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Icebreakers Lit
Icebreakers Lit is an online journal that publishes collaborative writing (two or more authors) in the genres of poetry, short fiction, personal essays, flash prose, and hybrid text. If you don't have a collaborator in mind, ask them to match you with another interested author. Previously published work is eligible. See website for themed submission calls. Editors say, "We like 80s and 90s nostalgia, nods to pop culture, and vulnerability. We like good writing that doesn't take itself too seriously. We also like being surprised and things that don't quite follow the rules."
Idiots’ Books
Idiots' Books is a Maryland-based indie press that publishes offbeat, satirical illustrated books featuring the work of writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr. Books are distributed through a subscription service. Titles include 'Dawn of the Fats', billed as "the oft-neglected examination of that special place where funnel cakes and zombiism collide"; 'Ten Thousand Stories', a book whose split pages can be recombined into 10,000 absurd but still grammatical narratives; and 'After Everafter', which gives ten classic fairy tales the same (mis)treatment.
Idiots’ Books
Idiots' Books is a Maryland-based indie press that publishes offbeat, satirical illustrated books featuring the work of writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr. Books are distributed through a subscription service. Titles include 'Dawn of the Fats', billed as "the oft-neglected examination of that special place where funnel cakes and zombiism collide"; 'Ten Thousand Stories', a book whose split pages can be recombined into 10,000 absurd but still grammatical narratives; and 'After Everafter', which gives ten classic fairy tales the same (mis)treatment.
If a Tree Falls: A Family’s Quest to Hear and Be Heard
When her first daughter was born deaf, memories of feeling unheard by her own mother led Rosner to trace the history of deafness in her family and imagine how love might bridge the communications gap between parents and children. This beautifully constructed memoir from Feminist Press touches on themes of assimilation, identity formation, and healing. Interwoven with Rosner's tender and humorous memories of her children's early years are vivid fictionalized scenes of her Jewish immigrant ancestors, whom she imagines wrestling with the same challenges in a very different cultural setting. The technology and politics of deafness may keep changing, this book suggests, but the need to connect with the ones we love is universal.
Illypsis Poetry: Amina Jordan-Mendez
Amina Jordan-Mendez is a poet, spoken-word performer, and activist in Western Massachusetts. She was the 2019-20 Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellow. She says, "Much of the intellectual property of Afro people has always been storytelling, poetry, song. I write for my soul. I teach for my heart. In my curriculum I strive to invite young people of color into poetry, wellness, spiritual health, advocacy, radical accountability."
Image: Art, Faith, Mystery
Beautifully designed, thought-provoking quarterly journal of the arts and religion. Free email newsletter profiles contemporary artists, writers and musicians whose work engages with spiritual themes in profound ways.
Immigrant
By Gary Beck
I carry the delivery bag
and no one looks at me.
They ignore the delivery boy
and I can't tell them
I’m a man, not a boy.
I hate my boss
who talks down to me,
because I'm an immigrant.
I hate the people who tip me
as much as those who don't.
They are all the same,
despising me.
I try not to think of the old days
when I walked with Shining Path,
carried an AK-47...
No one laughed at me then.
Now I am a delivery boy
and must eat my pride.
In a Kept World
By Carmine Dandrea. This noteworthy chapbook from Finishing Line Press is a unified 17-poem cycle voiced by a solitary older man inside a house in Michigan in deep winter. As the "prime suspect" of his own examinations, he reflects on mortality and time wasted. Women from his past reappear as nameless sirens and ghosts, arousing both desire and regret that he did not value their intimacy enough. Despite the assaults of unforgiving weather and the temptation to succumb to darkness, he also finds moments of sensual joy and radiance in the ordinary furnishings of his monastic cell. The recurring image of the garden comes to represent not only the literal promise of spring but the "seeds of love" and "sureness of life" that he wants another chance to cultivate in his soul.
In Break Formation
The indications used to come
like movie fighter planes in break
formation, one by one, the perfect
plummet, down and out. This time they're
slower. But after supper, when I hear
her in the kitchen hum again, hum
higher, higher, till my ears are
numb, I remember how it was
the last time: how she hummed
to Aramaic peaks, flung
supper plates across the kitchen
till I brought her by the shoulders
humming to the chair.
I remember how the final days
her eyelids, operating on their own,
rose and fell, how she strolled
among the children, winding tractors,
hugging dolls, how finally
I phoned and had them come again,
how I walked behind them
as they took her by the shoulders,
house dress in the breeze, slowly
down the walk and to the curbing,
watched them bend her in the back
seat of the squad again,
how I watched them pull away
and heard again the parliament
of neighbors talking.
Copyright 2008 by Donal Mahoney
Originally published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Winter 1968-69
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Donal Mahoney's "In Break Formation" for this month's critique because it illustrates how understatement and the careful withholding of information can enhance the power and freshness of a poem about a traumatic subject. Families affected by mental illness are often marked by secrecy, shame and confusion. Their members may feel like powerless spectators to the events of their own lives. Mahoney captures the dream-like numbness of this family's surrender, first to the momentum of the mother's madness, then to the authorities who take her away. The contrast between his flat reportage of details and the strangeness of those details sets up a dramatic tension that resembles the "humming" of an incoming bomb.
As we learn from the first stanza, the title was inspired by images of war planes being shot down and separated from their aerial formation. So, too, the woman in this poem is pulled away from her family, her unpredictable course determined by her broken internal compass. "Break formation" in this context also suggests the building-up of forces prior to a psychotic break.
The narrator, who I assumed was her husband and the father of the children in the fourth stanza, tries to steer her "humming to the chair" but his piloting skills are overwhelmed. That phrase gave me a mental image of an electric chair on death row, humming with energy as it is prepared for the next prisoner. Perhaps electroshock treatment, as well? Domestic, military and medical scenarios seamlessly shade into one another, prompting reflections on how dysfunction in one of these systems might impact the others.
The political analogies in this poem are never strained by over-explanation. Items that suggest a wider canvas than the domestic—fighter planes, Aramaic peaks, parliaments—are simply included in his catalog of details, as natural or unnatural as a woman throwing plates. Indeed, what does it mean to be sane in a world of violent conflict? Paranoia is never a purely private aberration. Like Ophelia, or a flower child, the woman could be said to possess a certain gentle beauty in her madness, "how she strolled/among the children, winding tractors,/hugging dolls"—an innocence that offsets the heartless intrigues of rational men.
However, the opening scenes of the poem imply that these moments of trance-like calm portend an abusive outburst. Overwhelmed, "I phoned and had them come again," the narrator says ominously, as if we all know who "they" are. He lets the authorities handle the woman like an inanimate object, or a criminal: "I walked behind them/as they took her by the shoulders.../watched them bend her in the back/seat of the squad again..." Has he betrayed her or saved her? The little word "again" drops a weight of despair on this scene as we realize that this rescue operation has happened before, apparently to no effect.
