Resources
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Lizard Lounge Poetry Jam
This Cambridge, Mass. nightclub offers a poetry slam open mike followed by featured readers and jazz band every Sunday evening. Check out their weblog for news and links to some of their regular performers.
Lodestar Quarterly
Lodestar Quarterly was an online journal of gay, lesbian, and queer literature, published 2002-06. Contributors included S. Bear Bergman, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jane Rule, Susan Stinson, Michelle Tea, and Emanuel Xavier. Complete archives are available on the website.
London Proofreaders
London Proofreaders is an online proofreading and copyediting service. They say their unique selling proposition is that they assign two proofreaders to every text, for more thorough error-catching. At 12.50 pounds per 1,000 words, their rates are in line with typical US rates of 1-2 cents per word. London Proofreaders can work with academic papers from undergraduate to Ph.D level, business writing, and literary prose. They also offer novel editing and book proofreading.
London Undercurrents
By Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire. This collaborative collection by two British poets creates a people's history of London spanning five centuries, through persona poems in the voices of women from diverse backgrounds. Notable athletes, activists, and literary figures share these pages with imagined characters who represent factory workers, strikers, and working-class girls enjoying a hard-earned holiday. This book would be a good resource for junior high and high school history classrooms.
Loretta Wray
By Terri Kirby Erickson
My mother, lipstick red, barefoot, toenails painted
the palest shade of pink, stretched out her dancer's legs
and rubbed suntan lotion into a face
that should have been magnified on a movie screen—
the kind that bowled men over even with curlers in her hair
and children dangling from both hands wherever she went.
They never saw the greasy chaise lounge behind our house
where the sun whispered sonnets in her ears
and darkened her skin with hot kisses while the radio
played "Blue Velvet." And the green grocer and the mailman
and the gas station attendants and the jean-clad
teenage boys loitering downtown on Saturday afternoons,
who caught glimpses of Loretta Wray every now
and then, if they were lucky, would have dropped dead with desire
if they'd seen her sunning herself in our backyard wearing
nothing but a two-piece bathing suit and a lazy, sun-drenched
grin, the best years of her life almost, but not quite, past.
#
(Reprinted from A Lake of Light and Clouds (Press 53); originally published in storySouth)
Los Angeles Review
Each issue is dedicated to a contemporary writer or cultural leader; honorees have included Ishmael Reed, Eloise Klein Healy, Judy Grahn, and Bruce Holland Rogers.
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Los Angeles Review of Books publishes original poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and literary and arts criticism. Their nonprofit foundation also offers publishing workshops, author events, and a book club. Use the online form on their Contact page to pitch an article.
Loss and Blossom
By Jeanne Julian
Everything liquid and solid
simultaneously, thick trunks
and twigs encased
in dripping ice, and between us
and everything, fog
on the way to the funeral
home. She was dead young.
Her father wished out loud
to see her future,
which never was.
Why is this now
never enough?
Humbled by hints of ebb,
coax permanence from
summer's temporary embrace,
let an imagined hammock hold
you warm under magnanimous
sky, and dreaming of daisies, deny
encroaching marmalade-hued mums.
Murmur over and over to the ominous
dark crickets crouched under cobwebs
that cling to the flowerpots,
"The cosmos blossoms
by the rotting stump."
Lost
I take your hand
which has at times enfolded mine,
with fingers certain of their strength and power
I search your face
so familiar as you turn to me,
each line etched upon my heart
by our countless years as one
Your eyes seek mine
yet gone from them is the heat,
the blazing force of passion
now cooled by drifting clouds of fear
Your mind, once compelled to dwell in
fierce logic and complexity,
has lost its way in the fog of disease
leaving you forgetful of even simple tasks
I loved you then; I love you now
yet my heart aches with the memory of the man I knew
as I live with the man who remains
Copyright 2010 by Maggi Roark
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
The difficulty in writing about illness, whether our own or that of someone we love, is that the emotions are so very strong. We long to express their full magnitude but have only feeble words to work with. Poetry presents itself as a way to empower, even venerate, these words, yet poetry requires form—some sort of containment. While this may seem oppressively restrictive in the heat of our urge to communicate, it can—in fact, must—become an asset if we are to write a successful poem. Containing our feelings pressurizes them, and it is this threat of explosion that moves the reader.
