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Koss Web Design
Poet and illustrator Koss, a winner of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, is also an accomplished graphic designer who creates logos and websites for writers. See examples of her site designs here and here (logo and website). She also redesigned the Ventura County Poetry Project site and managed their social media.
Kris Spisak’s Writing Tips
Affect or effect? Riffle or rifle? Even experienced authors are tripped up by common words and phrases that are often mistaken for each other. Kris Spisak's blog highlights hundreds of these and explains their etymology to help you remember proper usage.
Kseniya Simonova’s Sand Paintings
This unique and moving 8-minute video shows young Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova creating a sand painting that narrates the devastating impact of the Nazi invasion.
Kwame Dawes
This site, Live Hope Love, features the profound and lyrical poetry of Kwame Dawes as well as video interviews and background stories of the people who inspired him.
Kyoto Journal
See website for submission guidelines for poetry, prose, and artwork. Recent themed issues have included "Unbound: Gender in Asia" and "Transience: Dwelling in the Moment".
Lake Overturn
This standout first novel paints a tender, comical portrait of an Idaho small town in the 1980s, where a motley collection of trailer-park residents yearn for connection (and sometimes, against all odds, find it) across the barriers of class, sexual orientation, illness, separatist piety, drug abuse, and plain old social ineptness. You'll want to linger on the luscious writing, but keep turning the pages to find out what happens to the characters who've won a place in your heart.
Lambda Literary Foundation
The LLF hosts a book review blog, readings and workshops, and the annual Lammy Awards for the best LGBT books.
Landays: Poetry of Afghan Women
The Poetry Foundation website features this essay on landays, a traditional poetic form among the Pashto-speaking people of Afghanistan, which has become a clandestine outlet for women to express dissent and speak of forbidden subjects like love and sensuality. The essay includes many examples of landay couplets with cultural context and photos.
Lannan Foundation Audio Literary Library
An extensive collection of audio recordings of poets and writers reading their work. In 2004, The Lannan Foundation awarded $925,000 in awards and fellowships in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
Lantana Camara, Spreading Sunset
I bought you, lantana plant,
because you are drought tolerant—
or is it drought resistant? I forget.
Your pointed label reads SATISFYING
The defiant flames of your gold and orange
clusters force me to stare
Looking ahead, I wager that your five pound
maturity can handle neglect
Lantana camara, HARDY, INDIGENOUS, INVASIVE.
Spreading Sunset, you grow on me.
I knew I would leave, doubtful
the occupants after me would stop to stoke
your star-like blooms
or lean closer to attend each berry,
red, purple, charred rippled black
ripening toward poison,
changing colors with mood
Renters' sandals slap their beat
on painted gray planks and
drown out your quiet
restless offerings
Vacation a mere week—they almost water you,
the drought-tolerant plant right there on the steps
I knew all this but I bought you anyway
placing my momentary pleasure
above your very existence
Sunsets spread, spread, gold and orange
I return to your blooms, paper ashes
Your leaves clench against the heat.
I try to revive stalky ugliness but your hardened
roots reject my water offering.
No longer a sprawling potted plant, you have become
something a car would whiz by
or a mower would run over.
Lantana camara, spreading sunset.
Next morning I kneel and water again
you cautiously begin to unfasten.
Fruit and bloom are silent, but your leaves—
Were they always so cilia-soft to touch?
Veins like roadmaps stretch out, no longer cloistered
they accept drops of sun offering
As if to say, "I don't care what you think."
Copyright 2009 by Delia Corrigan
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose this month's poem, Delia Corrigan's "Lantana Camara, Spreading Sunset", because it illustrates poetry's gift for exploring the universal through the particular. A good poem can devote itself to a small object or event, and by looking at it more closely than we do in everyday life, reveal something of broader significance about human nature. Some examples are Theodore Roethke's "The Geranium" and Stephen Dobyns' "Indifference to Consequence". The poem shows the fractal qualities of its subject matter, replicating in miniature our higher-level patterns of interaction.
Occasionally, Corrigan's poem lapses into an overly colloquial or prosy voice, which is a common problem for contemporary writers of narrative free verse. These "off" notes are most noticeable in her opening and closing stanzas. While I think "Lantana Camara" needs a bit more work before it's ready for professional publication, I decided to feature it in the newsletter because the descriptions of the plant and the woman's evolving relationship to it are so vivid and well-observed, containing complex shifts of emotion in the space of a few lines.
