize, contact editor Christopher Howell.
Poet and artist Amanda Deutch blogs about her P&W–supported poetry workshop for young women at the YWCA in Coney Island. She is the author of four chapbooks: Gena Rowlands, Box of Sky: Skeleton Poems, Motel Drift, and The Subway Series. She is also the recipient of a 2007 Footpaths to Creativity Fellowship to write in the Azores Archipelago.
In late February 20
13 I put out a call for poetry books to create a lending library for the YWCA after-school teen empowerment program where Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival leads a weekly creative writing workshop. The invitation to donate books was put on Facebook and sent out to previous Parachute Festival readers. The message soon went viral in the poetry world and was picked up by the Poetry Foundation and Best American Poetry. We have received books from authors as nearby as Coney Island and Park Slope and as far away as Madrid; Ontario; and Amman, Jordan. My intentions were truly modest. I just wanted to get some poetry books for the teenagers in the workshop that I teach and perhaps some extras to donate to the high school’s library. What we have now—a collection of diverse small press contemporary poetry from all over the country—has blown my mind (and renewed my faith in the power of poets).
In the weekly workshop I try to bring in poetry that reflects students’ surroundings. When I was a child growing up in New York City, we never read any poetry in school that reflected the world and sounds I saw and heard around me—the buzzing sidewalk, taxicabs, the multiphonic spree of languages that is home to me. It wasn’t until I found poets like Edwin Torres, Tracie Morris, Diane DiPrima, and Alice Notley (among many others) that I saw my words and worlds reflected in the pages of their books. I want teenagers to have that opportunity too. Up until now, for over a year, it has been a girls’ group. We recently opened it up to both genders. A boy, Montague, poked his head in the doorway a few w
eeks ago and said, “Miguel Pinero, he’s the realest.” I said, “Yeah, his poetry changed the course of my life. Before that all I ever saw was poetry about daisies, not that I don’t like daisies. We don’t have any books of his, yet, but why don’t you read Sheila Maldonado? She’s a local poet, born around here.” He checked her book out of our new burgeoning library (and made my day). There are so many interactions like this. Maya is a thirteen-year-old student at the writing workshop. She soaks up information and is very talented. One day she came in asking me about a poem she’d seen that looked like an eye. We had a conversation about the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and for the next week’s class I brought in one of his books. She poured over the pages and held it up saying, “This one is my favorite.” I instantly got chills and realized, here I was in a classroom in Brooklyn, in Coney Island, discussing surrealist French poetry with a thirteen-year-old girl.
The poetry library grew very organically out of an instinct to get the teenagers books they love and to show them that poetry can take all different shapes, sizes, voices, styles, languages. It doesn’t have to rhyme, punctuate, or tell a story. Poetry can speak the way we speak or speak a new language all its own. Poetry can break open language entirely and begin anew.
We now have over a hundred books in our growing library and one of the most unusual, extensive poetry collections in any high school in Brooklyn, maybe the whole country. In Montague’s words—“the realest!”
Photos: (Top) Workshop participant Maya peeking out from behind a poetry book by Jessy Randall. Credit: Amanda Deutch. (Bottom) A donated poetry book sent from Madrid, Spain. Credit: Amanda Deutch.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Abbey K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
P&W–supported writer and presenter Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012–2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Her books are Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), named an American Library Association Notable Book. Flenniken is bringing poetry events to all thirty-nine counties in Washington State, including readings, workshops, and school programs, and publishes Washington State poets on her blog, The Far Field. She teaches through Writers in the Schools, Jack Straw, and other arts agencies, and is an editor for Floating Bridge Press, dedicated to publishing Washington State poets.
For a relatively small city, Seattle has a thriving literary community. What do you attribute this to?
Seattle is a magnet city. Writers find themselves surrounded by other working writers and a strong literary infrastructure—the University of Washington with its MacArthur geniuses (Linda Bierds, Richard Kenney, Heather McHugh, and Charles Johnson) and graduates, who tend to stay; the Richard Hugo House, a wonderful and democratic incubator for new talent; an impressive public library system; a reputation as a reading city; the marvelous poetry-only bookstore Open Books; University Bookstore and Elliott Bay Book Company; a number of excellent small presses and magazines; and a varied lineup of readings on any given night. Not to mention lakes and mountains, a temperate and moody climate, and beer and coffee houses with Wi-fi.
