Resources
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The Romance Novelist’s Guide to Hot Consent
In this article on the feminist sexuality website Jezebel, six successful romance writers discuss the importance of building consent into your scenes of seduction and intimacy, and how to write it in a way that feels natural and appealing. This piece is a must-read for fiction authors in all genres.
The Savvy Self-Publisher
At the website of Poets & Writers magazine, publishing veteran Debra Englander has interviewed numerous self-published authors about their experiences creating and marketing their books. Each interview is supplemented with expert opinions about the success of the author's self-publishing plan, adding up to a valuable case study on all aspects of self-publishing.
The School Magazine
A project of the New South Wales Department of Education (Australia), the School Magazine publishes poems, stories, articles, and plays that have literary and academic merit for elementary-school readers, typically ages 8-12. The four magazines under their publishing umbrella, each for a different age group, are titled Countdown, Blast Off, Orbit, and Touchdown. This is a paying market. See website for their values and content suggestions.
The School Reading List
The School Reading List is a UK-based resource site that recommends books, magazines, and newspapers for children and young adults, sorted by grade level. For British students, there are also resources for taking school entrance exams.
The Sea Letter
Launched in 2018, The Sea Letter is a print and online journal that publishes poetry, short fiction, chapters of longer works, and original photography and art. Submissions are accepted year-round. Payment is $50 for poetry and short fiction, $25 for art.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
By Deesha Philyaw. These bittersweet stories immerse the reader in the lives of Black women struggling against patriarchy and hypocrisy. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and secret queer lovers weigh the risks of authentic intimacy versus passing on patterns of repression to the next generation in order to keep them safe. Philyaw's debut book was a National Book Award finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Prize winner.
The Self Publisher
The Self Publisher is the writing resource site of novelist and writing coach C.S. Lakin. Her blog features useful articles on such topics as copyrighting your work, building an author website, how to price your books, and getting Amazon reviews.
the Shade Journal
In July 2016, queer black poet Luther X. Hughes transformed his blog into an online literary journal, with this mission statement: "the Shade Journal is an online poetry journal focused on the empowerment of queer people of color (QPOC); publishing poems that inspires, devastates, and howls–work that challenges form and upsets the canon, but understands its rigorous and traditional roots. the Shade Journal believes there is something divine about being a queer person of color in a world designed to destroy these bodies." Follow on Twitter @ShadePoetry.
The Shadow Gross National Product
By Barbara de la Cuesta
Where does it all go?
Sonatas memorized
Clarinet lessons
Sixteen years worth
Thirty years of
Diaries kept faithfully
Novels in drawers
Out of print
Foreign travel
Photos of
Sketchbooks filled
With long ago nudes, and
Poems on napkins and in
Albums
Painful letters,
Initials carved in trees—ah these
Last longest...
Chemistry notes
Separations negotiated...
Or excruciatingly ripped away
Like bandages from wounds...?
The town dump, you say
Or senescent memory
Or, more sentimentally, in memory
Of friends, descendants...
Not what I mean.
I mean the exquisite learning
Such efforts
Such efforts are said
To alter synapses but
Synapses short circuit don't they
Blow out
In that final effort?
But no,
It must, I say,
All be preserved
Somewhere
In the germ plasma
I say
In the sub atomic particles
I say
Awaiting confirmation
From cosmologists,
Biologists.
They are my
Theologians.
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal
By Jonathan Mooney. In this affecting and funny road-trip memoir, the author decided to fight his internalized ableism as a former special-education student by traveling through America in an old schoolbus to meet other neurodivergent and learning-disabled people. His personal experiences are interwoven with historical background on the social construction of conditions such as autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia, with suggestions for how we might frame cognitive differences in a less judgmental way.
The Short Story Reading Challenge
This group blog features reviews of short stories and story collections, plus essays on the form.
The Side of the Road
By Dawn Schout
You are relief from cement, stones,
a soft place to land,
trod only by shoes, no youthful bare feet.
You may not be decorated
with daisies, but you'll get
other gifts: the first
slice of bread, apple cores,
empty boxes,
sweat from runners,
flavorless gum, strands
of hair longer than grass,
spit, words we no longer want
to read, bandages holding blood,
all we have to offer,
these little pieces of us.
The Smart Approach to Contest Submissions
In this essay from May/June 2013, the staff of Poets & Writers Magazine gives seven simple steps to make your contest submission choices more efficient and well-targeted.
The Smoke of Dreams
By Reena Ribalow. This stately, melancholy collection of poems is steeped in sensual memories of bittersweet love, be it for a holy city or a forbidden affair. Her roots are planted in Jerusalem, sacred and war-torn, harsh and captivating. Her more personal poems show the same mix of pleasure and pain in romantic relationships. One way or another, history is inescapable.
The Sparrow
Members of a Jesuit-led expedition to another planet face the ultimate test of their wisdom and endurance when they encounter two intelligent alien species, one of which uses the other as both servants and prey. This well-written novel and its sequel, Children of God, raise profound questions about the spiritual meaning of suffering and the unforeseen consequences of our actions.
The Sport of Kings
Bucephala to the Nile, all lands southeast from Thrace.
In ten short years those kingdoms fall. Alexander rules.
Macedonia's king. In pictures he walks his horse and cools
the stallion's flanks, sweat-flecked by the conquest's pace.
Astride his horse, a Draft/Moor's Arab blend,
the Emperor of the West subdues Italy, then Spain.
In 768 Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne.
From that year, European culture and the thoroughbred, descend.
Now I, beside my horse, with nylon braided tethers,
hold one of history's haltered legends by his lead.
I walk my trotter slow through clover fields
to dry the first heat's sweat from his chestnut withers.
His in-suck of air, high-pitched like a wind-raked reed,
subsides. His flaring nostrils slow. His labored breathing yields
as we meander through tall grass, above deep-buried peat.
In service to his king, El Cid walked beside his mount.
And did not knights, who served too many kings to count,
lay hands, like mine, on horses' ribs, to feel the pounding beat
of equine hearts? King Arthur, seeking Holy Grail,
sometimes walked to spare his horse...
and so nobility and noble bloodlines, in due course
came down to this...a race along a rail.
In the paddock I re-install his harness, adjust the girth,
and settle in the sulky for the race's second round.