The last stanza relates the personal tragedy back to structural oppression with the image of the "parliament of neighbors". A parliament should be able to exercise power on behalf of the disadvantaged, but here it is depicted as adding to the shame and helplessness of the victims of this "bombing". Perhaps these neighbors are not so different, after all, from the madwoman cocooned in her dangerous visions, unable to break out of her solipsism and see the suffering of those caught in the crossfire. A lesser poem would spell out the moral, but Mahoney wisely refuses to do the work of self-awareness for us. It is sufficient for him to bear witness to discomforting facts, letting us draw our own analogies to the world we live in.
Where could a poem like "In Break Formation" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Lucille Medwick Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
Free contest offers $500 for poems on a humanitarian theme; entrants must be Poetry Society of America members (we highly recommend joining)
Fellows' Poetry Prize Competition
Entries must be received by December 31
Award of 500 pounds from UK-based literary society The English Association is open to British writers aged 16+
Strokestown International Poetry Competitions
Postmark Deadline: January 22
Irish literary festival offers prizes up to 4,000 euros for unpublished poems in English, Irish or Scottish Gaelic languages
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 31
Prestigious twice-yearly award offers large prizes for poetry, fiction and nonfiction, plus publication in handsomely produced literary journal; editors appreciate work with social-justice themes
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
In My Father’s House: A Memoir of Polygamy
This insightful, compassionate memoir tells of growing up within a breakaway fundamentalist Mormon sect that considered plural marriage a holy obligation. A theology of eternal family bonds, combined with the need to hide from persecution, drew her father's many wives and children closer together but also stifled their self-development. Amid the upheaval of social roles in the 1960s and '70s, the author strives to discover her own connection to God without rejecting her people. Personal narrative is well-balanced with historical background. First written in 1984, this book was reissued in 2009 by Texas Tech University Press.
In Our Write Minds
Kim Kautzer's blog offers lessons and resources for teaching writing to young people. Useful for schoolteachers and homeschooling parents.
In Sonnino
By Helen Bar-Lev
Signora Italia
sits on her terrace
on the top of steep steps
She is so old, so white,
so wrinkled, so immobile,
she seems to be rooted
in the planters like the flowers around her
She stares at us as we pass up the alley
and is there still when we return
many photographs and espressos later
Signora Italia does not say bongiorno,
does not wave, has not moved at all
and I envy this woman
planted in the soil of her country
While I am the intruder,
stuttering in her language
faltering in her alleyways
humbled before her history
As much as I read,
as much as I see
I shall never know how it is
to be rooted here
This poem and accompanying painting will be included in an exhibit at the Chagall Artists House in Haifa, Israel, opening September 17, 2016.
In the Collage of Life
Artistically designed limited-edition chapbook pairs poetic reflections with intricate abstract pen-and-ink drawings and collages suggesting forms from nature. Schulman keeps alive the tradition of books as art objects, creating an "illuminated manuscript" with a decisively modern feel.
In the Ghost-House Acquainted
Prizewinning first collection of poetry depicts the farming life unsentimentally yet with wonder at the mysteries of birth, death and transcendence. The language of these poems can be as stark and rugged as a Massachusetts winter, then blossom forth with the joy and terror of encountering the sacred in the cycles of nature. This book won the 2004 New England/New York Award from Alice James Books and the 2005 L.L. Winship award from PEN/New England.
In the Street Without My Glasses
By Harry Bauld
Blur sips at the blue bowl
of morning. The heart,
old mole, noses forward
to sense something of steel, maybe
of stone—without a lens the filth
is gone. Unrefracted men and women
regress toward a trembling Monet mean,
trees and marquees go dumb
in the warble of sky,
and even nameless cars
dodging their promised manslaughters
gleam like starlings
under bus faces smeared
to leaf and petal. Someone crosses
the street, a tremolo
of arm, a shudder of color
smoothed to one age, race and sex
as light as that shadow
shimmering off the asphalt
like distant desert heat, the true flicker
we may be. The world
before the uncorrected eye
brims, marbles, quivers
over its boundaries, wells.
In the Year of the Disease
By Phyllis Klein
after reading Joy Harjo's poem "Grace"
there was nothing more to lose until
there was. It was one thing after another,
the spring we hardly could notice
although it went on without a second thought.
It was the fabric of the human world unraveled.
No haircuts, no friends around the table,
no doctor visits. It was going to work, buying,
selling, all lost, or morphed into sitting
in front of our machines of connection.
It was grace, had we lost her or did she watch
from her balcony as the world pitched
into a chasm of mystery and gloom? Was she
a woman, or had she shapeshifted into a dream?
A tulip or a violet open in the sun? Some
of us knew they could find her, knew the places
she liked to hang out, while others kept trying
for a glimpse, like looking for someone
or something that had died. But she hadn't.
She might have been obscured in grief,
as she could pick it up on the wind, in the sun
or stars. She might have been angry,
and had to hide with the flowers she crushed
in her fists. Maybe she was too tired
or heartsick herself for a time.
Maybe she was lost somewhere until
she could find her way. The way. The way
back from a disaster.
Independent Book Review
Independent Book Review publicizes small press and self-published books through online reviews and author interviews. They also sell editorial services such as developmental and copyediting, proofreading, and book design. (Winning Writers does not recommend paying for reviews; submit your book for consideration to their free reviews service only.)
IndieReader
IndieReader offers self-published authors an attractive, professional-looking portal to list and sell their books. A fun feature of the site is the Indie Book Matchmaker, for readers seeking to discover new authors. Select a type of book from their quirky dropdown menu (options include "Fantasy Romance", "Hard-Boiled", "Based on the Bible", and "About Floral Arrangement"), then select a comparable well-known title from the second menu.
Indies Unlimited
Fiction writer K.S. Brooks administrates this online community that offers a platform for self-published and small press writers to promote their books. Weekly themed contests, judged by the readers of the site, offer the chance to be published on the website and in an annual e-book anthology. "At Indies Unlimited, we support a broad and inclusive definition that encompasses authors whose body of work is not obligated to a single large publishing company. Authors who are exclusively self-published, those who work with small print or regional presses, or small digital publishers, and those who may do some of each, or even have only some work published by traditional publishers are welcome here. The bottom line is that if you consider yourself to be an indie, you most likely qualify."
Indies Unlimited PublishingFoul Survey
Indies Unlimited is a platform to promote the work of self-published and small press authors and discuss best practices in the industry. This page summarizes the results of their 2015 PublishingFoul survey, which asked authors to share stories of being scammed by publishers. Follow them on Twitter @IndiesUnlimited and search the #PublishingFoul hashtag to keep up with and contribute to this conversation.
Indrisos
Indriso is a form created by contemporary Spanish poet Isidro Iturat. The poem is formed by two triplets and two one-line stanzas (3-3-1-1), with free use of the rhyme and the number of syllables in its verses. "The indriso comes from the sonnet but it is not a sonnet. In the same way, the sonnet is a variation of the Provençal song but it is not a Provençal song." See examples (mostly in Spanish, with some Englist translations) on his website.
Industry Interview: Talking Book Cover Design with Laura Duffy of Laura Duffy Design
In this industry interview, I speak with book cover designer, former Random House art director, and North Street Book Prize co-sponsor Laura Duffy about designing covers for indie authors. What can authors expect when working with a book cover designer for the first time? What is some important vocab for indie authors to know when working with their designer? And how can authors navigate the expectations during the design process?
