The Princeton, New Jersey-based National Poetry Series has announced the winners of its annual Open Competition. Each of the five winning poets will receive $1,000, and the winning books will be published by participating presses in the summer of 2013.

The 2012 recipients are the meatgirl whatever by Kristin Hatch of San Francisco, California, chosen by K. Silem Mohammad and to be published by Fence Books; The Narrow Circle by Nathan Hoks of Chicago, Illinois, chosen by Dean Young and to be published by Penguin Books; The Cloud that Contained the Lightning by Cynthia Lowen of Brooklyn, New York, chosen by Nikky Finney and to be published by University of Georgia Press; Visiting Hours at the Color Line by Ed Pavlić of Athens, Georgia, chosen by Dan Beachy-Quick and to be published by Milkweed Editions; Failure & I Bury the Body by Sasha West of Austin, Texas, chosen by D. Nurkse and to be published by HarperCollins.

Established in 1978, the National Poetry Series is a literary awards program that publishes five new books of poetry each year through its Open Competition. Previous winners include poets Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Eleni Sikelianos, and Terrance Hayes. 

To enter the 2013 competition, United States residents may submit previously unpublished book-length poetry manuscripts, typically between forty-eight and sixty-four pages in length, with a thirty-dollar entry fee by February 15, 2013. For complete submission guidelines and to learn more about the Open Competition, visit the National Poetry Series website. 

Lee Meitzen Grue lives in downtown New Orleans. Her most recent book of poetry, Downtown, is published by Trembling Pillow Press and is made up of new and selected poems chosen for their reference to the old neighborhoods of New Orleans, including Treme, The French Quarter, Marigny, Bywater, and the Lower Nine. The book is dedicated to her friends and neighbors in the Ninth Ward, who suffered from Katrina. Grue is also former director of the New Orleans Poetry Forum and editor of the New Laurel Review. She teaches writing at the Alvar Library.

I live in the Bywater, which is part of the Ninth Ward. When we moved to the neighborhood after Hurricane Betsy, many residents were moving out. We were able to buy an Edwardian house over one hundred years old. With some renovation, we built a small West Indies–styled building and began The First Backyard Poetry Theatre.  For nineteen years, I directed the New Orleans Poetry Forum Workshop, and we held readings in the theatre until 1991. Since Katrina, we’ve hosted two art shows and continued to host readings with local and internationally known poets and musicians.

I have an MFA in writing but don’t consider myself an academic. I enjoy the world of small presses and teaching in the community. A few years ago, I discovered Poets & Writers was offering grants for readings and workshops in New Orleans. Since the Alvar Library was my neighborhood library in the Ninth Ward, I approached librarian Mary Ann Marx about applying for a grant to host some workshops. Happily she did.

Although the library was flooded after Katrina, and many of its books were ruined, the people of Bywater rallied, remodeled, and revived the library. It now features artwork by neighborhood artists, new books and programs, and a beautiful garden.

The students who attend my workshops range in age from eighteen to eighty-eight, all hues. I teach fiction and poetry classes. For fiction, I get the class writing in the first workshop and ask each writer to talk about their writing.

In poetry classes, I suggest the students read a list of books, which have included The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, and Louis Untermeyer’s The Golden Treasury of Poetry, a book that my aunt drove fifty-five miles to Beaumont, Texas, to buy when I started writing poetry at the age of nine. It was the 1940s, but that book included women poets!

We’ve also asked the library to get us books, including Kalamu ya Salaam’s In The Bend of the River and books by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Yusef Komunyakaa, who is from Bogalusa, Louisiana. And, I recommend they read Poets & Writers Magazine, to which the library subscribes. 

We’ve collected stories for an anthology we hope to publish. Most remarkable have been the number of older students who have written books: Maggie Colllins has published a number of short stories and her novel Celestial Skies was a finalist for the William Faulkner Writing Contest. Edmunc Mazeika published Peace Is Possible online. Sean David Hobbs wrote a memoir about living in Turkey, called Sex and Homeland.