While lining up to post, I think of things
like bloodlines reaching back. No, I'm not royalty by birth,
nor lineage, yet in each race we've run, I've found
a link to all of history in this sport of kings.
Copyright 2006 by Barclay Franklin
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Barclay Franklin's "The Sport of Kings", appealed to me because of its positive outlook and conversational adaptation of the sonnet form. While the meter is irregular and approaches free verse in spots, the rhyme-scheme is that of a pair of Italian (Petrarchan) sonnets: two sets of abba abba cdecde.
In an Italian sonnet, the transition in line 9 (known as the "volta") to a different pattern of rhymes is supposed to mark the beginning of a new topic or line of reasoning. We see this clearly in the third stanza of Franklin's poem, where historical reflection gives way to the present-day activities of the speaker and his horse. A similar shift occurs between the fifth and sixth stanzas, as we move from King Arthur and the history of racing to the contemporary scene once more. This transition feels more muted because it is a return to a theme we have already visited, rather than an entirely new turn, and also because past and present were already commingled in stanza four. Because the author has taken some liberties with the meter and thematic structure we expect from a traditional sonnet, the casual reader may not notice how elegantly he has structured the interplay of past and present in this sequence.
When writing about the distant past, especially when a great swath of history must be surveyed in a few lines, the temptation is to fall back on stock images or a dry recitation of facts. The first two stanzas sometimes fall prey to the latter error. However, the poem as a whole has the vividness of lived experience because of Franklin's reverent attention to the equine personality, physical behavior and emotional bond with the human rider.
Taking a "horse's-eye" view of history is a creative way to awaken our feelings of personal connection to these remote events. A familiar legend can be given fresh life by reinterpreting it through the perspective of a formerly minor character. Examples include Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet), Virginia Woolf's novel Flush (the love story of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as told by her dog), and W.H. Auden's poem sequence The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. Often, this technique is used satirically, to puncture the authority of the official version and bring out insights that it had repressed. (See, for instance, T.P. Perrin's "Thersites" from our 2005 War Poetry Contest.) "The Sport of Kings" has a gentler intention, to humanize the past and evoke the fairy-tale atmosphere of kinship between man and beast.
We don't dare identify with Charlemagne or Alexander the Great, nor imagine that we could see the world through their eyes, but we can vicariously participate in their glory through the more accessible role of the king's horse. (It's appropriate that the poem begins with the word "Bucephala", the city that Alexander founded in honor of his horse, Bucephalus.) Although the world of the kings is lost to us, the timeless nobility and beauty of the horse, before which even King Arthur bowed, is a historical constant that overcomes the divisions between past and present, or king and commoner.
This poem is strongest when describing the physical sensations of horse and rider, and weakest where it becomes wordy with historical exposition. Lines like "he walks his horse and cools/the stallion's flanks, sweat-flecked by the conqueror's pace" are full of compressed energy and hard consonants. Notably, the stressed syllables are more closely packed together in this line, as compared with "In 768 Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne./From that year, European culture and the thoroughbred descend." This prosy sequence did not have the same well-wrought tightness and personality. This was one spot where I felt the limitations of Franklin's decision not to stick to a particular meter.
Could some extraneous information be cut here? I'm not sure we need to single out a particular date, when the other historical events are not so specified. "768" adds a lot of syllables that break the roughly iambic meter we've heard so far. Moreover, the abstraction "European culture" sounds too academic and lengthy in a lyric poem such as this. Suggestion: "Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne./From thence Europe and its thoroughbreds descend." This revision allows a double meaning for "thoroughbreds" as horses and also their noble riders. Among the other lines I would tighten is the last line, where eliminating the "of" in "all of history" nudges the meter back toward iambic pentameter. One could also consider cutting the "we've run" in the penultimate line for the same reason.
Other fine moments in "The Sport of Kings" are the alliteration in the third stanza ("hold one of history's haltered legends by his lead") and the lovingly observed mechanics of how this powerful beast moves and breathes. The lines from "I walk my trotter" to "deep-buried peat" are the heart of the poem, with every word rightly placed in a fine sprung rhythm and woven into a compelling texture of sounds. This is no abstraction, but a flesh-and-blood animal, gracing us with his mysterious presence. By the time the narrator leans in to feel the horse's great heartbeat, the reader cannot help but hear it too.
Where could a poem like "The Sport of Kings" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes up to $100 in various genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpt
Wells Festival of Literature International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by June 30
A good contest for both emerging and intermediate poets, this award offers 1,000 pounds and a reading at Wells Poetry Festival in Wells, Somerset, in October; fees in UK currency only
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 28
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories such as open-theme, formal verse and humor
Surrey International Writers' Conference Writing Contest
Entries must be received by October 25
Canadian literary conference offers prizes of C$1,000 each for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, by authors aged 18+
Robert Frost Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
$1,000 and public reading at festival in Massachusetts for poems in the spirit of Robert Frost
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Sports Museum
The Sports Museum is a nonprofit educational institution housed in the TD Garden in Boston, which draws on the heritage and values of the New England sporting tradition to help build character in kids. Their programs include the annual Will McDonough Sports Writing Contest for youth in 4th-12th grades.
The StoryGraph
The StoryGraph is a social network for sharing book reviews and recommendations. Created in 2019 by Nadia Odunayo, the app grew in popularity in 2024 as an alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads. Unlike its larger competitor, The StoryGraph allows half-star and quarter-star ratings. It also includes content and trigger warnings for books; the option to leave a check-box review rather than a written paragraph; and a journaling feature to take notes on books as you read them. Goodreads users can export their data to The StoryGraph so they don't lose their wishlists and reading history. Read an interview with the creator in The Huffington Post.
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
By Theodora Goss. Suspenseful but basically light-hearted, this series opener is a fun feminist talkback to the Victorian literary tradition of mad scientists who viewed women as raw material for monstrosities. The daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde team up with the Bride of Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne's poisonous Beatrice Rappaccini, and other not-quite-human women from Gothic fiction to track down a secret society that is performing murderous experiments. The third-person narrative includes frequent first-person intrusions by the characters, teasing each other or disputing how the story is framed. Some might find this editorializing a little too cutesy, as it does lower the dramatic stakes by reassuring the reader that the whole team survives to the end of this adventure. However, the style has the serious purpose of offering an alternative to the solitary hegemonic perspective of the male genius, as well as highlighting its monstrous heroines' common origins in the Victorian Gothic fear of hybridity. Not enough plot threads are resolved at the end, in order to leave an opening for the next book—a structural weakness, but one that does not unduly diminish the reader's warm feelings as the book closes.