Watch the entire interview for Laura's full insights. Some highlights include:
Laura Duffy on helping the author transition into the self-publishing industry (1:36):
Most of the people who come to me have never published before. So I give them kind of a heads up; okay, so you're going to focus on the cover, and then down the line we're going to be publishing it. So there's the back, and the flaps, and making all these decisions about trim, and formats, and stuff like that… if an author can start thinking about doing those things early on, it's best.
People come away appreciating that I've given them kind of a bird's eye view of what to expect. It's not just focusing on the cover, it's focusing on as much of the publishing process as I can tell them… I've been working with Indie authors for a few years now, and I was starting to hear the needs, the questions, all of the pain points, and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to do a deep dive into this world and really offer what I've learned along the way. And now that's what I do.
On working with an author's existing knowledge of design (6:59):
When we're first talking about the cover, I don't expect the author to really know exactly what they want, and that's where I come in—you know, reading the book and coming up with my own ideas, and then having a conversation… Either I've nailed it the first time and you're happy, which, you know, which does happen, or then we start to say, "Okay is it too dark? Is it the colors? Is it, you know..." then that's where the education starts to take place.
On prioritizing marketing needs as a cover designer (7:43):
I'm not just doing a cover to make somebody happy, I'm putting a cover together that's going to sell, that's going to attract readers. That's the goal.
Industry Interview: Talking Book Structure with Jendi Reiter, Editor of Winning Writers and Author of Origin Story
In this industry interview, I discuss book structure with Jendi Reiter, editor of Winning Writers, North Street Book Prize judge, and author of Origin Story, a literary novel about a gay man who recovers his traumatic memories by writing a superhero comic book in the 1990s.
I ask Jendi, what makes good book structure? What kinds of book structure do they typically notice in the North Street Book Prize, both effective and not-so-effective? How can self-publishers improve their book covers? How has Jendi's book structure been influenced by their North Street reading, and what words of advice do they have for North Street entrants?
Watch the entire interview on YouTube for all of Jendi's insights. Some highlights include:
Jendi on common difficulties with memoir structure (2:30):
It seems like we get a lot of memoirs that just go straight chronologically. You know, this is my childhood, this is my adulthood. And it takes a lot to make that retain interest… What I really like in a memoir, if it is going to be more straightforward/chronological, is to have a shorter span of time. You might start with a dramatic incident and then lead up to how you got there. Like, "I was at my father's funeral, and I did not expect him to die at forty-two. And I look back at what led to that". Then you go back. So you know what the payoff is going to be and why we are investing in this person's life story.
On poetry collection structure (4:48):
I feel like people don't structure their collections, and they should. I often get a batch of poems from someone, and maybe they're all good, but does one lead to the other? Poetry, I think, has to either have a narrative arc or a thematic weaving of two, or three, four, or five, themes and image sets that you're going to start with and develop. Like a fugue, like a motif that is being developed and recurring, intertwining with other, with other motifs. And to me, that's a collection that's really been thought through.
On art book structure (6:03):
With art books, there can be so many repetitive images, or images that don't seem to be presented in any particular order, and they might be really good images, but it becomes boring to read a whole book of it, where you don't really feel like it's building to anything. There has to be a sense that this is developed, it isn't just a collection.
On children's picture book structure (8:12):
With a picture book, sometimes people just try to put too many twists into a 32-page book, you know, or they make it much longer than a 32-page book, which for a picture book is, you know, a risky choice. So, you know, focus on one issue, one problem that's age appropriate, and then have the narrative resolve that problem.
On fostering a sense of unity in a book's structure (11:33):
[While writing, I've sometimes wondered], does this all make sense? Like, does this all belong in the same book, just because it belongs in my head? I think after a while, with a lot of practice, one can really lean into one's particular grab bag of weirdnesses and realize that you're the unifying factor. And if you're obsessed with certain things, somehow there's something they have in common, but you still have to find a way to sell that to the reader. And a lot of that has to do with just not lingering too long on things that don't serve the main reveal of the plot.
On using multiple genres to portray trauma recovery in Origin Story (26:37):
Trauma recovery is a lifelong process, and it's one that takes different forms the further you go along, but at different levels, hopefully higher levels, the more you go into that basement, and, you know, either slay the monster, or at least get rid of the monster, or make peace with the monster… Writing this book, and writing Peter's comic book scripts, where this character of the Poison Cure is either killing or curing people through his sexual contact, Peter's expressing the contamination that one feels as a sexual abuse survivor without knowing why. So his metaphors are telling him the truth before he knows the truth literally, and writing those scenes was so cool, to write a comic book script. I'm now working on a fantasy novel, which is very hard, and I learned a lot from trying out different genres within Origin Story.
On book cover design (34:24):
When I look at the book entries, often a couple of mistakes that people make with cover design is the cover doesn't fit the mood of the book, the cover is hard to read. I've seen books that had no title or author name anywhere on the book. Don't do that!
Contemporary book covers, unless they're biographies or history books, rarely have actual photos on them anymore. If you're using a stock photo on a book cover, it looks self-published in a way that isn't really to your advantage. A nice matte book cover with a good illustration will usually do you better for a literary book… Some of the memoirs have nice photo covers, but they have a kind of a sepia tone, or they've been manipulated in some way, where they look a little bit more soft focus, or they're inset with some other design elements… Readability is another issue. You want your design elements not to clash with your text elements. Both of those should be easy to read.
(For more insights about book cover design, see my conversation with our North Street co-sponsor and book design expert, Laura Duffy.)
On the importance of sensitivity readers (48:32):
In the literary world, there's a lot of over-sensitivity and weird, kind of ideological policing and asking for proofs of identity, which I think can be really unhelpful, but I think sensitivity reads as a practice are great. And if you want to call it something else, because sensitivity sounds like a weird word to you, that's fine, but just consider it research… If you were going to write an action movie, you'd research guns and airplanes and history and whatever it is. If you're going to write a medical thriller, you talk to a doctor about whether this is a plausible treatment for this illness, and are these the right symptoms. So if you're going to write about a certain culture or demographic, don't take it personally, as though you have to get permission from a group to write about a certain kind of character. Just think of it as, you want your book to be realistic and believable.
And a message of appreciation for North Street writers and poets (50:09):
Thank you for engaging with Winning Writers. We're really proud of you for having written a book, finished a book, designed a book, published a book, and had the guts to send it in to us! If we don't like it, somebody will. Just love yourself and write your books.
Learn more about our North Street Book Prize here: winningwriters.com/north
People, resources, and North Street winners mentioned in the video:
Ellen LaFleche, co-judge of the North Street Book Prize
Tracy Koretsky, poet and literary critiquer
Denne Michele Norris, writer and editor of Electric Lit
Critique Corner poetry critiques from Jendi Reiter and Tracy Koretsky
The Editors of Color Diversity Databases, for sensitivity reads, developmental editing, and more
Two Natures by Jendi Reiter
An Incomplete List of My Wishes by Jendi Reiter
Her Widow by Joan Alden
The Art of Symeon Shimin by Tonia Shimin
My Pants by Nicole Kohr
The Cricket Cries, the Year Changes by Cynthia Harris-Allen
Waking the Bones by Elizabeth Kirschner
Endemic by Robert Chazz Chute
Ingrid Wendt: “The Unknown Good in Our Enemies”
This essay honoring the poet William Stafford reflects on how literature can foster mutual understanding and empathy in order to break the cycle of violence. This article appeared in the April 2011 newsletter of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The link below will open a PDF.