Through the narrator's decision to purchase a plant for her temporary lodgings, we are invited to consider the anonymity and transience of our interactions with others in this highly mobile society, and how this situation can make us selfish. The narrator wants to believe the puffery on the plant's label ("HARDY, INDIGENOUS, INVASIVE") because it relieves her of responsibility for taking care of the plant she's picked out for her short-term enjoyment. She doesn't bother learning whether the lantana is "drought tolerant" or "drought resistant", or if there's a meaningful difference. Quotes from advertising can be an effective way to inject dramatic irony into a poem, since ad-speak tries to force words into a single unambiguously positive meaning, while poetry is about teasing out the ambiguities and unlikely associations between words.
Here, it's ironic that the plant's "pointed label reads SATISFYING" since whatever satisfaction she gets from the plant will be short-lived because of her own plans to move away. "Satisfying" is a word we see on a lot of product labels (not to mention Snickers' unintentionally gross-sounding variation "satisfectellent") although economic logic dictates that the product not satisfy for very long, otherwise we wouldn't need to buy more.
This habitual discontent comes through in the narrator's description of how she and the other occupants of the house are constantly on the move. Their lifestyle works against the tranquil and appreciative state of mind that would let them nurture a specific place and its nonhuman inhabitants: "I knew I would leave, doubtful/the occupants after me would stop to stoke/your star-like blooms", she writes, and later: "Renters' sandals slap their beat/on painted gray planks and/drown out your quiet/restless offerings". The combination of sandals, quiet, and "offerings" made me think of the atmosphere of a monastery, an association that's strengthened by the word "cloistered" later in the poem. The lantana, which has to grow where it's planted, simply devotes itself to existing and making the best of its surroundings, while the humans are rushing around to satisfy their temporary cravings.
The plant's quiet perseverance awakens the narrator's ethical sense. She feels remorse that she's treated the plant as an object for her enjoyment and not as a fellow living thing: "I knew all this but I bought you anyway/placing my momentary pleasure/above your very existence". Corrigan made the right choice in writing this poem as an address to the plant, not a narrative about the plant. If the "you" were replaced by an impersonal "it" or a sentimentally anthropomorphized "she", the poem would miss the chance to have the form reinforce the content, namely the passage from self-centeredness to relationship.
I thought the beginning of the poem was too weak, undercutting the authority of the speaker's voice before it had a chance to establish itself: "you are drought tolerant—/or is it drought resistant? I forget." Since we already know from the title that the poem is about a lantana, and we learn later on that it is drought-tolerant, it would be all right to open with a revised version of the second stanza:
The defiant flames of your gold and orange
clusters force me to stare
Your pointed label reads SATISFYING
Looking ahead, I wager that your five pound
maturity can handle neglect
Lantana camara, HARDY, INDIGENOUS, INVASIVE.
Spreading Sunset, you grow on me.
...
The other part that I would revise is the ending. "I don't care what you think" was too trivial a phrase to sum up the beautiful imagery and serious self-exploration that preceded it. It also seemed to contradict the lessons of compassion and interdependence that the rest of the poem teaches. What would the lantana really say, if it could talk? I don't think it would be this hostile. "I will survive"? "Grow where you're planted"? (Not that I would want to see either of these cliché phrases in the poem.) Actually, I don't want the lantana to speak at all, even in the narrator's mind. Its otherness, its nonhuman quality, has been necessary to expand her moral imagination. By not speaking or moving, it made space for her to examine her own thoughts and actions.
The poem could end by reversing the two penultimate lines to end on the stronger one: "they accept drops of sun offering/Veins like roadmaps stretch out, no longer cloistered." Since the word "offering" occurs three times in the poem, this might be a place to take it out, ending the line at "drops of sun". The travel imagery suggests that the plant has also been transformed by the interaction, taking on some of the narrator's energetic and adventurous qualities while she in turn has taken on some of its stillness.
Where could a poem like "Lantana Camara, Spreading Sunset" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Society of Texas Annual Contests
Entries must be received by August 15
Prizes up to $450 for unpublished poems in 100 different categories (some are members-only); no simultaneous submissions
Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by September 1
Prizes up to $1,000 for narrative poetry, from a new literary journal based in Western Massachusetts; enter online only
White Mice Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 15
This $200 prize for poems on an annual theme (2009 is "Renewal") is sponsored by the Lawrence Durrell Society; Durrell was a 20th-century novelist who wrote The Alexandria Quartet
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Largehearted Boy
Founded in 2002, David Gutkowski's literary blog explores the intersection of books and music. Features include Book Notes, which has authors create a mixtape relating to their latest book; Note Books, where musicians explore their literary side, Soundtracked, where directors and composers discuss their films' soundtracks; and "The Largehearted Boy Cross-Cultural Media Exchange Program," where authors interview musicians (and vice-versa).