What recent program have you been especially proud of?
I was very proud to bring Spencer Reece to Seattle for the first time with the help of Poets & Writers, Richard Hugo House, and Humanities Washington. Spencer was going to be in Portland for personal reasons. I was brazen enough to invite him, and he was brave enough to accept. The evening combined some of the poems from his first and forthcoming second book, The Road to Emmaus, and a film by James Franco based on Spencer’s poem “The Clerk’s Tale.” The evening began with a teaser for "Our Little Roses Film," a documentary about Reece's Fulbright year at a girls' orphanage in Honduras, where he is teaching his students poetry and creating a book of their poems about home. It was a beautiful evening and touched many people who came.
How does giving a reading inform your writing and vice versa?
Poetry needs to work out loud as a kind of music. Giving readings keeps me (and my music) honest.
If I know I don’t want to share a poem at a reading, and keep shying away from the opportunity, there may be a problem with the poem. It might be too raw, too personal, or lack nuance. Maybe there’s not enough good stuff going on—it’s boring and I don’t want to admit it. I have to face facts when I face an audience.
I think my perennial pursuit of the “funny poem,” successful or mostly not, is motivated in part by giving readings. It’s a powerful invitation to a new audience.
Reading and hearing the poems out loud sometimes calls attention to certain strategies I’ve used, maybe to excess. I might organize a reading around a subject and notice as I read before an audience: Oh, these three poems all rely on a surprising turn of phrase in the last line…hmm. Is that becoming a crutch?
What are your reading dos?
Remember it’s about poetry and the audience. Be respectful of both. Choose poems you can communicate effectively. Practice. Time yourself. Set up the poems that need it as simply as you can. Try to include a variety of tones. Give every poem its full due—reading slowly, with natural inflections. Learn to use the microphone.
Since I became poet laureate I’ve included poems by other Washington State poets. I’m their representative. When my appointment is over, I’ll continue that practice. It feels like good luck invoking another poet’s voice, and reminds me I’m part of a tradition and a community.
And your reading don’ts?
Don’t go on too long! Never, ever exceed your allotted time. Readings shouldn’t go longer than an hour, generally shorter if it’s one reader. Twenty readers? Three minutes each, and no meandering introductions!
Readings can be humbling. Don’t fall into despair after a reading that falls flat or feels, for whatever reason, embarrassing. Don’t forget, it’s about poetry. One for the cause.
As Washington State’s poet laureate, what do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?
Stories and poems remind us what it might be to stand in someone else’s shoes, and what our lives can mean. Literary programs make that experience communal. They bring people together to share matters of deep importance. I was part of a recent program sponsored by P&W at the Sammamish King County Library (on the outskirts of Seattle). Our readers were ages fifteen and up, and included me and poet Michael Dylan Welch, a master of the Haiku form, local students, a software guy, a veteran, a professional in a suit and tie. Our readers brought poems they’d written and wanted to share, and a number of other community members—families, seniors, singles—came simply to listen. If you looked out at the crowd, it was a real mix, but we were sharing an important conversation.
Photo: Kathleen Flenniken. Credit: Rosanne Olson.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Make a list of the physical objects you carry with you: a wallet and phone, a journal and pen, medications and mementos. Then make a list of the non-objects you carry: memories, ideas, dreams, scars (literal or figurative), the people or places of your past. Once you've created both lists, write an essay that incorporates and investigates the items on each. Why do you carry these things? What do they mean to you? Do the physical items relate to the mental ones? Use "These are the things I carry" as your opening line.
In Writers Recommend, Amy Shearn extols the virtues of coffee and its importance in her daily writing routine. Write a dialogue in which two characters are deprived of something: caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, sweets—or perhaps something as seemingly banal as cellular service, television, or the Internet. Now give one character his or her fix, leaving the other without, and rewrite the dialogue.
Katherine Noble, a senior in the English Department at the University of Texas in Austin, has received the Keene Prize for Literature for her collection of poems, “Like Electrical Fire Across the Silence.” She will receive $50,000.
Noble is the first undergraduate to win or even place in the Keene competition, one of the world’s largest student literary prizes, which has been given annually to University of Texas students since 2006. Graduate students in the university’s Michener Center MFA program typically take home the award.
“The judges were impressed by her audacious combination of spirituality with sexuality, by her wide range of literary reference, and her bold experimentation with the form of the prose poem,” said Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, chair of the Department of English and the award selection committee, of Nobel’s poems.