Thanks to Poets & Writers, we’re now the Alvar Writers. And, thanks to Henri, the librarian at the Alvar Library, we're always stocked with a few healthy snacks and some delicious chocolate!

Photo: Lee Meitzen Grue.  Photo credit: Henri Fourroux.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in New Orleans is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. 

The Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based literary magazine cream city review is currently accepting submissions for its annual poetry and fiction contest. Winners in each genre receive a $1,000 prize and publication in the Spring 2013 issue. The deadline for entry is December 31.

Poets and fiction writers may submit three to five poems or up to twenty pages of fiction, along with a $15 entry fee, which includes a copy of the contest issue, to cream city review, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201. Submissions must be typed, double-spaced (poetry may be single-spaced), and should include the author’s name and address. Winners will be announced on the cream city review website in the spring. The magazine’s annual nonfiction contest has been discontinued.

Founded in 1975 by Mary Zane Allen, cream city review is a volunteer-operated, non-profit literary magazine published twice yearly, in the spring and fall, by the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Boasting an international readership, the magazine is “devoted to publishing memorable and energetic pieces that push the boundaries of literature” and seeks to “explore the relationship between form and content.” The magazine publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, book reviews, literary criticism, author interviews, and original artwork. Approximately four thousand submissions are received each year from emerging and established writers. Past contributors have included Aimee Bender, Charles Bukowski, Robert Olen Butler, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Tess Gallagher, Joy Harjo, Bob Hicok, Allison Joseph, Audre Lorde, Ben Percy, Adrienne Rich, and Alberto Ríos.

The journal’s name pays homage to Milwaukee, whose moniker “The Cream City” refers to Cream City brick, a light-yellow-colored brick made from clay native to the city, which was first produced in the early nineteenth century. For more information about cream city review and for complete submission guidelines, visit the website. 

PW-funded poet Thomas Lux blogs about Bill Knott's new collection Selected Poems. Lux is Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has two new books out this fall—the poetry collection Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and his nonfiction debut From the Southland (Marick Press).

If you want to read the best poems by a poet who’s been struck by lightning at least twenty-two to twenty-three times, and you have $3.94 (three dollars and ninety four cents for a handsomely produced 192 pages!), order this book. The poet is Bill Knott, and the book is Selected Poems. I’ve loved Knott’s poems since I first read The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, as an undergraduate in 1968. Many poems in this book I still think of as the most penetrating short lyrics of the last fifty years or so. I believe I’ve read everything he’s published since then. He’s always shifting, changing, yet always maintaining a sharp poignancy along with having an ear like a fucking angel! He plays, he dodges, and darts. Many of his poems move through me like electric eels. He’s published several books over the years—from BOA, Random House, University of Iowa Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, etc., and, most recently, in 2004, The Unsubscriber, from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Selected Poems opens with a few pages of what I’ll call anti-blurbs. They make a kind of lacerating found poem. “Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail” is one of my favorites. Nullius in verba: Don’t believe anything anyone tells you. It seems Knott’s poems piss some people off. Someone (I think S.J. Perlman) said: “What’s the point of writing if you don’t piss some people off?” Let the reader know: There are just as many positive quotes he could have used, and the prominent words that occur in those are “original” and “genius.”

Full disclosure: I know Bill Knott and saw him quite frequently—in Boston/Cambridge, Chicago, and other locales—during the ’70s and into the early ’80s. Sporadically since then. He’s also been painting for over twenty years and I have some of his artwork from the early ’90s in my house and office. We’ve been in touch recently, and he’s sent me several more paintings. They’re mostly abstract, with an occasional figurative moment, and often the ghost of a figure. I love their colors. I sense some correlation between the music/voice of his poems and the way he uses color, though I am unable to articulate that.