Last Look
By Charles Burns. This volume collects Burns' acclaimed graphic novels X'ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull. Imagine that Samuel Beckett and Hieronymus Bosch dropped acid together and wrote a Tintin comic. These horror comics braid the real-world story of Doug, a photographer and failed performance artist obsessed with his lost love Sarah, with the nightmare visions of his alter ego, Johnny 23, a low-level functionary in a breeding factory where woman-like creatures produce monstrous eggs. The features of his grotesque dream world gradually reveal parallels to Doug's real life and the relationship patterns that trap him in isolation. Subtle clues toward the end indicate a Buddhist message about purifying one's mind to escape the wheel of rebirth.
Last Rites
By Roberta Beary
chest pains
breathing in
the sunset
hospice bed
the get-well roses
stunted bloom
thin sunlight
eyelids flutter
in morphine sleep
deathwatch
the arrival of fresh
coffee
day moon
we windowshop
caskets
day of the obit
inside his wallet
me at eleven
This poem is reprinted from her chapbook Deflection (Accents Publishing, forthcoming 2015).
Last Rites
By Pamela Sumners
It rained cottonmouths for 30 days after you died.
They wore proud boots and took over the streets,
slithered and kicked through the steel-plated doors.
They sat coiled or casually dropped in your special recliner.
They ate the last Tyson's chicken in Arkansas—they did!
and then ravaged the okra and bean patches out back.
Then they took the tomatoes and purple-hull peas,
cutting a swath like Sherman's army marching to sea.
Their white mouths turned a deep heliotrope purple.
We plied them with offerings of heavy red wine
and they turned all purple and died. We swept snakeskins
for weeks. Next the bats came, echolocating what we
humans heard only as a series of slight erratic clicks.
We developed a decoder that could read bat-tongue for us
and learned that they repeated through the walls a gossip chorus:
"You know he heard the wind chimes just before he died, a music
that played so hauntingly on the listening ears of time."
We banged every pot and pan in the house like a marching band
starting off a Fourth of July parade with John Philip Sousa's brass
until they gave up their roost, a lonely, leaning excuse for a chimney.
When finally we wept and muttered a flood of desolate words
over your cavernous deep rhombus in the earth, a dark hole really,
an aunt we barely knew said to me, "Give me your last skinny-back
wishbone hug and tell us how thin we've become."
Later Bloomer
Debra Eve has been a software executive, archaeologist, and professional writer. She started the site Later Bloomer to collect inspiring stories of creative people who achieved great things in midlife and old age. Examples include Inge Ginsberg, the Holocaust survivor who fronted a heavy metal band in her 90s, and Leo Fender, the former accountant who designed the iconic electric guitars. She offers an e-newsletter and a sister site called the Imaginarium with book discussion groups and skills-training classes to boost your creativity.
Laura Thomas Communications
Laura Thomas Communications hosts a blog with writing opportunities for authors aged 21 and under. There are free poetry and fiction contests (no cash awards) and a personal essay prize based on Thomas's book Polly Wants to Be a Writer, a YA fantasy novel that is also a creative writing manual. The LTC online store sells workbooks inspired by the novel, with writing prompts and an overview of basic concepts.
Layering Place: In Ourselves, in Our Writing
In this 2018 piece from Ruminate Magazine, a faith-informed literary journal, essayist Catherine Hervey discusses ways to flesh out literary characters through the details they notice about a place and the memories that overlay it.
Le Jaseroque
Frank L. Warrin's translation of "Jabberwocky" into French weds nonsense to high culture. "Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux/Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave." Whatever it means, it sounds very important in the language of Racine and Moliere.
Learning English Language Arts with the New York Times
This feature on the New York Times website collects archived content that can be used to teach writing skills such as dialogue, narrative, and criticism.
Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith
Part memoir, part religious history, this compelling, controversial book by a Harvard-educated sociologist describes the fallout from her recovered memories of sexual abuse by her father, a leading Mormon scholar. Her anger is leavened by compassion as she delves into the complicity of a secretive church culture in creating and shielding abusers with split personalities. Though the topic is a dark one, readers who accompany Beck on her healing journey will be rewarded with her account of her strengthened connection to God's love and her own inner truth.
Leeway Foundation
Based in Philadelphia, the Leeway Foundation offers grants to women and transgender artists in the Delaware Valley region who are creating social change.
Legal Shield
A good value for writers who can't afford traditional law firm fees, Legal Shield is a monthly subscription plan that allows you to call their attorneys for consultation on specific issues. You can ask for a lawyer with a particular area of expertise, e.g. intellectual property. Recommended by publishing industry expert Jane Friedman.
Lemon Hound
Poet Sina Queyras runs this blog about the theory and practice of poetry criticism. Lemon Hound's "10 Questions for Reviewers" series interviews prominent poet-critics about their goals and techniques. The "How Poems Work" series features a poem by a prominent contemporary author, plus a critique by one of his or her peers.