In last month's Critique Corner, we compared two poems that wrapped their narrator's experiences in metaphors, much as bitter medicines are wrapped in pill casings. By doing so, they enable the reader to swallow them, and so, feel their effects. This month, for contrast, we will look at another, very different, poem: "Lost" by Maggi Roark of San Diego, California, who told me in her letter that she originally turned to poetry while deep in grief. With "Lost" Roark has been less gentle than last month's poets, forcing the reader to look directly at what she herself is seeing.
The strength of "Lost" is its simple but elegant form: stanzas one and two begin with "I"; stanzas two and three begin with "your"; stanza five achieves a satisfying cadence by balancing "I loved" with "I love." This clean, musical structure helps to quiet the revelations of the text to a volume at which the reader can hear them.
Without it, phrases like "countless years" or "blazing force" might shout. They are, essentially, hyperbole, and hyperbole, when not used as irony or wit, can strain a reader. A second sort of hyperbole evident in this poem is redundancy—in other words, one way to overstate something is to say it twice. "Heat" in stanza three is restated as "blazing force"; "so familiar" rephrased as "etched upon my heart".
Since simplicity is this poem's chief asset, I suggest looking for ways to strengthen that quality, with a particular eye toward removing redundancy.
One way to revise towards simplicity is to scrub the text of extraneous words and syllables. "Helper" verbs, prepositions, articles, and so forth, can often be excised with no loss to meaning. For example, stanza one might lose "has" in line two and "with" in line three.
In stanza three, one word the author might want to reconsider is "countless" for the obvious reason that they are not countless at all, though perhaps seemingly so. Therefore the word needs either to be cut or modified.
More importantly though, as I said above, stanzas two and three contain restatements. Unless there is an expressive reason to do otherwise, only the strongest phrasing should survive revision. In this poem, "familiar" in stanza two could be removed. So could the entire second line of stanza three, especially since the third line with its lovely sound correlations between "cooled", "clouds", and "now" as well as "drifting" and "fear" make it the poem's strongest line.
Part of that strength is owed to the way the metaphor of the line extends into stanza five, as the clouds descend to fog. Following that image up with an explanation greatly reduces its impact. The reader understands line four of the stanza even without its being stated.
As for the final stanza, its beauty is in its balance. Besides, we have "heart" above. I suggest reinforcing the balance by removing everything in lines two and three but "the man I knew/the man who remains".
It can be an amazing and wonderful discovery for a poet to realize how powerful simplicity can be. Poems are constructed upon tensions. The contrast of overwhelming emotions plainly put forth is potent. Organized into an unassuming form, they become a plangent and universal song.
Where could a poem like "Lost" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Prizes up to $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 15
Good exposure for emerging writers in this contest from a national writers' magazine, which offers prizes up to $500 for poems 32 lines or less; online entries accepted; no simultaneous submissions
Dream Quest One Poetry & Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Twice-yearly contest for emerging writers offers top prizes of $500 for prose, $250 for poetry; previously published work accepted
Heart Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Twice-yearly contest from Nostalgia Press offers $500 for "insightful, immersing" free-verse poems
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Love in the Western World
Bold, original study of the invention of courtly love and its echoes in high and low culture through the centuries. Themes include the tension between romance and marriage, romantic ecstasy as substitute for religion, and the craving for union with the beloved as a disguised longing for self-annihilation. Nonscholars may skim some of the historical passages, but poets and fiction writers alike will benefit from reexamining the origins and implications of the romantic values we take for granted.