“I have been affected by images from biblical myths since I was a young girl,” Noble said in a press release, “and the narrators in my poems often wrestle to understand how God interacts with the physical world.”
In addition to Noble, three finalists will each receive $17,000. They are Corey Miller, a current Michener Center graduate student, for his collection of poems “The New Concentration”; Karan Mahajan, also a Michener Center graduate student, for an excerpt from his novel “Notes on a Small Bomb”; and Jenn Shapland, an English Department graduate student, for her essay collection “Finders Keepers.”
Fiction writer Fiona McFarlane, a Michener Center graduate, whose stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere, received the 2012 prize.
Established by the the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, the Keene Prize is given in honor of E. L. Keene, a 1942 graduate of the university who “envisioned an award that would enhance and enrich the university’s prestige and support the work of young writers,” which would be given for “the most vivid and vital portrayal of the American experience in microcosm.” The award is given to enrolled undergraduate or graduate students for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or plays.
Print or write out a handful of unfinished poems you’ve had difficulty revising. Cut out each line and mix them up. Rearrange the lines to make a new poem. Consider using one of the lines as the title.
Poet and artist Amanda Deutch blogs about her P&W–supported poetry workshop for young women at the YWCA in Coney Island. She is the author of four chapbooks: Gena Rowlands, Box of Sky: Skeleton Poems, Motel Drift, and The Subway Series. She is also the recipient of a 2007 Footpaths to Creativity Fellowship to write in the Azores Archipelago.
Celebrities flash everywhere: billboards, newspapers, computer screens, televisions. We live in a KarGaGaianBieber glowing orb of a virtual society. They suggest what we buy, how we dress, how we live, and what we consider beautiful. Unfortunately, Warhol’s prediction of fifteen minutes of celebrity fame has drawn out to become several hours of fame and in some cases, even years of it. Like it or not, we know celebrity's faces, their favorite coffee drinks, and the names of their pet monkeys.
Thursday afternoons, I lead a poetry workshop for the YWCA’s teenage girls’ empowerment program in Coney Island. Poets & Writers has generously funded eight out of a year’s worth of these workshops. (We still seek funding for the rest of them, as the workshop is such a success that we plan to keep coming back!) One Thursday, two of the teenagers were clamoring and giggling over Justin Bieber. Fourteen-year-old Medina screamed, “I have total Bieber fever!” Medina is a beautiful teenager with an infectious smile who lives in Coney Island, a low-income, urban neighborhood at the end of the subway line. This is not who first comes to mind when I think of Bieber’s fan base. But I am glad that life continues to surprise me. I decided to follow the guidelines we set forth at the beginning of the writing workshop: to suspend judgment and listen.
"What do you like about him and his music?" I asked. Then I asked, “Would you like to write celebrity poems?” “Yesssss!” We read Frank O’Hara, Diane DiPrima, and newpaper articles about celebrities. We wrote poems about a chosen celebrity, incorporating lyrics from their songs or language from news clippings. The topics of media, celebrity, and pop culture brought up great conversations in the room about fashion, body image, women in media, and intelligent role models. Below are some of our celebrity poems. Can you guess who the celebrities are? (Answers can be found at the bottom of this page.) If you’d like to read more of the teenager’s poetry, see our magazine online, Teenager Fever Magazine.
Hello Superstar
by Maya
I don’t know who you are
all I know is what I see
all over the silver screen
Plastic here plastic there
Short outfits
Outrageously colored hair
But what about your life?
What shows do you watch
on tv or do you watch tv at all?
Do you eat fried chicken stereotypically
or some gourmet stuff that
I can’t afford?
Do you shop at the mall?
Or does someone do it
for you?
Do you run your own
household or do
maids do all the work?
I’m not an overly
obsessed fan
but I just wanna see
beyond my tv.
Nobody’s Perfect
by Imani
Dear________,
I adored you since day one.
From your hit tv show to your
goofy catch phrases. Your hair
fascinated and intrigued me.
I envied the life you lived and
wanted to be you more than anything.
Then one day it was said that you
released nudes. I didn’t care.
You were still my idol and fashion
icon. Just like me, you
absolutely loved your dog. Then
one day you just vanished off the
face of the Earth and came back
with an EPIC haircut. Oh how
I admired it. Everyone made jokes
and criticized it, but I knew it was
for a great cause. When you
finally marry Liam
I’ll be there to throw rice as you
walk out.