The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe: And Other Stories of Women and Fatness
This important anthology from The Feminist Press spans a century of women's short fiction. The large women who populate these stories may be sensual goddesses, lesbian feminists, sideshow performers, battered wives, or troubled teens, but each poses a question about our discomfort with embodiment and female power. A bonus feature of this anthology is an excellent critical essay by Koppelman, a literary historian and the leading expert on short fiction by US women. View her author page at The Feminist Press website for other themed anthologies in this series.
The Submission Grinder
The Submission Grinder is a donation-based tool for poetry and fiction writers to search for publications to submit their work; view anonymized response time statistics based on other writers' submissions; and track their submissions. It is a project of Diabolical Plots, an online journal of speculative and horror fiction.
The Taxidermist’s Cut
By Rajiv Mohabir. Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for this ambitious, passionate debut poetry collection: a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. (Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana's sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida.) The poet is willing to lay his own veins bare in order to create an artifice that is painfully and beautifully true to life. This book won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize.
The Teen Mag’s List of Literary Magazines Accepting Writing and Art from Teens
This 2023 article from The Teen Mag lists reputable journals and funding opportunities for teen authors and artists, including the YoungArts and Scholastic competitions.
The Telepathic Bruise
he punched and i heard them
voices internalised by men i hear them still
1. happenstance
tell me everything
fade only with the bruise
life normalising
truth deposed
hiding placed behind backs
blackened eyes weep, waning back to flesh colour
i hesitate so too, the voices doubt
myself into their existence
clever intuition away
i see only the smiling faces, regret tears
they say 'sorry.' but tell me nothing
i believe in monsters
hold on
that's just my imagination
this time was different
the truth-whispering.
constant scolding, scouring
i hear them all in my crouched ear covering
i touch my face and find no wound
but still the throaty rumblings
but still the voices
echoed lodgements
fitted in sand, silver and lime
all purpling from a bath tap
a telepathic bruise
each day now i welcome the truth
i no longer need them to harm me
self-harming becomes salvation
i know what you're thinking
she's mad
one punch too many
hear now, i can hear you now
i thank you for your honesty
little voices in your mind are now little voices in my mind
trust only in my violence
not in my ribbons
eventually they dim
i refine my art, accordingly
a bashful thought
a bash filled art
i am no treasure
2. circumstance
i return from diversion
without my brushes or turpentine hair
i return to him no longer his prodigy
yet still
he defines my art
and sweaty wakings the night stories
the nightmare now becomes me
and the first completes the pattern
he punches and i hear them
i breathe in the death
the death shouts at me
i screw up my face in sanity
listening
Copyright 2007 by Belinda Smith
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Belinda Smith's "The Telepathic Bruise", uses a fragmented stream-of-consciousness style and unusual juxtapositions of images to convey the psychological disintegration of its abused narrator. As the poem progresses, we become increasingly uncertain who is being addressed and at what point in time we find ourselves. This disorientation reflects the ongoing power of trauma to blur past and present in terrifying flashbacks, as well as the abuse victim's tragic propensity to repeat the pattern in new relationships. The speaker's sense of self has shrunk to a timid lowercase "i" who struggles to differentiate herself from a chorus of internal and external voices. By the last two lines, however, some hope has emerged that she is beginning to find stability and clarity of understanding.
The poem is divided into sections titled "happenstance" and "circumstance". These words have such similar meanings that it initially seems odd to use them as separate section headings. Isn't it like giving two chapters of a book the same title? One is forced to meditate more attentively on the subtle distinctions between them, just as the narrator must look closely at the patterns of abuse in her life to distinguish reality from nightmare, unchangeable past from potentially changeable future. "Happenstance" is a fate outside one's control, suggesting the speaker's passivity and helplessness. "Circumstance" is more open-ended. Her circumstances are merely the facts of her life right now. Do they, too, simply happen to her, or might she have the ability to change them?
The opening lines declare the subject matter of the poem, leaving Smith free to descend into the speaker's disorganized thoughts without fear that the reader will lose the storyline. With the words "tell me everything," we may relax, picturing a therapist and the beginning of a healing confession. However, our expectation of a stable, benign presence is disappointed. Immediately the erasure of truth begins. The bruise fades, and the pressure to deny the abnormality overwhelms her. If she were to tell everything, she would not be believed. She is not given a way to make sense of her experience. "they say 'sorry.' but tell me nothing".
Smith's unconventional speech pattern and word use in the second stanza make this section more compact and memorable. "the voices doubt/myself into their existence/clever intuition away". I was struck by this paradox of doubting something into existence. Doubt makes the real speaker insubstantial while enfleshing the ghosts in her mind. Smith is almost using "clever" as a verb here—the voices are "clever-ing", or tricking, her intuition with the manipulations of a mind run amok. Other unusual phrases that give the poem intensity and texture are "crouched ear covering" and "echoed lodgements/fitted in sand, silver and lime/purpling from a bath tap". Familiar objects are shattered like a Cubist portrait, revealing new angles and unsuspected violent energy.
What makes the bruise "telepathic"? It predicts the future (or one possible future); it communicates without words; it makes connections between different personalities within the speaker's mind, and between her consciousness and that of her abusers. It is even a source of dark power, like a superhero's (or super-villain's) mind-control technique: "little voices in your mind are now little voices in my mind/trust only in my violence/not in my ribbons". These suggestions, of course, do not exhaust the possible meanings of this provocative phrase.
The dark-humored pun toward the end of the first section ("a bash filled art") hints at how the speaker may escape the cycle of abuse. She is speaking the truth that was suppressed in her relationships, but indirectly, through the tools and symbols of art. But don't trust the "ribbons," the artful exterior, she warns; her work is radioactive with violence, even if sublimated into a more acceptable form.