Love Justice
By Bracha Nechama Bomze. This debut poetry book from 3Ring Press is simultaneously a book-length love poem, a family memoir, and an epic of social change. The title's multiple meanings encompass generations of Jewish labor activism, winning the right to marry her lesbian partner, and the heartbreak of a closed adoption system that stigmatized her birthmother. Through all these personal and political traumas, the poet continues to praise the natural world that feeds her soul, and the life partnership that comes as a fairy-tale happy ending to a lonely childhood. The book is an inspiration and a delight.
Love Poem to Androgyny
Fierce, tragicomic poetry chapbook voices the struggles and desires of a lesbian whose masculine appearance leads her (not always voluntarily) to adopt alternate identities in response to others' preconceptions. This writer's fertile imagination was formed by a hostile world in which one best expresses one's true self by wearing a mask. "Who will believe us that deception is only/ a matter of cutting through the red tape?"
Lovecraft Country
By Matt Ruff. This suspenseful and satirical novel-in-stories follows an African-American family in 1950s Chicago who tangle with a cabal of upper-class white occultists. Each chapter cleverly inverts the xenophobic tropes of one of H.P. Lovecraft's classic horror stories, with the implication that the heartless and greedy cosmic forces of the Cthulhu Mythos are more a self-portrait of Jim Crow's America than an enemy from beyond the stars.
Lowell Celebrates Kerouac
The festival, held each autumn, celebrates the life and work of novelist Jack Kerouac.
Lulu’s Veil and Jocasta’s Brooch
By Dana Curtis
In answer to your question: I'm pretty sure
all the birds are dead now—this will teach
them not to think such dark thoughts,
such purple blotches across
a cat's electric fur. In response
to the continental shift, may I
just say: I've always loved
cracks in the earth, web underfoot,
the veil I only wear at murder
trials or someone else's wedding. Think
about it. You'll be pleasantly surprised
at the result, at what holds diamonds,
the silk: the wayward river from
the eye socket. I spent a long time
looking for just the right frame—
black with a dial. It connects
to what I need to connect—historical
fragments jumping out of
the bright red box. In reference to
the shutting of the cemetery, the removal
of your mouth, the selling
of a crystal doorknob: yes
or no, maybe later, vivid.
Luminarium
Full texts of medieval, Renaissance and 17th-century poetry and verse-dramas, with scholarly commentary. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Milton...
Lyn Lifshin: “A Wet Cold Winter to Come”
A haunting sequence of 9/11 poems. Part of the Political Anthology now online at The Pedestal Magazine.
Lyrical Passion Poetry E-Zine
Literary webzine with a specialized focus on Japanese short form poetry. Several contests throughout the year offer modest prizes for haiku, senryu, free verse, and flash fiction.
Lyttle Lytton Contest
This website collects and publishes the worst first sentences of imaginary novels (and some equally bad quotes from real ones).
M-Moments
By Lind Grant-Oyeye
Silvery hair, bones thinned in-out, of life the silver screen speaks.
Letter M, embossed in audacious colors. It had begun long before her time...
time when clay pots were sanded out to shimmer.
It starts by falling—falling in love. Minute carts tenderly packed
full of moments, full of memories delicately loosely tied together.
It flows with fantasies of prized certificates, a desire for a stamp—the majestic seal of approval.
It flows to the stage of self-journey through dark subways, tunnels to the unfamiliar...
untested promise lands. She heard some had swam bellied-up in wavy pools,
Chillin' to the historic tempest.
Others swim to "bien venue" cat-calls, to honeymoons filled with French kisses,
flowers and fresh caresses, beauty and beautiful feet planted on cozy carpets,
romance lasting into wintery and the hurricane hugging days.
On strange lands were some feet planted. They kissed strangers
and slept with enemies—red juices pressed against their lips,
with the firm force of a heavyweight boxer's strength, kissing Judas' doppelganger
to the sweet sound of the language from Babel, spoken with a lover's passion.