Young Money
by Gavrielle
Your songs go from hell and
back
Range from As to Zs
You can bring the final knockout
You have hate in your
heart, love in your mind
You see nights
full of pain and
days that are the same
Young Money
"Hello Superstar" is about Nicki Minaj; "Nobody’s Perfect" is about Miley Cyrus; "Young Money" is about Lil Wayne. (In case you are wondering, Justin Bieber’s illegal pet monkey’s name is Mally. But c’mon like you didn’t already know that!)
Photo: Workshop participant Maya reading Tupac Shakur's The Rose that Grew from Concrete. (Credit: Amanda Deutch.)
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Abbey K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Peter Cunningham, a participant in a P&W-funded writing workshop for cancer survivors at St. Luke's–Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, writes about his experience in the workshop. Cunningham, originally from Scotland, just became a citizen of the US after living in this country for twenty-two years. A passionate founder and part owner of Absolutely Wild, a New York City-based event design company, he was sidetracked last year by the discovery of stage-three rectal cancer. The resulting year of treatment forced him to step down from his position and focus on his own healing, spiritually and emotionally. He calls the cancer a life-giving experience. He is now not sure what he wants to do or be. Through what he calls "The Gift" of the Roosevelt Hospital Writers Workshop, he has found his voice in ink. He is in the process of writing a book about his experience with the goal of getting more people to "take their butt to get a colonoscopy."
Another hospital? I moaned to myself, as I slowly exited the elevator onto the first floor. Why did it have to be in a hospital? All my chemo senses were kicking into high gear. I took a deep breath and hoped this was going to be fun. I wandered down two wrong corridors and opened three wrong doors. Finally I made it to the Cancer Writing Workshop led by Sue Ribner. I was at the end of my treatment for rectal cancer and was hoping to meet some other men with the same diagnosis. But no, God had a better plan, as all God's plans are. She's funny that way. A conference table filled with women. Not for the first time in my life, I was the only male at the room. What could I possibly have in common with all these ladies? After a round of introductions, I quickly made it clear that I was not going to even try to balance out the energy levels. The damn chemo had made sure I did not have the strength to do that. Plus, I had grown enough in the past six months to know it did not really matter.
We began with some simple, fun writing exercises and then progressed to longer passages. Nothing about cancer, yippee! Lots of fun topics from the teacher and a great array of stories from each of the attendees. Some were more reticent to verbalize their jottings than others. Some more fatigued, some at the end of their treatment, and others in a chronic stage. All just happy to be alive and writing, no matter how bad it was. As the weeks progressed the topics raised more memories that we had all forgotten. Postcards, shoes, the softest thing, grandmother; something which is too small, memories of a bathing suit, swimming, hair, school prom, skin, voice, sex, trains, sleeping outdoors, a lover, romance, homage to your favorite body part, first memory, a scoundrel, a corsage, tea leaves, a bar of soap, how you would like to be remembered, learning to drive, kitchen table—and so the prompts went on. Each week a new thought would unravel and lead us to places we had put aside to deal with our most pressing needs in the now. The past was coming back to make us cry and to make us laugh. Always to make our writing richer. "Homework" was not a favored title and "work from home" eased some of the school-time angst. "Work from a bus" was always an option.
As the weeks hurried by, we, the seven scribblers, opened up, and instead of people dealing with cancer we became human beings with stories to tell, to voice. Cancer was on the back burner for two hours each week and we reveled in the escapism. Slowly but surely the single paragraphs became passages, the details enhanced, and our weakened bodies emboldened. Wondrous phrases flowed onto the pages: "bubbling naughtiness," "mad cap cackles," and "my heart was racing and the super was pacing" were among the many. We were becoming writers, if only in our own minds. On occasions, someone had to miss a session. Silently and deep down we all knew why and we were relieved to see them return the next week. We have found our voices in a place where we did not leave them. We are stronger in ink and more assured that nothing is certain. An unspoken bond bubbles between the pages and the conference room seats. We are united in moving through the different stages presented to us each day. We are able to help each other grow and bring out our unspoken best in just 120 minutes. No battles, no fighting. Just being. No therapy needed today.
Photo: Peter Cunningham. Photo Credit: Peter Cunningham.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