In the second section, "circumstance," the external facts of the speaker's life may be similar but she feels that her attitude is different. "i return to him no longer his prodigy". This man, not previously introduced in the poem, could be an abusive parent, a controlling lover, and/or a domineering artistic mentor. His exact identity almost doesn't matter, because the whole theme of the poem is how she has replicated this relationship in many guises. Despite her new sense of empowerment, he still "defines my art" and haunts her nightmares. But now she is not running away from the pain. Instead of splitting into different voices, the speaker in this section has a unified, if bruised, self. She faces her demons "in sanity", which is a tiny but real step away from "insanity". Let the death shout all it wants—she is listening.
Where could a poem like "The Telepathic Bruise" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: February 28
Writers' resource site offers prizes up to $500 and online publication for poems up to 40 lines; low fee
Connecticut River Review Annual Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Long-running award from Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems; no simultaneous submissions
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Irish literary publisher offers prizes up to 1,000 euros, anthology publication and reading at West Cork Literary Festival; enter online only
Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31 (don't enter before March 1)
Prestigious award offers $300 for unpublished poems by women, from the journal Calyx; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Telling Room
Based in Portland, Maine, the Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center for youth aged 6-18. Their programs seek to build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real audiences for their students. The website includes a list of magazines, contests, and conferences for young writers.
The Third Millenium
all the good air gone
with the ghosts
live wire and chatter
long for a face
a voice, a torso with arms,
legs, gone the
words, books, love
notes, business lies
scattered to the
air—bugs
tend flowers while
some mammals, wrapped in
aluminum, live without joy
on riches and letters of
the alphabet building
clouds floating
around the
O-zone.
Copyright 2005 by Joan Blake
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Joan Blake's "The Third Millennium", is primarily concerned with constructing an atmosphere rather than a narrative or an argument. It appeals to our intuitive ability to perceive connections that we may not be able to explain analytically. John Ashbery is one of the most well-known writers in this style, elements of which can also be found in Mark Strand's early collection Darker.
We're taught to decipher poems by looking for the "real" meanings that the surface images represent: the moon is like a woman's face, the fallen leaf is a metaphor for death. For Blake's poem, I think this technique would miss the point. Trying to match up the "aluminum" or "letters of/the alphabet" to literal features of 21st-century life would prematurely arrest the free association of images that these words are meant to provoke. I will share some of my impressions of the poem below, but these should not be considered an authoritative key to its meaning(s).
The overall mood that I got from the poem was one of unreality and isolation, worsened by technology. I was immediately grabbed by the opening lines, "all the good air gone/with the ghosts", with their strong repetition of "GO-" sounds. The words "gone" and "ghosts" cannot help but arouse feelings of loss. Even before we know where we are in this poem, we are already nostalgic for somewhere else. There was a time before this fog descended, but those better days have slipped away somehow.
"Live wire and chatter/long for a face" suggests that this is going to be a poem about how email, phones and other long-distance communication have replaced authentic relationships. The loss of "good air" reminds us of the pollution that often goes along with society's so-called progress.
But then we get images of scattering and dismemberment—"a torso with arms,/legs, gone the/words, books, love/notes, business lies/scattered to the/air"—that for me brought back those post-9/11 scenes of office debris littering the streets around the World Trade Center site. This allusion lends an additional dimension to the "ghosts" and the spoiling of the air.
In a few brief lines, this stanza manages to evoke several recognizable, interconnected ideas, but so fleetingly that we scarcely understand what memories are producing our emotional reaction. Moreover, the poem still works without any interpretive overlay, as a direct experience of disconnection, confusion and loss.
The second stanza paints a picture of the pleasant but meaningless fantasy-land into which "some mammals" have retreated, while the larger world deteriorates as we have already seen. "Wrapped in aluminum" reminded me of the stock figure of the crazy person who wears tinfoil to keep the aliens from hearing his thoughts. It's shiny, high-tech, but actually flimsy, not offering the protection that these characters seem to expect. Could there be a sadder indictment than saying that we "live without joy/on riches"? In the "letters of/the alphabet building/clouds floating", I saw language and symbols, the things that make us more than mere "mammals", becoming unmoored from meaning and productivity. This stanza had a more universal feeling; its mood comes across perfectly without the need for connections to specific events and problems.
It's hard to explain why I found the last lines, "around the/O-zone", to be a letdown. As readers of this column know, I demand a lot from last lines, but that's because they set the tone for how the reader will remember the poem. Did the journey end at a destination or just stop? Maybe the destruction of the ozone layer is an overly familiar concept, maybe the unusual capitalization and spelling hinted at a double meaning or pun that I didn't get, or maybe the final period made the poem less open-ended than I wanted. Whatever the reason, I didn't feel that "O-zone" had enough significance in this context to warrant the emphasis placed on it.
I would have preferred to continue the poem's dominant mood of floating disconnection and unresolved questions, rather than bringing it to a sudden stop that doesn't feel necessary. A change as simple as removing the final period and bringing "ozone" up to the previous line might suffice:
live without joy
on riches and letters of
the alphabet building
clouds floating
around the ozone
One could also experiment with various adjectives in front of "ozone" to create a more specific mental picture. Around the blue ozone? Around the thin ozone? Many options are possible, depending on the final impression that Blake wants to leave in the reader's mind. Overall, this was an intriguing poem that managed to do a lot in a small space.
Where could a poem like "The Third Millennium" be submitted?
These upcoming contests came to mind:
Poetry Society of America Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 23
https://poetrysociety.org/awards/annual-awards/2020-individual-awards
Highly prestigious awards program for unpublished poems on various themes; poems like "The Third Millennium" might be a good fit for the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for lyric poems on philosophical themes. You'll need to join PSA to enter the Hemley contest and some others, but it's a good deal.
Beullah Rose Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
https://smartishpace.com/poetry-prizes/
$200 prize for work by women poets, from the literary journal Smartish Pace
Milford Fine Arts Council National Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: January 31
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Milford-Fine-Arts-Council/103514274805?ref=stream
$100 prize for unpublished short poems (10-30 lines, maximum 40 characters/spaces per line); no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
The Three Great Secret Things
Gentle, profound coming-of-age story about an orphan boy in postwar America and his introduction to the mysteries of sex, love, art and faith. The boarding-school setting allows insightful readings of literary classics and Christian beliefs to be skillfully woven into the narrative. Readers of all ages will feel for young David Lear as he matures from observer to author of his own life, with help from a strong-willed, unforgettable girl. This book is the sequel to Leaving Maggie Hope but can be enjoyed on its own.