Ink & Peat Podcast
Ink & Peat is a podcast "for enthusiasts of the written word," hosted by Craig Stewart and Barb Robitaille. They interview authors, editors, publishers, ghostwriters, and others in the self-publishing and indie book world about their writing and marketing strategies.
Ink From the Pen
Ink From the Pen is a nonprofit website that accepts submissions of inmates' artwork and sells prints and T-shirts to benefit the prisoners and their families. Writers who work with prisoners may find this a useful resource to encourage their creativity.
Inked Voices
Inked Voices connects writers who are looking to form small groups (5-15 members) for critiques or accountability in meeting deadlines such as NaNoWriMo. Their software facilitates sharing of drafts and mark-ups. Each group has its own private online workspace.
Inside Publishing: The Book Publicist
This installment of Poets & Writers "The Practical Writer" column discusses the functions of a book publicist and their continued importance in the new social media landscape.
Inside/Out
By Joseph Osmundson. This daring flash memoir, which can also be classified as a prose-poem collection, looks from multiple angles at the arc of an emotionally abusive relationship between the white author and his African-American ex-lover. Like a mosaic of broken mirror fragments, each sliver of memory reflects larger themes of exclusion, power exchange, personal and collective trauma, and the nature of intimacy, raising as many questions as it answers.
Inspired by Starlight
Sparks fall like starlight
And a child runs inside,
Where her mother comforts with a promise.
But the streets have all been stained,
Soaked with tears and washed by blood
And covered over by long hours of winter.
No one knows when the end of winter
Will bring hope among the starlight
And the endless reign of blood
Will creep back to hide inside
A psyche that has been forever stained
By the treason of a shattered promise.
Who can trust a promise?
Time brings unto all things winter
Even after life, sun-stained,
Is soothed by cleansing starlight.
Water flows deep, forgotten inside
For it is far less viscous than blood.
Even so, oil is thicker still than blood
And vastly more powerful than a promise
Negotiated by important men inside
Offices guarded, safely out of winter.
They shake hands before the starlight
But with their blood those hands are stained…
The innocent whose eyes are stained
With visions flowing down like blood
Obscuring gentle shafts of starlight
Thinking wistfully of a promise
Made to a maiden with cheeks of winter
Who will now forever wait inside.
Waiting, hopefully, but slowly dies inside,
Clutching a letter with ink all smeared and tear-stained
Heart freezing slowly into winter
Until it refuses even its own life-blood
Making silently a sacred promise
To gaze into eternal starlight.
But what meaning lies inside a drop of blood
Spilled onto already-stained streets? Hardly a promise
Leftover from winter, cracks illumined by starlight.
Copyright 2005 by Dana Bailey
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Dana Bailey's "Inspired by Starlight", is an example of one of my favorite poetic forms, the sestina. I love writing sestinas because adherence to a pattern is a great way to discipline a poem, but the sestina's freestyle line length allows for a more contemporary sound than forms requiring rhyme and meter. Forms involving repetition, such as sestinas, rondeaus and villanelles, also help the author stay focused on a particular theme and set of images.
As is evident from the poem above, the sestina consists of six stanzas of six lines each, plus a three-line "envoi" or final stanza. The word at the end of each line is called a "teleuton". Each stanza uses the same six teleutons in a specific order, and the envoi uses all six words. The rules for writing sestinas can be found at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sestina.html
The best sestinas take advantage of the repetition to disclose new facets of the original image. This quality attracted me to "Inspired by Starlight", a poignant lament for youthful innocence crushed by a world at war. Though verging on sentimentality, this poem moved me because of its gentle tone and vivid, tangible imagery. The compact lines transition easily from one required end-word to the next without feeling forced.
The writer of a sestina should look for teleutons that are elemental and multivalent enough to generate powerful reactions in more than one context. This poem's key words are starlight, inside, promise, blood, stained, winter. The list by itself already conjures up an intense world of relationships: heat (blood) versus cold (winter), purity (winter, starlight) versus defilement (blood, stained), and intimacy and security (inside, promise) versus the indifferent, violent outside world (starlight, winter, blood). These oppositions generate the poem's central message.
Bailey plays upon the reader's emotions by interleaving moments of tenderness and beauty with scenes of pain and destruction. The radiant opening image, "Sparks fall like starlight," and the instantly sympathetic character of the child invite us into the poem's world. All too soon, the second half of the stanza menaces the little scene to which we have become attached. The sparks that seemed beautiful to an unwitting child may have come from bombs or burning homes.
The need to work in those six words sometimes leads Bailey into thickets of abstraction, where it is unclear who or what is the active subject of the sentence. I encountered this difficulty especially in the last stanza, which begins with the subjectless verbs "Waiting, hopefully, but slowly dies inside". I keep searching for the main character of this stanza till I get to "Heart freezing slowly into winter/ Until it refuses even its own life's blood". The "it" of the fourth line must be the heart, but whose heart? Presumably, whoever was waiting and dying inside, most likely the "maiden with cheeks of winter" from the preceding stanza. A clearer transition would have helped here.
Who is the maiden, and how does she relate to the child in the opening lines? I interpreted both characters as archetypes for the innocent next generation whose springtime has been delayed by an endless winter of war. She thinks wistfully of the promise that the young take for granted, the hope—almost amounting to a sense of entitlement—that justice will prevail and the world will allow you to fulfill your dreams. Still, some things about the plotline of the poem remain vague.
By contrast, the stanza beginning "Even so, oil is thicker..." seamlessly integrates the required end-words while adding another important piece of the narrative puzzle. The broken promise is no longer just a metaphor for loss of innocence, but an actual misdeed by leaders who repudiated their treaties and betrayed their allies because of greed for oil.
This return to concrete events is refreshing, not only because it snaps the poem out of sentimental abstraction, but also because it suggests that the permanent winter is not an unavoidable fact of nature. It suggests, ever so faintly, that human beings making different choices could break the spell that freezes the characters inside their besieged homes and traumatized hearts.
The envoi refuses to confirm this hope. "But what meaning lies inside a drop of blood/ Spilled onto already-stained streets?" The lives that were lost, or never begun, on account of the oppressive conflict – were they just wasted? Would it also be a waste for anyone to martyr himself trying to end the violence? The ambiguous final lines—"Hardly a promise/ Leftover from winter, cracks illumined by starlight"—offer a beautiful glimmer of possibility that melts away like a snowflake when we try to grasp it.
I wasn't sure what "Leftover from winter" meant here. The word "from" implies that winter was the source of the promise, but elsewhere in the poem, winter usually stands for the negative forces opposed to the promise. Also, "Leftover from" sounds as if winter has passed, while the rest of the poem says that there is no end in sight. If my interpretation of the stanza as a whole is what the author intended, "Hardly a promise/ Surviving winter" might convey the meaning more clearly.