Leonard Gontarek
God rubs shoulders with ghosts and mailmen in Gontarek's dreamy verses, which hover on the edge of abstraction like a Turner painting, and are often suffused with the same melancholy golden light. As he writes in "Amnesty": "When the earth & snow is apricot for seconds & your dreams fall fast as water Out the window, wouldn’t you say in the middle of that uncontestable joy, is sorrow, Like a metal sliver?"
Lesbian Poetry Archive
Julie R. Enszer, editor of the long-running lesbian-feminist literary journal Sinister Wisdom, maintains this free digital archive of poetry chapbooks, pamphlets, anthologies, and out-of-print journals of lesbian writing.
Letter from Dhahran
January 15, 1990
You learn to live on the back of a snake
that's always shedding its skin.
When you hike out, you can't
navigate by distance or by dunes.
Sand walks through tent walls.
The grains dance on wires. Wind
is a visible darkness. You don't recognize
duffle bags crumpled on your jeep.
You look as grey and as flat
as a plastic tarp.
* * *
You move with the two-beat undulation
of hands entrenching shovels.
When it feels like you're staying on
at a campsite you don't like anymore,
you argue over the size of city blocks
pace off remembered lots and back yards,
recall the green penetration of oleander,
how you worked to make hedges civilized.
In uniform, it's the same push and pull,
the same heartbeat of sweat.
Like following a lawnmower,
blades shearing down grass, the world
through a haze of clippings, the slashed
green scent in your nostrils, the whir
inside you. Like the time you mowed clean
into the garden and butchered the spinach.
* * *
Only when you stop to eat, do you slow
enough to start seeing behind the wind.
You pop open a can of pudding and lick off
the lid, making trails in the vanilla.
Ever notice how sugar sears
your mouth when it dissolves?
How your jaw aches? Almost wounded.
As if tears bled from your tongue.
Copyright 2004 by Heather McGehee
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Letter From Dhahran" by Heather McGehee, depicts the cognitive dislocation of a soldier beginning a tour of duty in the Saudi Arabian desert. Dhahran is the site of a US military base where troops were stationed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The poem captures the obstacles that the soldier must surmount before even seeing battle: homesickness, fatigue, and a punishing environment that adds risk to the simplest tasks.
The ever-shifting desert sands contribute to the dissolution and re-formation of the soldier's identity, as he struggles to integrate his old self, with a home and personal memories, and his new role as a more impersonal unit of military force. (In order to avoid repeating "he or she" throughout the critique, I am assuming the soldier to be male, but the poem could just as well be about a female soldier.) To adapt, he must become as mutable as the landscape, "a snake/that's always shedding its skin."
The personal and the impersonal change places in McGehee's imagery, creating a sense that the soldier is fighting to maintain his psychic boundaries against a landscape filled with invisible enemies. Sand "walks through tent walls" like a sinister spirit, while the soldier feels like he has turned into an object, "as gray and as flat/as a plastic tarp."
One way that the soldier stays centered is to map memories from his old life onto his new one, sometimes in an absurdly literal way, as he plots out familiar streets and backyards on the grounds of his base camp. Digging ditches, he remembers happier exertions, "how you worked to make hedges civilized."
This last word, "civilized," is the closest the poem gets to noticing the ironic contrast between the two types of work, cultivating a garden and digging trenches in preparation for killing other people. His ultimate mission seems absent from the soldier's mind, not even as a repressed source of tension. Is it because he's sure that his work here is also on the side of "civilization"? Or is he just so preoccupied with his daily physical and mental hardships that he cannot look that far ahead? "Like the time you mowed clean/into the garden and butchered the spinach." The poem here hints at the dangers of focusing too narrowly.
The last section, indeed, shows the soldier beginning to reach for a fuller emotional perspective. "Only when you stop to eat, do you slow/enough to start seeing behind the wind." Nurturing himself with food, he discovers the sadness concealed in the sweetness, as the poem returns to its opening themes of hidden perils and complex identities. Still, one senses that the sadness is primarily for himself, not for the larger conflict in which he plays a part. Does he realize that he is like the sugar, able to wound as well as nourish? Paradoxically, the poem raises this question most effectively by leaving it unsaid.
Where could a poem like "Letter from Dhahran" be submitted? The following contests, sponsored by journals that favor narrative free verse, may be of interest:
Arts & Letters Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 15
Florida Review Editors' Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 2
Marlboro Review Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Greensboro Review Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: September 15
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2004 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Letter Review
Letter Review is an online lit mag with contests, publishing opportunities, and articles about the craft and business of writing. They offer a reasonably priced critique service for short fiction, and an annual poetry and fiction contest with attractive prizes. An interesting feature of their publishing advice columns is that they tell you the going rates for selling work in various genres.
Letter to My Parents Long Gone from 853 Riverside Drive
By Norbert Hirschhorn
I think of you often,
especially on your birthdays
(July 19, November 29),
each of you divine,
your spirits nesting inside me.