The Tipping Point for Best Selling Authors
In this 2016 post from his blog Dying Words, a resource for mystery and thriller authors, crime novelist Garry Rodgers interviews nine best-selling indie and self-published writers about the strategies that took their book sales to the next level. Some common themes: build a mailing list, focus on your niche, and keep putting out new titles that are well-written and professionally edited.
The Trees Stand Watch
Last month as I lay ill
and dying still,
my neighbor's trees
kept watch
Their bony arms raised
to the skies
defying winter's wrath,
blackly outlining
starkest cold felt deep
within the marrow
of my bones,
and without as well
Then the birches, with March,
heralded false Spring briefly,
with a fuzzy show of slightest green
worn off again in hours
by the ice-storm
I felt surround my heart,
my soul, my everything
Birch is hard-wood
and so am I, so together
we stood strong,
weathered the non-season
Refusing to give up the ghost,
die, as expected;
we toughed out the weeks
until real Spring
Deigned to put in
her appearance
and now the trees stand watch,
their branches lovely,
dancing full of leaves
and grace and hope,
and yet, like sentinels,
they guard my being,
not allowing death
to steal in and make off
with anything
I am loath
to give up
just yet.
Copyright 2008 by S.E. Ingraham
Critique by Jendi Reiter
In this month's critique poem, "The Trees Stand Watch", S.E. Ingraham writes with a simplicity and cleanness of style that befits the narrator's stripped-down spiritual condition. A crisis can force us to abandon the luxury of ironic distance, the fear that our emotions will seem too sentimental if we don't surround them with elaborate artistic tricks. Sincerity is born of desperation.
Illness foregrounds our animal nature and its limitations, sometimes a rude surprise for the artist accustomed to exploring the seemingly infinite territory of the imagination. Here, the narrator learns how to remain present with her painful body by finding kinship with the strong, protective, long-lived trees.
With powerful directness, the first stanza introduces the primal antagonists at work in the poem, death and solitude ("Last month as I lay ill/and dying still") versus life and caregiving ("my neighbor's trees/kept watch"). I think it's significant that we know this detail, that these are the neighbor's trees rather than the protagonist's own property or simply "some trees". "Neighbor" instantly connects the trees to companionship and a kind of unconditional solidarity with strangers in need, as in "love thy neighbor as thyself".
The word "still" in the second line adds no new information to "ill and dying"—one could even call it redundant—and yet I feel it is the pivot of the whole stanza. Some words do extra duty in a poem, common little words with so many meanings that they add layers of significance without calling attention to themselves. The internal rhyme "ill/still" gives a poetic cadence to what would otherwise be a very plain-spoken sentence. "Still" as adverb suggests the long, slow death that we dread—"still dying". "Still" as adjective, meanwhile, sets the tone of stillness, of patient observation. The invalid comes to reinterpret her unwanted immobility in light of the more positive steadfastness of the trees.
The subsequent stanzas flesh out the connection between the speaker and the trees with realistic sensory details. These feel like the genuine observations of a bed-ridden person who has been studying the trees from her window, day after day, perhaps noticing their moods more closely than she ever did in her busy, healthy life. The reader's heart experiences a sympathetic pang as recovery is glimpsed, then lost again: "a fuzzy show of slightest green/worn off again in hours/by the ice-storm/I felt surround my heart". The security reached at the poem's end is earned by this moment of looking into the void.
Something in the rhythm of the final lines falls flat, for me. Perhaps it is because the last seven or eight lines lack the physical imagery that enriches the rest of the poem. The concluding words do not seem strong enough to be stretched out over this many lines. The qualifier "just yet", as the speaker's final word, undercuts the triumph of survival. I would have liked to see a continuation of the parallelism between the condition of the trees and that of the speaker. What sensations experienced by the now-healthy person are analogous to the trees' springtime vigor and delicate beauty? Instead we shift to an abstract explanatory mode after "sentinels", losing some of the sensory grounding that makes this poem succeed.
Though the seasons as metaphor for our mortality are a familiar poetic trope, Ingraham makes it fresh because she is interested in the trees in their own right, not simply as reflections of the human character's feelings. Her real subject is the natural cycle of rebirth that comforts us in our weakness by reminding us that we have companions on the journey.
Where could a poem like "The Trees Stand Watch" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Princemere Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: September 30
$250 prize for unpublished poems, from the literary journal of a nondenominational Christian college
Second Light Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
British writers' group for older women poets offers 300 pounds for poems by women over 30; previously published work accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The True
By Sarah Kornfeld. A darkly humorous cautionary tale for the post-truth era, this work of narrative nonfiction recounts Kornfeld's quest to comprehend the life and death of her former lover and mentor, renowned Romanian theatre director Alexandru Darie. Passionate and enigmatic, Darie was generous with his attention but secretive about the alcohol abuse and political trauma that fatally affected his health. Visiting Romania shortly after his death in 2019, Kornfeld falls under the sway of a volatile young woman who claims to have been his girlfriend. The onset of COVID in early 2020 adds another layer of distance and mystification to their correspondence, as Kornfeld, back in America, becomes enmeshed in elaborate online negotiations to produce a book and TV series about Darie. When the whole enterprise is revealed to be a hoax, Kornfeld must face how grief led her to search for answers where there were none—a parallel to her country's plunge into simplistic conspiracy theories and quick-fix politics.
The Twin Bill
Launched in 2020, The Twin Bill is a handsomely illustrated online quarterly that publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction about baseball. Editors say, "We celebrate the rich history of the game while also recognizing its vibrant present through essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and visual art. We welcome writers of all levels and experiences."
The Uncapping
By Tim Mayo
A friend once told me this story
as I was on my way to a wedding.
It happened deep in the woods
on a ridge somewhere west of where
he lived: a woman he once loved
led him there down path after path,
reading signs only she could see,
to show him a secret place in the earth,
shown to her many years before.
It was capped with a nondescript rock
no one would have ever noticed,
which still took all her small weight
to push aside showing the entrance
to an ancient beehive chamber.
Inside: a circular stone wall rose
from the earthen floor, then arced
inward to form a dome making it
seem impossible to scale back up.
He couldn't believe they climbed in,
so that small opening—its light—
became the only link between them
and the outer world—that they stayed
waiting in the dark, as long as it took,
to see how the buried past hunched
its earth and stone shoulders over them,
and then, they made the difficult
climb out into the rest of their lives.