For more advice on writing sestinas, see http://www.marilynkrysl.com/krysl/poems.html
Sestinas by Jendi Reiter:
The Apocalypse Supermarket
Registering Bliss
Other good contemporary examples of the form are Diane Wakoski's "Sestina from the Home Gardener" in her book Emerald Ice and W.H. Auden's "Paysage Moralisé" in his Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. Auden was one of the leading practitioners of the form in modern times.
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
Annie Finch Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 30
http://www.nationalpoetryreview.com/
Contest named for contemporary formalist poet, offers $300 and publication.
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 6
http://www.writersdigest.com/competitions/
Prizes up to $5,000 and publication in WritersDigest.com for poems 32 lines or less (so no sestinas); accessible yet well-crafted poetry in the style of "Inspired by Starlight" would probably do best here.
Mad Poets Review Competition
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.madpoetssociety.com/
Poets in this annual journal speak directly about universal emotions; free verse predominates, but they are open to formal verse with a contemporary sound; $100 prize.
Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.winningwriters.com/contests/margaret/ma_guidelines.php
Winning Writers assists this international contest, which is sponsored and judged by John Reid. This is its second year. $2,000 in prizes will be awarded, including a top prize of $1,000, and the winners will be published. Submit poetry in traditional verse forms, such as sonnets, ballads, odes, sestinas, blank verse and haiku.
Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 1
https://www.wagingpeace.org/shop/poetry-contest-entry/
The antiwar themes suggested in "Inspired by Starlight" would fit this contest; $1,000 prize.
The Writers Bureau Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
https://www.wbcompetition.com/
An online writing school in Britain sponsors this contest. The top prize is 1,000 pounds. See past winners on website.
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
InstantPublisher.com
The best deal we've found for self-publishing. Their print-on-demand software lets authors design their own professional-looking books for only a few dollars a copy. Order anywhere from 25 to 5,000 books.
Institute for Writers
Formerly the Institute of Children's Literature, this is a resource site for authors. Offerings include correspondence courses, how-to articles, and a newsletter with writing tips and calls for submissions.
Interlink Books
Based in Northampton, MA, Interlink Publishing is a literary small press with a cosmopolitan perspective. They publish literary fiction, history, contemporary politics, art, cultural guides, international cuisine, and illustrated children’s books from around the world. Interlink has a special interest in introducing Americans to topics and areas of the world often ignored by the Western media. Their list includes many thought-provoking works by Palestinian and Middle Eastern authors.
International Cities of Refuge Network
ICORN is an association of cities and regions around the world dedicated to protecting freedom of expression by offering refuge to writers fleeing political persecution.
Internet Writing Workshop
The Internet Writing Workshop is a free online forum for writers to exchange critiques of their works in progress. There are groups for short fiction, novels, poetry, nonfiction, and young adult literature. There are minimum participation requirements for each critiquing list representing approximately one half-hour per week. In addition, there are discussion forums to share ideas about marketing, literary craft, and favorite books and movies.
Interviews with Practicing Writers by Erika Dreifus
Fiction writer Erika Dreifus publishes the Practicing Writer e-newsletter, a monthly roundup of markets, contests, and writing advice, in which these interviews first appeared. Featured authors include Kimiko Hahn, Tayari Jones, Ellen Meeropol, and Dinty W. Moore.
Into the Drowning Deep
By Mira Grant. Masterful pacing and character development distinguish this cosmic horror novel about a scientific voyage to discover man-eating mermaids, set in a near-future where climate change and pollution are reshaping our relationship to the ocean. On a state-of-the-art ship commissioned by an American entertainment company, a diverse team of researchers fight to survive (and even study) a mysterious predator that overwhelms their defenses and challenges their belief in humanity's dominance of the ecosystem. Several crew members have disabilities, which turn out to give them unique knowledge that proves integral to saving their shipmates. A lesbian romance subplot lends a spark of hope to a terrifying situation.
Irish Writers Online
Bio-bibliographic database of over 500 classic and contemporary Irish writers, plus an impressive variety of links to authors' websites, booksellers, publishers, and other literary resources.
Irish Writers’ Centre
The IWC provides a database of contemporary Irish authors and links to literary sites. Admirers of Irish culture will also enjoy the site of the Yeats Society Sligo.
Iron City Magazine
Iron City Magazine is a print and online journal specializing in creative writing and art by currently or formerly incarcerated people. They publish short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, one-act plays, cartoons, comics, graphic stories, and art. Prison volunteers, staff, or family members may submit work on topics related to mass incarceration. Prisoners and former prisoners can submit work on any topic. Unpublished work only. No explicit violence, nudity, or detailed discussion of drug use. Read detailed guidelines and then enter by mail or email.
Is Your First-Person Narrator Hurting Your Story?
Is your first-person narrator hurting your story? Ten traps to watch out for, and resources that can help.
Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
The author wants the reader to feel close to the story, characters, and narrative voice. They believe that first-person narration will make readers experience the story as they do. Why not? The reader will "see" and "feel" everything in the same order, and in the same detail, as the author does in their head. This approach may seem common-sensical, but reader experience doesn't exactly work that way.
Recreating the environment we see and feel in our heads through a first-person narrator rarely achieves the author's intent. It's not artful enough. Good fiction is successful not because it draws from the "common sense" we know from everyday life, but because its author has become an expert at creating an artificially immersive experience for the reader. That takes a whole different set of rules and tools.
From this point of view, first-person narration is like the "hard mode" of fiction writing due to the temptation of using "common sense". It can lead writers to collapse tension, reduce reader investment, and diminish the authority of the storytelling. Read on to ensure your first-person narrator isn't falling into these ten traps.
The narrator is a glove puppet for the plot
An author has come up with an amazing plot, and they want it to stand out. They leave their first-person narrator undefined, or vaguely defined, to allow the maximum number of readers to project themselves into the narrative.
It might feel logical to help one narrative element stand out by toning down another, but watch out. A disembodied "I" immerses readers less than a narrator who feels specific and concrete. That's because a book feels most like "a real book" when all of the ingredients are used in the right balance: Plot, character, setting, theme, mood, tone, atmosphere, motif, and more. Dial any of these down too much, and readers instinctively lose investment.
For more information on what makes a strong first-person narrator, check out these articles from Now Novel and Writing Mastery. The exercises on my blog post about one-dimensional protagonists might also help.
The narrator is all interiority and no material context
You're reading a book with a first-person narrator. After five pages, you realize you still don't know the setting, the time period, the genre, who the narrator is, who the other characters are, what their relationship is, or what kind of plot you can look forward to. The narrative is so far inside the first-person narrator's head that there's little concrete information for the reader to hold on to.
Winning Writers editor and North Street Book Prize judge Jendi Reiter describes the problem this way: "[Some] authors start too soon within the subjective experience, and don't bother with the setting or the material details of who this person is."
While it might seem like good sense to create a feeling of mystery by withholding information from the reader, it can backfire, especially when writing in first person. Readers need a certain amount of information to feel interested. The time for perspective shifts, plot twists, and withholding information is in the rising action, when the reader has already become oriented in the narrative.