You gave me life. Full stop.
What you endured to see me through:
abandoning your parents to the Shoah,
uprooted, flight, turmoil in America.
And I, know-it-all, hardly knew
what you went through—I fled,
abandoned you, even as
you stayed faithful to me.
My most sorrowful apologies,
Your firstborn son
Levellers Press
This small press based in Western Massachusetts publishes literary novels and short story collections through its Thornapple Books imprint, and poetry collections through Hedgerow Books. The press has also published nonfiction books relating to local history and progressive social thought. Poets in their catalog include Annie Boutelle, Patricia Lee Lewis, and Anne Love Woodhull. See website for submission guidelines.
LGBTQ Publishers and Paying Journals
Erica Verrillo's writing resource blog features news of submission calls, agents seeking clients, and other publishing opportunities. This post, last updated in April 2024, lists 35 small presses and 30 paying journals that accept un-agented submissions of LGBTQ fiction and nonfiction. While the recommendations include many reputable presses such as Bold Strokes Books, Bywater Books, Chelsea Station Editions, and Riverdale/Magnus, it's important to do your own research: the gay romance publisher Dreamspinner Press, included here, was the subject of a big scandal several years ago for not paying their authors.
LGBTQ Reads
Dahlia Adler, author of several Young Adult and New Adult novels including Under the Lights, writes this book review blog that spotlights queer-themed fiction for teens and adults.
Libby App
Libby is an app for smartphones and tablets, which lets you search and borrow e-books and audio books from any participating library where you have a membership card. You can also send the borrowed e-books to your Kindle.
Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature
This online archive at the Library of Congress features over 150 recordings of significant 20th and 21st century American writers reading their work.
LibraryThing
On this website, you can catalog your books online and connect to other readers who share your interests.
LibraryThing: Name That Book
LibraryThing is a service that allows members to catalog and search the books they own. Members can also participate in discussion forums, such as Name That Book, which helps you remember the title and author of a book you can describe but can't name.
Life
Life is long when you are young
Life is short when you are old
Life is long when songs are sung
Life is short some days I'm told
Life is gone when you are dead
Life is done the graveyard said
Life's a question asking why?
Lively blossoms fill the air
Life's a heartbeat pulsing by
Life is maidens soft and fair
Life of dawning days will end
Life's a yawning viper's grin
Life's a calling whippoorwill
Life's a melody of rides
Life's a falling star until
Lifeless crater she resides
Life is good but sometimes odd
Life's a life then life subsides
Life is from the breath of God.
Copyright 2012 by Wesley Dale Willis
Critique by Laura Cherry
Form and content should touch and talk to each other like a pair of dizzy lovers, or dance and sing together like a well-honed vaudeville act. The poet can start with either one, and find that his or her choices are guided, coaxed, informed and sparked by the other; ideally, this interplay happens throughout the creation of the poem, and these two components strengthen each other like the members of any good team. To see how this works in action, let's look at what can happen when the poet starts with a particular form in mind.
Paradoxically, rules and guidelines can work as a stimulant to creativity; they can provide just the right kind of distance to guide an idea out of chaos and into words. In particular, heavily weighted emotional content can be easier to manage when it is poured into a container rather than onto the open floor of the white page. While one part of the poet's mind is occupied searching for rhymes or counting beats in a line, another can be shaping those emotional raw materials. The swamp of emotion becomes a project—an elegant building or bridge—rather than a morass.
There is a whole tradition of forms to choose from, of course, but inventing a form can be an extra feather in the cap! The invented form, of course, has the additional advantage (and challenge) of allowing the inventor to set the rules him- or herself, based on what sort of tickle will provoke the muse of that particular day. In "Life", the poet, Wesley Dale Willis, uses an invented form he calls a "sonnadeucearima", whose form we'll examine closely in a moment to see how it works and plays with its content.
Invented forms have an appropriately quirky history. They're often, though not always, created for fun, and sometimes for the sake of a single poem. Some notable invented forms include the clerihew (a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley) and the roundel (a variation of the French rondeau, invented by Swinburne). The Pollock (John Yau) and the Rothko (Bob Holman) are invented poetic forms inspired by painters. Another recent example is Billy Collins's paradelle, which he invented as a parody of complicated, repeating French forms like the villanelle. Though it began as a sort of literary joke, other poets have actually embraced the paradelle, even producing an anthology of poems in the form.
Like any form, of course, the invented form must be examined to see what qualities and effects that form itself produces. A villanelle, for example, with its patterned repetition of lines at the end of each stanza, is an excellent way to examine the same idea, theme, or image from a number of different angles, or with a deepening perspective (as in Dylan Thomas's classic "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). Such a form would not be a good choice to tell a long or complex story—the repeated lines are too circular to proceed clearly and narratively through scenes and plot points.