Faint memories show M in the alphabet song, is for Migration, for marriage.
M. Miriam Herrera
See Ms. Herrera's website for mystical, earthy poems from Kaddish for Columbus and Witch Wife.
Mad to Live
A pregnant woman develops a craving for bugs. A couple bond over the failure of their wife-swapping party. A father consoles his child over the dinosaurs' extinction, while wishing his own parents had allowed him to believe in heaven. These are some of the seeds from which spring Randall Brown's quirky, brilliant, heart-rending short-short stories. This collection won the 2007-08 Flume Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Their book design is also a standout.
Madhouse Media Publishing
Madhouse Media Publishing is a self-publishing services company based in New South Wales, Australia. Their offerings include editing, book and cover design, print/e-book conversion, and marketing assistance. Visit their blog for how-to articles for indie authors. Their Ebook Revolution Podcast features author interviews about craft and career topics.
MagCloud
Self-publish your own magazine through MagCloud. Simply upload a PDF of your issue and MagCloud will handle printing, mailing, and subscription management. Small press runs are no problem here. Participation is limited while the site is still in beta-testing.
MagCloud
Self-publish your own magazine through MagCloud. Simply upload a PDF of your issue and MagCloud will handle printing, mailing, and subscription management. Small press runs are no problem here. Participation is limited while the site is still in beta-testing.
Magic Dragon
Published since 2005 by the nonprofit Association for Encouragement of Children's Creativity, Magic Dragon is a quarterly magazine featuring art and creative writing by children aged 12 and under.
Maine
Offbeat offerings in this winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize include "Hair Club for Corpses" and a sestina in which every line ends with "Bob". Winter can switch from serious to humorous and back again in a blink: "Everyone's losing at something./ It just matters more to some people, for example, Orpheus/ or Ty Cobb."
Make a Living Writing
Freelance writer Carol Tice's blog offers field-tested tips on how to market yourself and increase your earnings. Other services include an e-newsletter and mentoring consultations.
MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine
Contributors have included Joyelle McSweeney, Eula Biss, Gabriel Gudding, and Joe Meno. See website for upcoming themed issues. Editors say, "Chicago is a storyteller's city, and MAKE is the story's magazine. Chock full of fiction, poetry, essays, art, and reviews, MAKE is substantial in both feel and scope. MAKE expands on the Chicago tradition to entertain and to inform."
Making Certain It Goes On
No modern poet captured the essence of a place as well as 20th-century master Richard Hugo, whose tightly paced free verse reveals the dignity of America's forgotten towns.
Making Manuscripts: An Irregularly Braided Conversation
In this interview from the Spring 2021 issue of DMQ Review, poets Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (Morse Poetry Prize winner for Tulips, Water, Ash) and Annie Kim (Word Works Washington Prize winner for Eros, Unbroken) share their manuscript craft tips and intuitive strategies for discovering how poems speak to one another.
Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth
By Carl Siciliano. This luminous memoir by the founder of the Ali Forney Center, the nation's first homeless shelter for queer and trans teens, is both a spiritual autobiography and an incisive social history of the 1980s-90s. Siciliano shows how we could save children's lives with a small fraction of our city and state budgets, yet often ignore this population because of racism, queerphobia, and even respectability politics in the gay community. Moreover, the problem would not exist on such a huge scale without hateful theology from Christian institutions that causes families to throw their queer kids out on the streets. Siciliano poignantly describes a lifelong struggle with his Catholic faith. The church is responsible for a great deal of abuse, but the tradition also gave him role models for a life of sacred service, like St. Francis and Dorothy Day. As a spiritual touchstone, the author returns to memories of Ali Forney, a murdered genderqueer teen, drug user and survival sex worker, who proclaimed unshakeable confidence in God's love.