Exercise: Read these articles from Writers Helping Readers, Georgina Green, and Reedsy, then look at your exposition. Does it contain answers to the following questions: What, when, where, why, who, how? Is your exposition setting up reader expectations for later? If not, how can your exposition be changed to fulfill those functions while staying immersive?
The narrator is an excuse to "tell" and not "show"
"Writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think, but when they provide a context within which others can think." (from How to Know a Person, by David Brooks)
Writing in first person is like the hard mode of "showing, not telling" due to the dominance of the character's point of view. Yes, it is the privilege of the first-person perspective that more telling feels okay compared to third person, but sometimes authors can take it too far. With unlimited access to the character's thoughts, authors are sometimes tempted to really make sure readers understand what's going on.
This can lead to a flattening of the narrative through redundancy or just plain over-simplicity. Here's an example: ("telling" parts in bold):
I sat miserably in my chair, biting my fingernails. I felt so upset. Rachel had tripped me on my way into the classroom that morning, and her friends had laughed. They were bullying me. I raised my hand in order to get the teacher's attention. The teacher noticed, but didn't call on me. She was ignoring me!
Here, the bolded sentences prioritize plain information over providing an immersive experience. They unnecessarily repeat what the un-bolded sentences have already demonstrated. The paragraph gets stronger when the "telling" language is removed:
I sat miserably in my chair, biting my fingernails. Rachel had tripped me on my way into the classroom that morning, and her friends had laughed. I raised my hand. The teacher noticed, but didn't call on me.
If you'd like to learn more about showing and telling in the first person, these articles from The Habit and Inkthinker can provide some good context.
The narrator is overly observant
Have you ever met someone who had to comment on everything they saw? While this can make a person fun to talk to in real life, it can also make it hard to have a straightforward conversation. And when it's a first-person narrator who's over-commenting, the excess detail can obscure the main plotline.
I mainly find the overly observant narrator in novels with worldbuilding: sci-fi, fantasy, and historical fiction. The author wants to make sure the reader is "seeing" every interesting aspect of the built world. When those details aren't supporting the plot, though, it can lag the pace and make the reader feel less invested.
Exercise: Read this novel excerpt from Roz Morris, then do a line edit for excess detail. For everything the narrator "sees", ask: Does this support the main plot or themes? Does it foreshadow? Is essential characterization provided by the way the narrator thinks about it? Is it contributing to atmosphere or tone? Does it feature in the story later? If the answer is no, that detail might be better left out, or replaced with one that supports other elements in the story.
The narrator is static
Even when the first-person narrator has an interesting character profile, the narrative will likely feel flattened if there's no character growth. "But my book is plot-driven, not character-driven," some authors respond. Fair enough. But even plot-driven novels have character growth—especially high-interiority books, like those with first-person narrators.
The difference between plot-driven and character-driven books comes down to emphasis. In a character-driven book, each plot point supports the character's inner journey of change. In a plot-driven book, the main character still grows, but each stage of character growth supports the forward movement of the plot. Both types of books have plot development and character development—they just perform different functions.
Exercise: Read this article about balancing plot and character development by Jami Gold, then journal on your first-person narrator's growth arc. What about your narrator is different in the falling action than it was in the exposition? When the climax happens, what change in the narrator is it catalyzing? What in the rising action is foreshadowing this change? How is the change reflected in the narrator's attitudes, speech, and behavior toward other characters?
The narrator sounds too old or too young
It's important to get the "age" of a first-person voice right, or risk losing believability. Jendi observes that we often receive books with young narrators whose "observations, references, or syntax sound too adult," as well as teen or new adult narrators who sound "developmentally younger (simplistic reactions, no awareness of issues outside their immediate personal life, immature dependence on peers' opinions)." Narrators with the wrong-aged voice can jolt a reader out of the story.
Fortunately, there are resources to help authors achieve a believable voice for their character's age: here's Writers and Artists on writing like a child, DIY MFA on middle-grade narrators, and Sophia Whittemore on first-person teenagers. Lit Hub has a thought-provoking article on how fiction treats the elderly, and this forum discussion on writing older characters is full of good insights.
If your first-person narrator is a different age from you—or even if they're the same age—it might be worthwhile to spend a week or two developing their voice to make it sound realistic to readers. Harking back to the "glove-puppet narrator", above, it's not safe to assume that the common-sense knowledge about age you have from real life will translate into a realistic voice on the page.
The narrator's views become the book's views
One of the most distressing experiences for me as a contest judge and book critiquer is when a first-person narrator has prejudiced views, and it's impossible to figure out if it's just that character who is flawed, or if the book/author endorses those views. Nine times out of ten, this problem arises from a problem of tone: the distance between the narratorial voice and the authorial voice has collapsed.
Jendi describes the problem this way: "The first-person narrator has prejudices or uses problematic language, and because we're limited to their point of view, it is not clear whether the book endorses those attitudes. Too many authors think that a first-person character voice automatically creates critical distance, but no. The story still has to show some pushback, either from other characters, from the point-of-view character changing, or from the facts around them."
The authors I talk to about this rarely intended to have the entire book come across as prejudiced. But while they as authors knew how they stood on the issues, those perspectives never made it to the page.
How can an author create space for contrasting and contextualizing information in a first-person story? There are multiple ways. Making choices in the wider narrative that disprove the narrator's opinions can help, as Mythcreants points out. This article from Gotham Writers shows how to incorporate other characters' thoughts into first-person narration. Electric Lit demonstrates how making a narrator obviously unreliable can challenge their prejudices, and also gives good examples of when it didn't work so well.
If your book takes on prejudices, it might be worthwhile to reconsider whether first-person narration is the best choice for what you want to communicate. Researching the basic functions of first-, second-, and third-person and experimenting with alternate POVs in your manuscript could boost your book's credibility and effectiveness in the long run. Jericho Writers and The Novelry both have straightforward and comprehensive overviews of the POVs and where they work best.
The narrator takes over the book
The author has a character in mind and wants the reader to experience that person the same way they do. They choose a first-person narrator to make the reader really close to that character. Anything else that happens in the book—plot, other characters, setting, theme—comes a distant second to the narrator, their thoughts, and their reactions to things.
The takeover narrator often appears when the first-person figure is a proxy for the author. I see it often in memoirs and fictionalized memoirs, and also in genre fiction, literary fiction, and poetry. My interest plummets if I notice that the first-person narrator has taken over. To me, it's a sign that the author is writing the book as a personal processing tool rather than as an immersive experience for readers.
The first-person narrator who takes over also often has other problems, like being too self-congratulatory, too often correct, remaining static, and solving every problem too quickly. Believability suffers in these cases. Most good fiction leaves room for ambivalence—contrasting emotions and attitudes that exist at the same moment. Too much certainty, success, and correctness in the narrator can lead readers to suspect that parts of the narrative are being left out, parts that would have shown its events (and the narrator's part in them) in a fuller light.
If your project is in first person and you haven't yet considered whether the narrative voice is balanced with the plot, it could be a good idea to look into it. Ideas on how can be found in these articles from ThoughtCo (the section entitled "The Demands of the First-Person Singular") and Alyssa Matesic (item #3, "Alienating Readers").
Reading up on how first person is used in memoirs can help, with many of the same insights applying to fiction. Brooke Warner's article on self-referentiality and Jane Friedman's observations on POV in memoir are great resources.