Willis's sonnadeucearima uses a rhyme scheme of abab, cc, dede, ff, ghgh, ihi, with additional internal rhymes in the couplets (gone/done, dawning/fawning), and has seven feet per line, four stressed and three unstressed. It's also worth noting that the poet says that his poem was written after and about his father's death: hence the emotional content mentioned above. Where, then, does Willis's created form lead the content of his poem? The rhyme scheme, together with the short lines, lends itself to a deliberate simplicity, as in a lullaby, which provides an intriguing tonal contrast with the poem's themes: death, impending death, fear of death, and acceptance of death. This, in turn, leads the poet to a songlike repetition of the same word (or variants of that word) at the beginning of each line. And the lines themselves offer clichés turned on their heads and intermingled with fresher imagery. The next question to ask is: how effective is each of these strategies in conveying this heavy freight of content?
To my mind, the strategies employed in this poem are each at least partially successful. The lullaby simplicity of the poem not only provokes images from childhood (and confounds them with its theme), it echoes works in the canon like Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience". That said, it can be difficult to manage simplicity in a poem without tripping into oversimplification. In "Life", for example, I enjoy the clear statement, "Life's a calling whippoorwill", but the line "Life is maidens soft and fair" seems more tired, less vivid, and somewhat archaic. It's worth avoiding archaisms in a poem whose form already so strongly harkens back to another era.
Repetition can be used for a number of different effects: to provide emphasis to a particular word, phrase or line; to set up expectations for sound and meter and potentially to subvert them; or to connect different ideas or moments in the poem. In other words, repetition has implications for both the thematic content and the music of the poem, working in concert on both aspects. Rooted in the oral tradition, repetition and rhyme once made long poems and songs easier to recall and retell. We don't often memorize and declaim poems these days—at least, most of us don't—and so our poetic effects are aimed at different targets, but a striking use of repetition can still remind us of its historical usage.
The repetition of "life" as a stressed beat at the beginning of each line gives it clear pride of place within the poem. The subject is life (and its opposite), and the poem had better live up to it! As with the other effects, the technique of repetition provides both an opportunity (to explore different aspects or facets of the same idea) and a challenge (to do this while maintaining conceptual movement and verbal interest over the course of the poem). Willis does diversify the ideas and images in each line, again with some success. "Life's a question asking why?" is something like placeholder philosophy and is much less interesting to me than a line like "Life's a heartbeat pulsing by", the rhythm of which brings to mind an actual beating heart, as well as the temporal meaning of "heartbeat". Repetition can truly shine in its variations, which stand out and focus the reader's attention. To zero in on these, the two lines that do not start with "Life" or "Life's" are:
Lively blossoms fill the air
(Life's a falling star until)
Lifeless crater she resides
These lines show the kind of flexibility that even a strict form can provide. Of these two variants, I prefer "Lively blossoms fill the air" (though I'd love to see the language punched up a bit, made more strange and wild). In the second variation, while I appreciate the juxtaposition of "Lively" and "Lifeless", and find the image of the star and crater compelling, the sudden personification of the star as "she" is another archaism. The device jars me because it is not echoed or supported elsewhere in the poem.
Playing with cliché is a valid, but dangerous, poetic tactic—all too often it can fall short of the mark and come across as the very cliché it means to subvert. For that reason, my recommendation for this poem is to maintain the repetition and form, with their effective simplicity, and further tweak the imagery of the poem so that each line contains a surprise for the reader. "Life is short when you are old" reads as received wisdom, with nothing in it to wake the reader up. By contrast, "Life's a melody of rides" has a lovely newness and resists easy interpretation.
The final tercet, or three-line stanza, functions in much the same way as the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet: to wrap up both form and content with a last, perhaps summarizing, flourish. This tercet provides a strong end to the poem that could be made even more powerful. In "Life is good but sometimes odd", I very much enjoy the understatement of "sometimes odd", but see "Life is good" as a catchall phrase and missed opportunity. "Life's a life then life subsides" reads beautifully aloud and gets in three punches of the word "life", as if in a final frenzied dance. "Life is from the breath of God" pivots on that word "from", which torques what might be a religious cliché just enough to make it both strange and tangible.
Finally, a note on the title: while it underscores the repetition of the lines' first word, as well as the poem's apparent simplicity, it arguably takes that simplicity a step too far. Another possibility would be to use the title as a place to launch more freely from the poem. A title such as "What the Graveyard Said" is more likely to stick in the reader's mind than the perfectly apposite but less intriguing "Life".