Mannheim
By Erika Dreifus
I did not cry the first time I went to Mannheim,
when my father and I studied the nameplates
listing the residents of the building on Ifflenstrasse
where his mother had been born, and grown up.
The building she left one April day in 1938, just in time,
and had never re-entered.
I did not cry even when the current second-floor residents
invited us in, and I stood in the high-ceilinged rooms
where my great-grandparents had withstood the Kristallnacht.
In the photos my father snapped
to show my grandmother, back in Brooklyn,
I am smiling.
I did not cry the second time I went to Mannheim,
when my father and mother and sister and I toured the city,
armed with Grandma's handwritten maps,
and visited the shiny blue synagogue.
From the hotel we telephoned Brooklyn
before driving away on the Autobahn.
The third time, the train from Stuttgart stopped.
I descended to the platform.
And the signs read,
Mannheim.
This time my grandmother was gone.
Not just from Germany.
But back in New York her namesake had just arrived.
I blinked a few times. Bit my lip.
Stared at the sign, and swallowed.
Then I walked, fast, through sunbaked streets,
straight to the department store
where I bought the baby a sweater
and tiny socks
before I hurried back to the train station.
Manoleria
By Daniel Khalastchi. Winner of the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Prize, this collection is a memorable addition to the literature of horror poetry, as well as the poetry of political witness. The narrator of these poems obediently submits to an endless sequence of bizarre procedures that are part surgical invasion, part public spectacle of punishment. Like someone brainwashed or anesthetized, he is quite clear about what is physically happening but has numbed out the normal reactions of fear, anger, or confusion. There is no narrative movement toward freedom or enlightenment, but a strange kind of beauty arises from the speaker's attention to detail.
Manuscript Tips
Literary contest judges read hundreds of manuscripts each year. A professional-looking submission makes your work look good. By contrast, a surprising number of contestants ignore the rules, spoiling their chances. Here are formatting tips from Jendi Reiter, editor of Literary Contest Insider and final judge of the Winning Writers contests.
FONTS AND PAPER
Manuscripts should be typed or printed on white 8.5x11" paper. Use a common, legible font such as Courier New or Times New Roman. A good type size is 12-point. If a different size is needed to fit within a contest's page limit, don't go lower than 11-point or higher than 13-point. Legibility will suffer and the judge will think you're playing games.
Most contests expect poetry to be single-spaced. If double-spacing is preferred, the rules will say so. Fancy paper and flowery fonts are a waste of time and money, and can annoy judges who find them hard to read. Gimmicks suggest you are an amateur.
FRONT MATTER
The term "front matter" refers to the cover page, title page, table of contents, and the acknowledgments page where you list the publication credits for poems in the manuscript. Some contests will specify whether the page limit includes the pages devoted to front matter. When in doubt, assume that it does.
COVER PAGES [sample] AND TITLE PAGES [sample]
The cover page should contain the following information, centered on the page:
Author's name
Author's address, phone number, and email address
You can put "Copyright 2015 Your Name" in the lower left-hand corner. This is not required. Your work enjoys basic copyright protection at creation.
Underline the title. Both the title and the author's name should be in a larger font than you would use for text in the manuscript. A good size is 24-point type for the title, and 18-point type for your name.
Often, a contest will ask you to submit a manuscript with both a cover page and a title page. This conceals the author's identity from the judges until they've chosen a winner. The cover page, which has your name and address, is filed by the contest coordinator. The title page stays with the manuscript. This page has just the manuscript title on it. You can also put "Copyright 2005" but leave out your name.
TABLE OF CONTENTS [sample]
The table of contents should use the same font and size as the poems. It should list the poem titles on the left of the page, with a line of dots matching each poem to the number of the page where it starts. For untitled poems, put the first line or first few words instead of a title. If your manuscript is divided into sections, the table of contents should also list the page where each new section begins. Most word-processing programs will generate a table of contents for you, or you can do it by hand. Always include a table of contents, even when the rules don't request one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [sample]
Place your acknowledgments page after the table of contents or at the end of the manuscript. Set it in the same font and size as your poems. Some contests prefer you to submit this page as a separate sheet. Others may ask you to omit it. This page lists the poems in your manuscript that have been published and where they appeared. It's not necessary to list the dates or issue numbers of the poetry magazines that published your work, but you may do so if you have room.