The United States of Queer Bookstores
This 2024 blog post from Red Hen Press, a prestigious publisher of literary prose and poetry, recommends 50 independent bookstores—one in every state—that are owned by LGBTQ folks or active allies to the LGBTQ community.
The Universe
By Carol Smallwood
It must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read
so it brings me security to make patchwork quilts at night;
it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and thread.
"You are not lonely when you sew," Grandmother often said
as she sewed apron after apron with evident delight;
It must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read.
Other activities most likely should have been my stead:
quilt after quilt I've made at night sitting straight, upright:
it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and thread.
Mixing pattern with plain, varying width until ready for bed,
securing the needle easy to spot on a piece extra bright—
it must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read.
Fleece, flannel, denim, have made many a patchwork spread
and those who receive them do express thanks forthright:
it makes sense to cut up squares to sew with needle and thread.
I've concluded I'll have no edge or center when I'm dead
and finding security sewing squares is better than fright.
It must be true: the Universe has no edge or center as I've read
it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and thread.
The University of Texas at Austin - UT Library Online
This large page of links to etexts shows what a wealth of classic literature is available free online. Choose from thousands of works of prose, poetry, philosophy, religion and world literatures. Some resources are limited to UT Austin users, but many are open to the public. Notable resources include Project Gutenberg, Bartleby and Banned Books Online.
The Unraveling
Eight thousand sunsets ago
you left for the wars of Ilium
I imagined you there Odysseus
taking courage from a song
the thrust of a staff
from a fierce verge of self
one expects kingdoms from.
Since then a flotsam of ill-omens
have washed these shores.
Out of desire and spite
I wove them darkly
into a shroud by daylight
ripped them skein by skein
in the bedding night of Ithaca.
When at last you found your way home,
my mistrusting heart refused you
so bitter it was
from a decade of waiting.
But the melting moment came—
you paused to touch the bedpost
you once carved
from the olive tree thrusting through the floor
a secret foundation
sustaining us where we loved.
Together we wept
offered gifts to the gods.
and you planted an oar
celebrating the passage
and the sorrow.
In a bronze twilight
we each told our story
holding back the night.
Now the shadow of a sundial
crosses your face
now your eyes are restive.
Like boundaries of a dream
they have no home address.
Tell me, dear wanderer
did you come all this long way
to revisit old terrain
inspect your own heart?
Copyright 2004 by Lou Barrett
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Characters in literary classics can become so much a part of our collective psyche that they seem like real people, whose lives continue outside the boundaries of the story. This month's critique poem, "The Unraveling" by Lou Barrett, imagines what happened after Odysseus came home to his wife Penelope. According to Homer's Odyssey, while she waited for Odysseus to return from the Trojan Wars, Penelope kept her suitors at bay by saying she would not remarry until she had finished weaving the shroud of her late father-in-law, Laertes. However, she secretly unraveled the shroud again each night so that the work was never completed. (Read more about Penelope.) In Barrett's poem, a different kind of unraveling is in store when her husband finally comes home.
The opening line, "Eight thousand sunsets ago," measures the beloved's absence in nights rather than years, the enormous number immediately showing us how vast and monotonous the time seems to the one left behind. Why "sunsets" instead of days or mornings? The "bedding night of Ithaca" is when she feels her husband's absence most keenly, and also when she unravels the day's work and perhaps broods on the futility of her actions.
The first two stanzas suggest that darkness has crept into every aspect of her routine. The morbid task of weaving "a shroud by daylight" alternates with the unraveling "out of desire and spite". The objects of these emotions are left nameless. Spite toward the suitors, surely, but her desire for Odysseus is probably also mixed with resentment toward him and the male world of war that lured him away. The emotions themselves may have become their own rationale, divorced as she is from meaningful connection with any man.
Yet Penelope still draws hope from the memory of her husband as a larger-than-life figure, who stands on "a fierce verge of self/one expects kingdoms from." (Fantastic line.) When he returns, the ritual-like gesture that finally melts her mistrust—touching the bedpost—establishes their love as similarly mythic, able to compete with the grandeur Odysseus sought in his voyages. Her realm and her achievement are momentarily equal to his. "The olive tree thrusting through the floor/a secret foundation" parallels the "thrust of a staff" in the first stanza, and the planting of the oar to symbolize that he now belongs to the land, not the sea.
Not long thereafter, though, Odysseus is restless again. "The shadow of a sundial/crosses your face." Do the days weigh as heavily on him as the sunsets did on her? Penelope begins to fear that his dreams "have no home address." Ever the patient one, her tone at the end is gentle and compassionate, not bitter and disappointed: "Tell me, dear wanderer...." It's as if she realizes that she has traveled further in terms of emotional maturity; after all his voyaging, he still doesn't know what he wants. "Did you come all this way/to revisit old terrain/inspect your own heart?"
This final question, like many of the lines in "The Unraveling," is fruitful with multiple meanings. One interpretation: The most important discovery resulting from the voyage was nothing "out there," but rather a deeper understanding of himself and the place he started from. Another, less cheerful interpretation: After everything we've been through, are you really going to reopen the question of whether you belong here? Was your course of action, like mine, circular and pointless?
This poem works so well because it is tightly structured around pairs of opposites: day and night, male and female, patience versus ambitious questing, land and sea. Each member of the pair vies for dominance and in so doing, reveals new aspects of its counterpart.
Where could a poem like "The Unraveling" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
National Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 31
Traditional themes welcome at this competition sponsored by one of Britain's leading poetry organizations; top prize 5,000 pounds
Briar Cliff Review Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Style and content are a good match based on past winners
Third Coast Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: November 15
$1,000 prize from well-known literary journal, judged this year by Pulitzer finalist Sydney Lea
In addition, these journals would welcome poems on classical themes (note that both are highly competitive):
The New Criterion
Conservative, high-modernist review of the arts and culture
First Things
Catholic intellectual review of religion, politics and literature
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Unsealed
The Unsealed is a free online community for people to write and exchange inspirational open letters that reveal strength and encourage compassion. Sports journalist Lauren Brill founded it to provide a space where people of all races, genders, sexual orientations and socioeconomic backgrounds can be heard and supported, while also motivating and educating others. The site offers contests, free workshops, and pen pal relationships to seek advice on personal topics.