The narrator's first-person combines with present tense to flatten the narrative
An author wants readers to feel the immediacy of a character's experience, so they couple the use of first-person narration with the present tense (example: "I walk to campus with Julie. We're talking about John when I see him crossing over the green towards us.") Again, though, this common-sensical approach can backfire if used without careful consideration.
Jendi describes the problem: "In general, I read too many books nowadays with first-person, present-tense narration (traditionally published, as well as in the North Street competition). The present tense deprives the POV character of the temporal complexity that a novel, as opposed to a movie, can provide—the ability to look backward, forward, introspect, and go beyond blow-by-blow external action."
If you find your first-person present narrative feels flat, it might be time to think about moving to past tense and/or third-person to open up the range of literary tools at your disposal. The articles mentioned above by Jericho Writers and The Novelry could be helpful for analyzing POV choices, and Writer's Digest has an excellent write-up about choosing tense and POV together.
The narrator starts too many sentences with "I"
The last trap first-person narration can lay is stylistic: it tempts authors to start sentences with "I". It's not a sin to start sentences with "I", but it can be a flow-killer beyond a certain point. Take, for example, this paragraph:
I sat upright in bed. Where was that noise coming from? I fumbled to turn on the light, and at the same time I used my feet to search the floor for slippers. I could hear a scratching under the floorboards. I almost didn't get out of bed, I was so scared.
When there's this much repetition in sentence structure, the writing can look inorganic on the page and cause the reader to lose immersivity. Rewriting to remove the majority of "I"s helps pacing and focus:
I sat upright in bed. Where was that noise coming from? My fingers fumbled for the light switch while my feet searched the floor for my slippers. That scratching—it couldn't be from under the floorboards? My feet shrank back up to the mattress.
Having to leave the "I"s behind didn't just reduce repetition, it gave me the opportunity to introduce new literary devices that added interest: personification ("my fingers fumbled", "my feet searched", "my feet shrank") and free internal discourse ("That scratching—it couldn't be from under the floorboards?")
Line editing for "I" sentences is usually a good idea when writing in first-person. These articles from Writing Classes, Louise Harnby, and Liminal Pages discuss the problem and suggest different sentence openers.
Choosing the right point of view for your narrative, be it first-, second-, or third-person, is only one part of what makes writing a novel different from everyday communication. A great novelist can tap a wide range of literary skills. For a detailed description of the key differences between writing "a real book" and simply "telling a story", see this article from The Editor's Blog. Or, for a more personal analysis of your work-in-progress (novel or memoir), submit it to our Critique Service.
Isamu Noguchi’s “Red”
By Joseph Stanton
A tall rectitude of red travertine,
one of Noguchi's monumental zeros,
full of nothing and nothing if not full,
speaks to his Euro mentor, Brancusi,
yet, also, seems as Zen as Zen could be,
wabi as well as sabi,
a statue that resides in a West that is also East,
Honolulu to be exact,
where Japan and America
cross in more ways than one,
a sculpture offering two sides,
an ancient rune whose tune
also declares the modern,
and we can see, too, that the smooth
is backed by the rough hewn,
balances struck and striking,
primitive, yet sophisticate,
powerful, yet simplistic,
rock that is also flesh,
containing crystals that spark light,
a sun setting on a Pacific expanse—
touching upon his mother and his father
as he often did in mind,
seeking, again,
the balance that is the everything
and the nothing at all.
It Wasn’t Poetry
it wasn't poetry, those years
(summer toothsome as a ripe fruit,
juice dripping down our wrists)
it was trees and shadows
pieces of wind blown in from the sea
boats and waves and bodies
it was the passion moon
yellow as a smoker's tooth,
palms pressed red against the sky
it was voices climbing atop each other
like crazed people in a locked room,
a child's wail pulled from a private place
it was moonlight pooling on the concrete,
long oars of light,
the silver odor of blood
it was sentinels falling, dregs of desperation,
ceasefire seizing the streets,
and the future, lifetimes away,
dreaming us safe
Copyright 2004 by Lisa Suhair Majaj
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "It Wasn't Poetry" by Lisa Suhair Majaj, is a haunting evocation of a lost paradise that is sure to resonate with anyone whose beloved homeland has been torn apart by war. The half-glimpsed hope at the poem's end is a scrap of nourishment for us in these violent times.
The first three stanzas seduce the reader into thinking this is going to be a benign pastoral or nostalgic poem. The disruption comes without warning, as disorienting as war's sudden invasion of normal life. We are thrown from a realm of sultry pleasures into a Holocaust-like scene of "voices climbing atop one another/like crazed people in a locked room". This phrase immediately reminded me of the Nazi gas chambers.
Again we shift dizzily back and forth between beauty and horror, as "moonlight pooling on the concrete" turns into blood. By the poem's end, chaos has taken over, and the inhabitants of this landscape cannot tell what the future holds. The "sentinels falling" suggests that the war persists, but on the other hand there is mention of a ceasefire.
"Ceasefire seizing the streets" is a powerful line, growing in intensity with the repetition of "E" and "S" sounds. The unusual word choice "seizing" tells us so much about the people's distance from true peace. The ceasefire is experienced here as paralysis, an uncertain lull rather than a reliable end to the conflict.
Set against this strife, the remembered summer of pleasure seems even more precious than it did at the time. Why does Majaj say, "It wasn't poetry"? Perhaps because it was too fleeting, only a moment separating the fruits of Eden from the autumnal decadence of "the passion moon/yellow as a smoker's tooth". These joys were taken for granted, never subjected to the process of reflection and preservation that produces poetry, and thus they were easily lost.
Alternatively, Majaj may be saying that our ordinary lives are sublime enough to deserve this elegy. Even if the people in the poem didn't produce high culture and poetry, they had something worth saving that the war destroyed.
A third interpretation, in tension with the other two, would be to read "It wasn't poetry" as a warning against idealizing the past. On this reading, the idyll already contained the flaws that would undo it, thoughtless pleasures and harmful overindulgence (the interchangeable "bodies," the stained hands and teeth). I'm less enamored of this negative reading because the first two stanzas feel predominantly life-affirming to me. Still, it is another possible layer of meaning, and one that fits well with the poem's ending.
The last two lines imply that salvation will come, if at all, from looking to the future and not the past. Peace is still only a dream that may be "lifetimes away," but the fragile hope must be preserved along with the memory of the good life that was lost. It wasn't poetry, but turning it into poetry may be a step toward its restoration.
Where could a poem like "It Wasn't Poetry" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
James Wright Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Sponsored by Mid-American Review; read work by 2004 final judge Michelle Boisseau here
National Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 31
Major British prize sponsored by the Poetry Society
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: November 19
We promote this magazine so often because, well, it deserves it. Recent winning poems have explored war and peace, cross-cultural encounters with suffering and grace.