You can include your manuscript title on the acknowledgments page, but leave out your name and address.
TEXT [sample]
Put each poem on its own page. Placement on the page (centered, left-justified, or scattered around) depends on the style of your work. I prefer left-justified over centered, since that's the way most poems are printed in books and magazines. Number every page. Your word-processing program will do this automatically if you activate its page-numbering function.
COVER LETTER [sample]
Your cover letter should use a common, legible font such as Courier New or Times New Roman. I suggest the 12-point size. Standard white paper is fine.
State the following at a minimum: "Enclosed is my manuscript, [title], which I am submitting to the [name of contest]. I have enclosed the entry fee and a SASE for your response."
You can also include the names of magazines where your work has appeared and books that you've had published.
Some contests prefer that you complete their entry form rather than submit a cover letter.
WHAT'S A SASE?
A SASE is a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. (British contests call it a SAE.) Use an ordinary letter-sized envelope for notification of winners, or a 10x13" envelope with adequate return postage if the contest guidelines say that manuscripts will be returned.
We suggest buying a small postal scale at an office supply store such as Office Depot. You'll save money by not putting too much postage on your packages. Current US postal rates are available at http://www.usps.com/.
Good luck!
Manuscript Wish List
Manuscript Wish List is an online database of agents and editors, with information on what they're currently seeking. The site also has a podcast and blog with craft articles.
Maple Tree Literary Supplement
The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, a thrice-yearly online journal, provides a platform for dialogue or interviews on any topic between and amongst Canadian writers, while featuring their work and reporting on literary events, landmarks or festivals in Canada and around the world—with an emphasis on their Canadian composition. The journal accepts submissions of unpublished poetry, short fiction, general-interest nonfiction and personal essays, excerpts from dramatic works, and author interviews. This is a paying market.
Maps of War
Visual history of war, religion, and government. Animated maps show the rise and fall of empires over the centuries.
Maralys Wills
Writing instructor, speaker, and memoirist Maralys Wills is the author of 12 books, including the writers' manual 'Damn the Rejections, Full Speed Ahead'. Visit her website and blog for writing advice and pithy anecdotes about juggling work and family life.
Marc J. Frazier Poetry
Marc Frazier is the author of the poetry collections Each Thing Touches (Glass Lyre Press, 2015) and The Way Here (Aldrich Press), and the chapbooks After and The Gods of the Grand Resort, both from Finishing Line Press. Cyrus Cassells calls Each Thing Touches "rich with striking and dynamic questions...refreshingly human, urgent, and disarming." Frazier has had several residencies at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois and received an Illinois Arts Council award in poetry. Visit his website to find out about his workshops.
Marie Osmond Performs Dadaist Poetry
In this charming and peculiar video clip, rediscovered at the Lambda Literary website, television personality Marie Osmond reenacts the origins of Dadaism with Hugo Ball's "sound poem".
Marine Corps Heritage Foundation (The)
The Marine Corps Heritage Foundation sponsors several free awards for books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by veterans and/or about Marine Corps history and life.
Marry Me and Praise for Wyatt
Marry Me
My friend Susi and her boyfriend
were in the bleachers when someone
launched a home run.
Fireworks burst
like a corsage over their heads.
That's when she said Robert
leaned over and proposed.
The whole ballpark was cheering.
What did you say? I asked.
"I couldn't hear over the crowd
a word he was saying.
But the cheering got me excited
and I stood up jumping like crazy
and my boyfriend thought I
had said yes. He threw his arms
around me and five years later
we have a gaggle of children."