Where might a poem like "Life" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Alabama Writers' Conclave Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 20
Local poetry society gives prizes up to $100 for formal and free verse poems, fiction, and essays
Lucidity Poetry Journal Clarity Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Twice-yearly neutral free contest gives top prize of $100 for poems about the human experience, by authors aged 18+
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 6
Competitive contest for poetry and several prose genres from Writer's Digest, a leading publisher of directories and advice books for writers, gives a grand prize of $5,00, a paid trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, a coveted Pitch Slam slot at the Writer's Digest Conference where the winner will receive one-on-one attention from editors or agents, and publication of their winning piece on WritersDigest.com; enter by Submittable
New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by May 31
Numerous prizes up to NZ$500 for poems in various genres and age categories; open to international entries; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Light as Magic
The essence of magic is light
says the puppeteer to me as I peer
through his box of a stage
yet but a shell of trash—
limp pieces of strings,
sleeping snakes of light cords,
tubs of light shades, the puppets
mere swaths of rags.
Life moves only where
there is light, he seems to chant,
invoking magic from his words. In the myth
of creation, God first bid Light with words and Light
burst into rays like wings or so the puppeteer
imagines.
You can ride on light,
the universe does, speeding and crashing
on taut streams of translucence. I can transform you
into a nymph under these lights,
the puppeteer turns
to me, sensing my longing.
Could I grow into wings if
I wish
and vanish in the light? I ask. Or
like my puppets be born
and live if only for a fraction
of light, he answers grinning. I hesitate
but then, step in to his box of a stage among scraps
of life and give in.
Copyright 2006 by Alegria Imperial
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Alegria Imperial's poem "Light as Magic" gracefully explores age-old questions of free will, mortality and faith, through the metaphor of the puppet show. The dialogue between the puppeteer and the narrator can be understood on many levels, but it is fundamentally a poem about trust.
Can the spectator trust the artist enough that she will suspend disbelief and let him turn his "box of a stage" from a "shell of trash" into a cosmos in miniature? She must decide whether to rely more on her skeptical eyes, which see only the unglamorous machinery and "swaths of rags", or on the puppeteer's seductive promises and the longings of her own heart, which beckon her to move from spectator to participant. One could even see this as an example of the tension between scientific and religious approaches to knowledge—the former demanding that the knower remain objective and detached from the known, the latter requiring personal commitment as a precursor to understanding.
This poem also has a romantic dimension, with the puppeteer as the seducer ("I can transform you/into a nymph under these lights,/the puppeteer turns/to me, sensing my longing"). The lady is uncertain, wanting assurances of eternity: "Could I grow into wings if/I wish/ and vanish in the light?" However, her suitor will only promise to make her feel alive as never before. He makes no guarantees as to how long it will last: "Or/like my puppets be born/and live if only for a fraction/of light, he answers grinning."
Similarly, if we read "Light as Magic" as also an allegory of the soul and God (a reading made plausible by Imperial's explicit reference to Genesis 1), the narrator may want a relationship with God but is holding back for fear that she is deceiving herself. It's hard to take the unseen world seriously, when the evidence of sin ("sleeping snakes") and lifeless matter is right before her eyes. She wants a revelation first ("Could I grow into wings"). But the puppeteer responds that this is the world he's made, and the first move is hers to risk.
Certain line breaks in "Light as Magic" emphasize the pivotal moments in this gentle contest of wills. The words "I wish" are set off by themselves in an unusually short line, as if to highlight the fact that this argument is all about the narrator's self-assertion versus submission to the puppeteer. The line break after "Or" toward the end of the poem is like the edge of a cliff. The narrator doesn't know what will happen if she steps off. In the lines "Light/burst into rays like wings or so the puppeteer/imagines", the final word stands by itself to underscore the idea of creation ex nihilo. "Imagining", by itself, contains all things. Imperial's radiant imagery effectively brings this familiar myth to life.
Casting God as a puppeteer suggests a worldview in which human free will is constrained. Yet the poem is all about the narrator's moment of decision. Will she fully participate in life—a life open to the possibility of magic—or will she refuse to step onto the stage? A dazzling future is hinted at in the beautiful lines "You can ride on light,/the universe does, speeding and crashing/on taut streams of translucence." Just as the humble puppeteer's illusions contain a spark of the light that holds the universe together, the narrator has the power to say No to that light. To experience the light, she must become a puppet: "step in to his box of a stage among scraps/of life and give in." Is this giving up free will or becoming truly free? In a sense, it is both, which makes the ending poignant as well as hopeful.