Poetry Society of America Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 23
Several high-profile contests on various themes, some for members only (we recommend joining); see especially the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for poems on a humanitarian theme
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
It Would Rain on that Saturday
By Ken Allan Dronsfield
absent of pearls in a grand ocean mollusk
crying self righteousness without salty tears
seeking to find truth in an unrelenting fervor
see the dark drifting during a twilight crescendo.
dancing in the dark, or waltzing in a whirlwind
depraved and decrepit as a one legged snake
sweet tea from its spot in a cherry wood box
steeped in red clay pots amongst the ingrates.
lightning strikes throughout the lower treeline
disturbing thoughts of ambivalence in dreams
hoods in mourning whilst a crypt-like fog lifts
gates of iron grasp upon the spirit deep within.
rain hits upon leaves making a steady tapping
bare feet hit the road, a slippery slope aghast
a poncho saves the day, in a simple pious way
for we all knew it would rain, on that Saturday.
It’s In the Knowing
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
I want to know...
how my marrow
ran in their bones. If these Cycladic figures
inspired Picasso, flat-faced; Miro,
expressionless. But Quakers
who stitched sunbonnet girls
on quilts knew Keros not at all,
nor farmers and fishers,
nor those who pillaged their ancient
shards. Mayans pulled faceless dolls
from husks of corn, never knew this one,
broken arm, vagina visible
between its open legs, harp in its lap. Still
its music melts over five millenniums
to touch me,
allow me to put
my face on its.
It’s Not About Sharks
"Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God."
—Jim Morrison
It's about sharks and how there was no warning,
No lifeguard's whistle,
No dorsal fin sailing horizontal to the beach,
No time to decide between flight or fight,
Only sink or swim.
It's about trust and finally feeling safe enough
To lay back and float on the waves,
Eyes closed under the sun's watchful gaze,
Arms extended outward like an aquatic crucifixion.
It's about pain, fear and the heart-stopping shock
Of being dragged down, pulled under,
Where no one can see you struggle or hear your screams.
Your mouth fills with water with each "why?" and "what?"
To a force you cannot yet see.
It's about sharks and what they take from you,
The loss of faith as you remember
The moment before, how sure you were
That the warmth on your face was the smile of God
And the breeze his breath on your skin.
It's about isolation and struggling to survive.
It's the blank gray face, the cold dead eyes
That leave you, bleeding out,
To fight the pain, the undertow and the shock;
To live, if you dare.
It's about sharks and what they leave you with:
A fear of a place you once loved,
Phantom pains that haunt you years later,
An artificial limb that will never feel like your own,
Prosthetic toes that cannot wiggle in the sand.
It's about sadness, madness and the loss of God.
It's about things that can never be retrieved
Even if the fishy guts were split open.
It's about my life and all that was taken from me
On these shores.
And no, it's not really about sharks at all.
Copyright 2008 by Renee Palmer
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Renee Palmer's "It's Not About Sharks" uses her literal subject, a shark attack, as a metaphor for another trauma that is never defined. This indirection gives the poem its universal resonance.
Experiences too terrible to be spoken about find expression in dream symbolism, sensory memories stripped of context, or sublimation into a work of art. This last strategy contains the emotions within a less charged set of facts so they can be viewed apart from the wounded self. Trauma overwhelms our consciousness, cutting off awareness of past and future, and with them the hope of experiencing anything other than the painful feelings of the moment. The healing process can start with the mere act of expanding one's field of vision to include a storyline other than the autobiographical.
Because indirection and metaphor are well-known ways of talking about trauma, the tension between Palmer's title "It's Not About Sharks" and her refusal to talk about anything but sharks convinces the reader that the unnamed event was real and significant. It also leaves a space open for the reader to identify the "shark attack" with an experience in her own life.
This type of opening is one of the main reasons we need poetry. The literal surface of events can distract us from their inner truth. "This is a piece about rape," we might say, or "a piece about losing a beloved parent," and be deceived that we have understood the thing described, that we have exhausted its meaning and can move on. This is especially true if the subject is familiar from other literary or news treatments.
Instead of selecting such an overdetermined narrative, Palmer bypasses explanation and submerges us in the sensations of a scene that cannot help but make our hearts race: the too-placid day, the caressing waters, the benevolent gaze of the sun. We know from the movies that someone is in for a bad shock. Somehow, that predictability doesn't deprive the set-up of its power to lure us in. If anything, it affects us all the more, because we all go around with some half-suppressed fear that any tranquility we've secured in our lives is vulnerable to disruption at a moment's notice.
Palmer's style is straightforward, without a lot of technical complexity, but always seasoned with strong images that maintain the poetic tone. Among the strongest lines were the "aquatic crucifixion" and "the blank gray face, the cold dead eyes/That leave you, bleeding out". In the latter sentence, we confront the alien ruthlessness of the shark, who has transmitted its deathly pallor to the victim "bleeding out", so that her appearance is now defined by the attack. The replacement of her real leg with a prosthetic continues this negative transformation, an alienation from the self, in the same way that the trauma retrospectively leaches the warmth from memories of the place she once loved.
If Palmer was looking to condense this poem, she might consider taking out a couple of lines that verge on over-explaining. They're not jarring, but neither are they strictly necessary. Some candidates are "It's about isolation and struggling to survive" and "An artificial limb that will never feel like your own".
"It's Not About Sharks" is a vivid poem that will resonate with many people's experience. Because of its simple narrative style and direct emotional appeal, a poem like this would probably fare better if submitted to general-audience magazines and contests run by local poetry societies, rather than the university-affiliated journals.
Where could a poem like "It's Not About Sharks" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Arc Poem of the Year Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine offers top prize of C$1,500 for unpublished poems; online payment accepted
Kentucky State Poetry Society Contests
Postmark Deadline: June 30
KSPS offers $200 for unpublished poems up to 32 lines, any theme or style, in "Grand Prix" category; 24 other categories (various themes/styles) offer top prizes of $15-$100
Writers Bureau Poetry & Short Story Contest
Entries must be received by June 30
British online writing school offers 1,000 pounds in each genre; online entries allowed
League of Minnesota Poets Annual Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Local poetry society offers $125 in Grand Prize category, 17 other themed awards with top prizes of $20-$70
Poetry Society of Texas Annual Contests
Entries must be received by August 15
PST offers Grand Prize of $450 in open-theme category plus 99 themed awards (some members-only) with prizes of $25-$400; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
It’s War, Fadwa Says
By J.C. Todd
A cousin moved to Baghdad
from Tehran
gone
her children
gone
or all of them
missing
which may not mean
gone
but just
beyond reach
which may mean
alive.
Or not.
It's war,
Fadwa says,
and there's no fog
in her
sorrow
and clarity.
Ten years,
she says,
no word.
Wishing no one
dead
even if they are.
[Reprinted by permission of Able Muse Press]
J Journal: New Writing on Justice
This literary journal, launched in 2008, is published by a well-regarded college in the CUNY system. Contributors have included Paul Mariani, Erika Dreifus, Randall Brown, Paul Hostovsky and Kathryn Howd Machan.
James Merrill House
The James Merrill House offers workshops for adults and youth, lectures, and a writer-in-residence program.
Jane Friedman’s “MBA for Writers” Lectures
Digital publishing expert and former Writers' Digest executive Jane Friedman's blog contains a wealth of resources for professional writers. Her 6-part "MBA for Writers" online lecture series covers the principles for success in today's rapidly changing industry. You can purchase access to the whole series or individual sessions.