The Update
By Joshua Corwin
I tread transgressions
against how far I've come
as a kid diagnosed
on the autism spectrum
at the age of 5
and processing delay
at 6
along with anxiety disorder
and ADHD—
I don't want to repeat
circles, with my feet.
One smaller and the other
—reminds me of my mind.
Neurotypical.
[also, alcoholic—
Thank God I'm sober,
but that's
another story.]
Like a pacifist in rage
I need to accept my brain chemistry.
But persevere.
Circles.
Those feet
make them.
Quake.
And color loses its vivacity...
Like the squeamish self I am—
(Just
see me at the doctor.
Please.
Don't.
I'm embarrassed,
by how I fade.)
O, it's so hard
to fit in
when you're hardwired
to differ.
Range
like a spectrum of shapes:
I circle,
but I transcend.
But because I do,
I have these fits
{usually every 3 months or so,
sometimes once a year}
It comes from acting
typical
when you're
atypical.
—did I tell you I had to learn
thousands of idioms?
[I thought...
when someone
said, "it's raining
cats and dogs,"
That it was.]
—flashcards of rules...
I don't want to rock back and forth,
as I pass on going out the door,
because I am now the floor...
unable to speak
when I have so much to say...
That happens every now and then...
and my feet repeat themselves in circles...
around a shape—a square or rectangle or circle perfect:
the kitchen table, where Dad is late
because he's paying the bills,
so I can get the therapy I need,
and the speech therapy
—to learn idioms...like..."it's raining cats and dogs"
—I feel like "it's raining cats and dogs":
the words and screams of atypicality,
in dysfunctional
familiac ways—words invented
I have so much to hear.
I have so much to say.
I'm trying to not repeat the circle and fall on the ground...
But perhaps. Putting on the guise
and persevering like I do.
Perhaps, I need to fall.
Perhaps, I need to circle.
How else could I draw the line
of when it's time to stop the update?
[This poem first appeared in Placeholder Press, "Archive", December 31, 2019.]
The Valley of Hearts Delight
By Mary Lou Taylor
From the vantage of lush hillsides
Santa Clara Valley unveils fields
of yellow mustard in wild disarray
between row upon row
of pale pink cherry blossoms.
Plum trees offer the first whisper
of spring, the valley bursting
with delicate, fruity scents.
A drought ended, brought on
the first celebration, the first
Blossom Festival, invitations
to view the blossoming.
Hundreds responded. Invitations
are out again forty years later
for this true celebration—music,
vintage cars, food, arts and crafts,
poetry—and memories of a peach,
pink and white world.
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
Every story is a masterpiece of voice, setting, and emotional depth in this collection of short fiction from the 1970s and '80s. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Mary Gaitskill, Ron Hansen, Chris Offutt, Susan Power and John Edgar Wideman. This anthology stands out for the genuine diversity of its authors and subject matter (race, class, gender, location, historical period) and the absence of intellectual anomie and cynicism: something truly human is at stake in every tale.
The Volta in Flash Fiction
In this craft essay, fiction writer Cole Meyer, an editor at The Masters Review, suggests structuring a flash fiction piece like a poem with a "volta"—a shift of thought or mood that gives the piece its tension and forward movement.
The Voodoo Doll Parade
The profane becomes sacred under this poet's unflinching attention, in earthy poems about illness, sex, and prayer (and sometimes all three tangled up in bed together). The heart of this chapbook is a series of unforgettable narratives about homeless and mentally disabled clients of The Dining Room, a soup kitchen in Oregon where the author volunteered. This book was selected by Terry Wolverton for the Main Street Rag Author's Choice Chapbook Series.
The War Poetry Website
British site features bios of leading WWI poets, links to anthologies, and well-crafted poetry about contemporary conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
The Web of Language
The Web of Language is Dennis Baron's blog focusing on newsworthy issues in grammar, language usage, and technology. Topics include the history of gender-neutral pronouns, America's politically motivated bans on using foreign languages, what makes a brand name a racial slur, and the interpretation of hate-crimes statutes.
The Weeds
By Gil Fagiani
Last of the old-time Yankees,
the Weeds never mixed
with their suburban neighbors
and kids said the younger brother was psycho,
pulling a knife on trick-or-treaters
when they knocked on the door.
A fence thick with vines and branches
blocked a view of their yard,
vibrant with snorts, grunts, moos,
clucking, cawing. I once spotted
the elder Weed driving his pick-up truck
with a live deer in the front seat.
When the peacocks came,
their piercing cries echoed
through the neighborhood
He-lp! He-lp! He-lp!
At first, thinking someone needed a hand,
I ran down and rattled the gate door,
but the younger Weed waved an ax
and scared me away.
I got used to the peacocks' cries,
saw them parading on the sidewalk
by the Weeds' house,
their upright purple plumes,
the rainbow eye
of their erect tail feathers.
One day a police car stopped
and two cops asked about reports
of a man shooting at pet dogs,
when the peacocks cried
He-lp! He-lp! He-lp!
What's that? the cops asked.
Sounds like somebody’s in trouble, I said,
pointing to the Weeds' house.
When the cops arrived,
the younger Weed cursed at them,
shotgun in hand
and, after a brief standoff,
he was taken away in handcuffs
—to the funny farm, I heard—
and never seen again.
The Weight Journal
Launched in 2020, The Weight Journal is an online literary space for the best poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by high school students. Editor Matthew Henry ("MEH") is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and the author of Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020). Read an interview with him about The Weight Journal in Frontier Poetry.
The Whole 9
Free online job board features calls for artists, writers, performers, and graphic designers, plus contests and other opportunities for creative people.
The Whore’s Child and Other Stories
Deftly drawn portraits of intimate relationships explore how the people closest to us may be the most mysterious. In the title piece, an elderly nun in a fiction writing class writes her memoirs in defiance of the teacher's expectations, but the exercise reveals that the true story is different from what she had thought it to be. Other pieces gently probe the strengths and weaknesses of long-married couples, and how they are held together as much by the fictions they believe as by the truths they know about one another.
The Wicken Bird
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
A glimpse of feathers in the reeds.
And the air carries the spring's return
where the rain tastes of the sun
when other birds are sought
from the world beyond.
An instinct conferring grace
over land and water
passing through nature's dreams
prepared for a life of flight.