Where could a poem like "Light as Magic" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 20
Prizes up to $500 for poems 32 lines or less, offered by well-known national magazine for writers
Cecil Hemley Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 23
Members-only award from the Poetry Society of America (we recommend joining) offers $500 for a lyric poem that addresses a philosophical or epistemological concern
Tiferet Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Ecumenical journal of spirituality and the arts offers $750 apiece for poetry, fiction and essays that "help reveal Spirit through the written word"
Wigtown Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by June 7
Literary town in Scotland offers prizes up to 1,500 pounds for the best unpublished poems in English, Scots or Gaelic by authors 16+; no simultaneous submissions
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
$250 award for unpublished poems includes invitation to ceremony at the elegant, prestigious National Arts Club in NYC in April
This poem and critique appeared in the December 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Light Quarterly
Pleasant and witty, "a quarterly of light and occasional verse, squibs, satire, puns, and word-play." Free excerpts online.
Lighten Up Online
British quarterly webzine of light verse, launched in 2008. Both published and unpublished work accepted. Read back issues before submitting.
Lighthouse Poem
By Eva Tortora
Lighthouse shows me the way home
Shines bright on me how much I've grown
Can see you all through waves and motion
Makes me feel like life is in forward motion
So where is my love, he's out to sea
I wait by lighthouse in hope and reverie
I have faith that you'll return home again
My light, my shadow, my angel my friend
So all this will work out I'm sure
With an ocean of worlds and an ocean of words
Pina colada and chocolate by the sea
Hope to find my friend sitting by me
I'll follow Lighthouse, I'll follow stars
Bright and bold wherever you are
I promise to return in great health
Sometimes friendship is the greatest form of wealth.
First published in the newsletter of the National Lighthouse Museum in Staten Island, NY
Lightness, High Desert
By Ruth Thompson
Here heat rides the horse of light, vaults
sun to sun, a glare that slams the eyes shut,
licks from morning's skim of clouds, cools
to coal in shadow. I forget how deadweight
darkness lies grave with unshed heat, nightlong
pall of wrestler sweat. In my tinder carapace
of borrowed roof and wall, quickness flies me
clean. Nothing adheres, even the sticky heart.
Blithe and volatile as sunlight on the morning
table, in dreams I sheer to grassland, burning.
Lily’s Odyssey
In this novel, a retired scholar in a working-class Midwestern town struggles to process her memories of childhood incest and unravel its effects on her psyche. This book's strengths are its sharp characterization of people and cultural settings, and the connections it draws between domestic abuse and sexist institutions that conspire to keep it secret. On her long journey to claim her truth, the narrator must rethink not only her family's official storyline of virtue and vice, but the messages from religious authorities and psychologists who dismiss a woman's perspective. Metaphors from her scientific research give her a creative way to resist. This book shows how trauma can give birth to an artist's intellect that notices and questions human behavior.
Linda McCullough Moore
Winner and finalist of numerous national short fiction awards including New York Stories, the Nelson Algren Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pushcart Prize XXXV. Ms. Moore is the author of the literary novel The Distance Between (Soho Press), the short story collection This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon (Levellers Press), and more than 300 shorter published works, appearing in such places as The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train, The Boston Globe, The Alaska Quarterly Review, House Beautiful, Queen's Quarterly, The Southern Review, and Books and Culture. She lives and writes in western Massachusetts where she teaches creative writing and mentors aspiring writers. Winning Writers editor Jendi Reiter recommends her workshops.
List of Free Online Courses for Authors: The Digital Reader
The Digital Reader is a news and tech blog about publishing, indie authors, e-books, and e-readers. This 2018 post compiles links to reputable free online courses where authors can learn about writing, design, marketing, and public speaking.
Listen Notes
Listen Notes indexes over 650,000 podcasts that you can search by keyword for a specific person, topic, or show name.
Literary Agent Links at Ardor Magazine
The online literary magazine Ardor maintains this annually updated list of over 100 literary agents and their preferred genres, with links to their websites.
Literary Citizenship
In this article, creative writing professor Cathy Day proposes the concept of "literary citizenship"—the skills and habits that we can all cultivate to build a stronger and more generous literary community, whether or not we are published authors ourselves. Day observes: "the reason I teach creative writing isn't just to create writers, but also to create a populace that cares about reading...I wish more aspiring writers would contribute to, not just expect things from, that world they want so much to be a part of." Good citizenship includes reviewing books you enjoyed, letting writers know you appreciate their work, and buying books and literary journals.
Literary Journals That Publish Poetry That Rhymes
Rhyming poetry can be hard to place in modern magazines. This 2024 feature from Authors Publish recommends eight reputable journals that regularly publish rhyming poetry and other traditional forms.
Literary Magazine Database at Poets & Writers
Poets & Writers Magazine offers this free online database featuring submission guidelines for hundreds of literary journals. The database is searchable by name, keyword, genre, openness to simultaneous and electronic submissions, geographic region and more. A very useful service.
Literary Mama
Literary Mama is an online journal publishing poetry, fiction, personal essays, reviews, and articles about the many faces of motherhood.