Praise for Wyatt
As a bachelor the only thing I could cook
was the smoke alarms.
You steam vegetables in woks,
flip crepes deftly, paddle creams and butters,
and aren't afraid to try new recipes
whether from Beijing or Tuscany.
Your skills at laying cables,
editing audio tracks, playing drums
and writing impromptu songs
at jamming sessions makes me think
that everything comes easily to you.
I admire your confidence
but I love your kindness more,
and I pray for your good health,
for a cure of your diabetes.
You don't remember receiving
your first injections, 18 months old,
or your tiny fingers bleeding
four times a day...your cries
needles through my heart.
Copyright 2010 by Bob Bradshaw
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
If you are a frequent reader of the type of literary e-zines included in the Best of the Net Anthology, you have probably encountered the work of the much-published Bob Bradshaw. His talent for the refreshingly apt and original metaphor, coupled with his charmingly self-deprecating humor, give Bradshaw's deceptively simple poems a distinctive voice popular with editors. So when I received a letter from him containing poems that, he said, had been rejected numerous times, I became deeply curious as to why. Little did I know his poems would lead me to question the very nature of poetry itself.
You see, Bradshaw favors poems that tell stories, usually of the head-scratching variety. The reader is left thinking, "Well, who would have seen that coming?" or, "Isn't that just amazing?" The narrative poem is often accessible, which explains why it is so frequently enjoyed, but it is problematic too. What makes a story a story and a poem, a poem? Indeed, what, in fact, is a poem?
Consider for a moment that the Latin origin of the word "verse" means to turn. The word "story", on the other hand, comes from the word "history"—a series of events. In fiction, one event generally causes another, or is, at least, related in some way. Furthermore, story—as opposed to history—has a beginning, middle, and end, though, as any first course in writing will teach, they do not necessarily have to be presented in that order. Nevertheless, causation is the logic of plot, and therefore of story.
Not so for poetry. Poems "verse"; they turn, sometimes several times. They may leap from the logic of the story to a metaphor bringing in a wholly new idea or image. They may leap to another level of meaning, suddenly more universal or personal, serious or surreal. The address—that is, to whom the poem is speaking—might redirect. Even something as subtle as an alteration of verb tense can affect a turn.
Sometimes poems open as if they have windows within them, bringing in another context or reality and then rebounding to the original one. Often the turn comes at the end, so that the reader lands in a new place, not one hinted at by the original story or subject or theme. Making this leap is the work of reading poetry, its surprise and delight.
It is this quality that, in my opinion, "Marry Me" lacks. Here Bradshaw has put forth a story in its chronological order. The single metaphor: "Fireworks burst/like a corsage", while not the freshest in Bradshaw's oeuvre, is wonderfully resonant in its context, but does not really constitute what I mean by a "turn" in that it does not depart from that context.
Reworking the poem to end with the metaphor might be one way of building a turn. In this case the poem would transit from the literal to the metaphorical. In so doing, the poem would move from the drama to the setting, landing the reader in a new location in the end. This would require rethinking the order of the story's plot, which in any case might be a good idea here. Beginning with "The whole ballpark was cheering," for example, would bring the reader immediately into an active scene. Another strategy might be to begin with Susi and her gaggle of offspring and move chronologically backwards. Every story has multiple points of entry; it is always valuable to investigate several.
Actually, our second piece, "Praise for Wyatt", provides an excellent example of the concept of turning a poem. In line 12, Bradshaw moves from "you" to "I", taking the poem in a more personal direction. In line 15, there is a sudden change of tone. More significantly, though, the poem moves from the present to the past in its final stanza. We come to understand that the narrator has known the subject all his life, that Wyatt is, in fact, most likely a son. This shines a whole new light on everything we have read so far, complicating and enriching it.