A small press I edited from 1970–1975, Barn Dream Press, published two of Knott’s early books, Nights of Naomi and Love Poems to Myself. Young poets often did that in those days (and young poets still seem to be doing it today, in print magazines, and now too with the great advantage of the Internet): you started a magazine, a small press, a reading series. The one unwritten rule then (at least to my understanding) was that you didn’t publish yourself. I reiterate: $3.94. Bill Knott, Selected Poems. One thing I remember him saying, several times: “Poetry’s an art form, it’s a craft.” Indeed it is, and he is a master of that craft. Get this book. Read the anti-blurbs first. Then decide for yourself. If you don’t find it worth $3.94, I’ll refund the money myself (if you send me the book), and I’ll refund, as well, my memories of you.

Photo: Thomas Lux

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Atlanta 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.

Readings/ Workshops (West) assistant director Jamie FitzGerald describes a visit to the P&W–supported  EngAGE senior writing workshop taught by Hannah R. Menkin. Menkin is an educator, poet, and visual artist, who uses an integrative approach to help adults, older adults, and veterans discover their own voice through oral history, memoir, storytelling, and the creative/expressive arts.

On November 7, 2012, the morning after Barack Obama was elected for his second term as President, my co-worker Andrew Wessels and I made the hour-long drive across the sprawl of Los Angeles, from the Westside to the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, where we met with a group of “confident,” “relieved,” “peaceful,” “hopeful” seniors (words they chose to describe how they were feeling that morning).

We were welcomed by poetry workshop facilitator Hannah Menkin, whose work with seniors and veterans P&W  has supported since 2009. The poetry workshop at the Burbank Senior Artists Colony is facilitated by EngAGE, a nonprofit organization that fosters the arts, wellness, and lifelong learning for seniors in Southern California. The group in session that morning was holding a special Poetry & Tea celebration. They were delighted to have representatives from P&W visiting them, and the all-female group referred to Andrew humorously as “the rose amongst the thorns.”

Participants spoke about why the writing workshop was valuable to them and shared a few poems. Kit Harper, who writes every day, had this to say: “I love this group. They’re like my sisters. We’re all here to dig deep.” And dig deep they do. Menkin acknowledged that as we age, we experience more losses. In her workshop, it’s understood members can freely address loss, and anything else, together in a safe, uncritical environment.

The group has enjoyed each other’s company for more than a year, and the bonds they have formed show in their easiness with one another. Dolly Brittan, originally from South Africa, attested to this: “We’ve all developed trust amongst each other. It’s a safe place. Poetry has really helped me to cope with my life.”

The most senior member, 90-year-old Karolyn Merson, said of the workshop: “I came here and just blossomed out. It ignited my life.” Later, Merson passed around her chapbook full of astute and often humorous haiku, as well as a booklet of collaged found poems culled from the pages of the Los Angeles Times.

Menkin’s teaching style encourages self-expression without criticism. She has told her group to banish the inner critic and trust in the “true voice,” which needs no revision. Still, the seniors in her workshop spoke of craft and working on poems at home in their spare time. Subtly, Menkin manages to pass on the message of daily work, craft, and revision that is foundational for any serious writer.

Menkin also recites contemporary poetry to her group. The day’s selection included an ars poetica by William Stafford and a poem by the ever-popular Billy Collins. She has her students writing from prompts—found poems, acrostic poetry, sensory-based poems, and so on.  But the mechanics of poetry are secondary to the sisterhood that has formed in the group. The love these women have for poetry is humbling and the tranformations it has clearly wrought in them renews one’s faith in the act of writing things down.

Photos: Hannah Menkin (holding flowers) with her Saturday workshop group, including the “sisters”: Kit Harper (next to Hannah), Karolyn Merson (wearing scarf), Dolly Brittan (next to Karolyn), and Felicia Soissons-Segal (far right). Found poem collage by Karolyn Merson. Credit: Jamie FitzGerald.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.