The marshland melody foretells
a future watchful and winged,
an ancestral enchantment
woven in a thread of grass.
We search the sky for signs
only the clear eye can see
for the coming season
of beauty and strength in song.
In the bird world lovers are chosen
to bind desire in harmony.
All else is curious intrusion,
a cuckoo's egg of course.
The Wild
She would have sworn up and down
That there was nothing more common
Than the constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet.
The warm monotone of hot water against steel
Cancelled the emotion in the farmer's voice.
She didn't have a choice
But to sit there and wait
For one more syllable to explode.
And what a heavy load for such a young girl.
She'd been alive for eight years and still laughed like a child
But the scars on her thigh showed that she's battled the Wild.
Beneath the eyes of a woman, she wore a little girl's pout
As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out.
Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet.
Like trust, their bodies took an instant to break,
And an eternity to mend.
By then, the screamers from the barn
Refused to be reconciled with their laughing counterparts
By the simple reassurance of fun and games
Perhaps gone just a bit too far.
Her work was careful and clean. She didn't cut herself at all;
Couldn't afford to lose more blood after her terrible fall.
Hot, red innocence had flooded the land,
The day the Wild of home had knocked it out of her hand.
The sour aftertaste of fruits that don't belong in human mouths
Can only be rinsed out by the
Warm, warm water, so
The constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet
Remained more in demand than anything else.
It had taken eight years, but eventually,
She had learned to read
The cryptic braille of scabs that lined his forearm.
She could understand what he muttered
Under alcohol-stained breath,
And the worst part:
She would have sworn that there was nothing more common.
Copyright 2007 by Tabitha Wood
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Tabitha Wood's "The Wild" as this month's critique poem to explore the potential benefits and pitfalls of multiple styles within a poem, and to illustrate how an author can create dramatic tension by withholding information. Fans of mystery and horror films know that the unseen menace is often the most frightening. The creaking door, the odd angle of light, put the audience in the shoes of the protagonist who gropes for clues to the identity of the threat. Our inability to piece the facts together mirrors her helplessness.
With cinematic pacing, Wood focuses first on the dripping faucet, leaving us to speculate what trauma could have turned this ordinary object so sinister. The entire experience of violation is contained within this image. It is an all-consuming wrongness that poisons the smallest, most prosaic details of the child's world. Wood understands that to describe the abuse with more specificity would be to step outside the perspective of the victim, who has no name for what has happened to her—it is simply "The Wild", the haunted forest of fairy-tales, from which the monsters of our collective unconscious emerge. The unspeakable is defined by a negative, "the sour aftertaste of fruits that don't belong in human mouths".
The imagery now takes a more fantastical, overtly violent turn: "As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out./Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet." Because she began with a realistic, emotionally understated setting, Wood can dial up the intensity without seeming melodramatic. The striking phrase "hot, red innocence" reverses the usual values we assign to these attributes.
The word "chalet" did confuse my mental picture of the scene, since this style of building is more common in alpine or beach resorts than on a farm. I also don't associate scorpions with any of these types of landscape, but rather with a desert environment. Perhaps we are not meant to read this passage literally; it has the feel of a child's embellished imaginings, where the farmhouse becomes a chalet (or castle) and dead grasshoppers could be dangerous stinging insects. This still doesn't fit with how I understood the poem's general structure, putting the real-life segments in free verse and the metaphorical interpretation in the italicized, rhymed couplets.
How wise of Wood to keep those "screamers from the barn" offstage, an obscene parody of the screams of delight from the child's "laughing counterparts" at play. As W.H. Auden said in his famous poem "Musée des Beaux Arts", "About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters...That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." The outside world going about its business, ignorantly and indifferently happy, reinforces the abused child's isolation.
The ending follows the same "less-is-more" logic of the earlier stanzas. The child learns to read the scars on her abuser's body (a parallel to those on her own thighs?) and understand his drunken mutterings, but we're not told outright what she learns. An empathy, perhaps, that would seem like cheap and sentimental moral equivalence if outsiders like us verbalized it. We get a subtle clue in the last line: "she would have sworn that there was nothing more common." The worst part, for her, is knowing that abuse is so common that her tormentor was once a victim himself, perpetuating the pattern. What happened to her, unfortunately, is not a rare exception.
It's risky to include different styles within a short poem, as Wood does here. Done right, multiple voices can add depth and tension as each provides a new interpretation of the same reality. However, it undercuts the writer's authority if she seems unable to decide on the right voice for her story.
I felt the technique was only a partial success in "The Wild" because the rhyming lines are not as tightly crafted or mature in their authorial voice as the free-verse section. Rhyming couplets with no evident meter are a common feature of beginning writers' work, and I find them less effective than true formal verse because they suggest a blinkered emphasis on end-rhyme to the exclusion of the other elements of a poetic line—a musical cadence, varied pacing and syntax, and diction that differs from prose. The line is not disciplined; as long as it ends with a rhyme, it can wander as long as it wishes (a bargain pushed to its absurd extreme by Ogden Nash's light verse). For instance, I felt "the day the Wild of home had knocked it out of her hand" was a mixed metaphor that Wood wouldn't have used unless forced to find a rhyme for "land". When she says "knocked it out of her hand" I picture a solid object being dropped, but the only possible referent for "it" is the "hot, red innocence," presumably a liquid, blood.
Would the poem work better without the italicized sections? I think Wood's intuition is correct that a more emotional interior voice is needed as a counterpart to the repression and confinement of the child's external situation. One reason these sections feel weaker to me may be that they over-explain, compared to the Hitchcock-like subtle terrors of the free verse segments. I would like to see more surrealism, more drama, more lines like "lined her wall with shards of glass" and "hot, red innocence". And perhaps no rhymes. In fact, try going further in the direction of psychological chaos with a fragmented and surreal style, as Belinda Smith used in the poem we critiqued in February, "The Telepathic Bruise", another narrative of abuse. "The Wild" is already a powerful poem, and will be even better when its parts cohere a little more harmoniously.
Where could a poem like "The Wild" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Texas poetry society offers $100 prizes in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature and novel excerpts
Connecticut Poetry Competition (formerly the Brodine/Brodinsky Poetry Competition)
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 and anthology publication for unpublished poems
League of Minnesota Poets Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes up to $125 for poems on various themes or in traditional forms (18 categories in all); publication not included
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