But "Praise for Wyatt", because it is not based upon a plotted story like the one in "Marry Me", is not strengthened by the logic such a story provides. This is another difference between poems and stories: the ways in which they unify. Poems can be brought together through music or other formal or structural elements. For example, Bradshaw could rework "Praise for Wyatt" as a litany, perhaps by repeating the phrase "I admire", or even more subtly, by creating parallel grammatical structures in his second through fourth sentences.
Most often though, in free verse narrative poetry, unity is achieved via the extended symbol. In other words, the logic of the piece is created by the development of its central trope. At this point, I would say, "Praise for Wyatt" lacks such a cohering trope, and so reads like prose. Focusing on Wyatt's hands might be one solution; they're already present in the final stanza, and certainly the activities depicted in previous stanzas rely upon them.
Both poems might also be nicely complicated with more abstract titles, offering thematic suggestions to the reader. The point is not to be obtuse, but rather to create some layers of meaning. Because, unlike stories, which are like exciting trolley rides, speeding along on greased rails, poems are like gifts for readers to savor as they unwrap.
Where could poems like "Marry Me" and "Praise for Wyatt" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 31
Twice-yearly contest from local poetry society offers prizes of $50-$100 in categories including traditional verse, humor, open theme
Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by September 1
Prizes up to $1,000 for narrative poetry, plus publication for many runners-up, from a new literary journal based in Western Massachusetts
Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
Contest for Massachusetts poets offers $100 and reading at annual poetry festival in Somerville, near Boston; previously published work accepted
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
Prizes up to 500 pounds for poems up to 30 lines (published or unpublished), from UK-based writers' resource site
Lucidity Poetry Journal Clarity Awards
Entries must be received by October 31
Twice-yearly free contest offers prizes up to $100 for poems in any form dealing with people and interpersonal relationships, by authors aged 18+
These poems and critique appeared in the August 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Mary: A Literary Quarterly
Submissions of poetry, fiction, and essays are accepted by email. Maximum 5,000 words per piece. Contributors have included Tom Cardamone, Christopher Hennessy, Michael Montlack, and Sarah Sarai.
Massachusetts Poetry Festival
This annual celebration of Massachusetts poets and small presses is held every October. The festival is based in Lowell, Mass., and also includes events around Boston, Worcester, Amherst, and the Berkshires. Videos from the festival are available on their YouTube channel: presenters include Rhina Espaillat, Robert Pinsky, Nick Flynn, and Martin Espada.
Massive Bookshop
An anti-capitalist alternative to the big online booksellers, Massive Bookshop is a place to list your books for sale while supporting social justice. Instead of seeking profits, Massive Bookshop donates whatever is leftover from operating expenses to various mutual aid and community-building projects such as Decarcerate Western Mass.
Masters Review (The)
The Masters Review is an online and print literary journal dedicated to supporting emerging writers. They publish short fiction and nonfiction, craft essays, and interviews with established authors. Ten winners of their annual fiction contest receive cash prizes and publication in an anthology that is mailed to agents, editors, publishers, and authors nationwide. The contest has been judged by prominent writers such as A.M. Homes and Lev Grossman. Contributors to the magazine are also paid. See website for deadlines and rules.
May I Have Several Hours of Your Time?
Writing professor Karen Craigo's poetry books include No More Milk (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In (Hermeneutic Chaos, 2016). In this blog post, she shares strategies for setting boundaries and time management when asked to mentor emerging writers. A very useful read for people on either side of the mentor-student relationship.
Mayfly
Biannual journal of haiku poetry, established in 1986. Mayfly is a paying market. Editors say, "We feel it is the duty of the editors and writers to make careful selection and proper presentation of only the very best, the most evocative, the truly effective haiku. We publish only 14 or 15 haiku per issue, but each haiku is printed on its own page."
Mayweed
By Frannie Lindsay. Winner of the 2009 Word Works Washington Prize, this spare and radiant poetry collection centers on acceptance of loss. Its key figures are a beloved sister who died of cancer, and their late father, a perpetrator of incest.
