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Timothy Steele
Dr. Steele is a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Los Angeles. See his website for selections from his poetry and critical essays as well as a useful introduction to traditional poetic forms and meters.
Timothy Steele
Website of neo-formalist poet Timothy Steele, a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Los Angeles, includes selections from his poetry and critical essays as well as a useful introduction to traditional poetic forms and meters.
Tincture
Lethe Press is a well-regarded small press with an interest in queer literature. Their imprint Tincture is dedicated to publishing LGBT authors of color. Books in their catalog include the anthologies From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction and Walking the Tightrope: Poetry and Prose by LGBTQ Writers from Africa, as well as individual titles by Nathan Goh, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Timothy Wang, and others.
TinFish Press
An adventurous small press in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Founded in 1995 by Susan M. Schultz, TinFish publishes experimental poetry and prose from the Pacific, including Hawaii, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, California and western Canada. "Tinfish uses recycled materials, including tarpaper, weather maps, proof sheets, and hamburger sleeves to cover its always un-recycled poetry and prose." Bestsellers include Sista Tongue by Lisa Linn Kanae and Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture by Lee "Da Pidgin Guerilla" Tonouchi. Read an article about TinFish in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
Tinnitus
By Barbara Regenspan
1
The cicadas come to me
at three in the morning.
The trees
are inside the room,
hiding in darkness.
The dust on the floor
belongs now
as particles of soil,
until morning
when they'll reclaim their soul
as dirt.
2
He said, there are crystals in your ear.
I can break them up with one painful tweak.
He did; they didn't.
He said, your mind is stretching to hear
what it used to—and can no longer—
so it generates sound to fill the silence.
3
She knows now: on its way out,
everything is vibrating; hear it
and try not to answer. Let it stand in
for the last beautiful word.
Tint Journal
Tint is an online literary journal for ESL (English as a second language) writers. They publish poetry, fiction, essays, flash prose, author profiles, and articles with writing advice.
tinywords
tinywords is a daily online journal of haiku and micropoetry (150 characters maximum). Sign up to receive a poem a day by email or text message.
Tip of My Tongue
Search this database of dictionaries for that word you can't quite remember. You can input meanings, syllables, sound-alikes, and letters that it should or shouldn't include. This free reference site is created and maintained by writer and software designer. Chirag Mehta
Tips for a Good Poetry Reading
This post from award-winning poet Diane Lockward's blog offers sound advice for poets, hosts, and audience members. Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us and Eve's Red Dress, both from Wind Publications. (Hat tip to The Practicing Writer newsletter for the link.)
To Everyone Who Wants Me to Read Their Writing and Tell Them What to Do
In this 2022 blog post, publishing expert Jane Friedman talks about the benefits and limits of asking for feedback as a beginning writer. The takeaway: perseverance and passion are more important than any one person's opinion. "If I were to tell you today that your project is a waste of time, would you abandon it? If so, perhaps it's best that you did. To keep writing in the face of rejection is required of every professional and published writer I know."
To Go Big or Come Home: On the Writing Life with Major and Indie Publishers
In this 2025 essay in The Metropolitan Review, Tom McAllister demystifies the advantages of a Big Five publishing contract and makes the case for working with a small press that's dedicated to innovative writing. McAllister is an editor at the literary journal Barrelhouse and the author of three novels and the essay collection It All Felt Impossible (Rose Metal Press, 2025).
To Trope or Not to Trope
In this 2017 essay from the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, Chloe N. Clark discusses four stories that self-consciously re-use common fictional tropes about women in order to subvert these tropes. While beginning writers are often told to avoid clichéd roles for their characters, it can be an effective postmodern literary technique to make the characters themselves aware of and commenting on the limited identities they are forced to embody.
Too Much Horror Fiction
Will Errickson is the co-author, with Grady Hendrix, of Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction (Quirk Books, 2017), a popular history of the pulp horror paperback in its heyday. Errickson's blog reviews notable and campy titles from the 1960s-90s, a number of which are being reissued now by Valancourt Books.
TOON Books
TOON Books publishes high-quality comic books for children, designed to teach verbal and visual literacy in a more engaging format than traditional books for first readers. Editorial Director Françoise Mouly is the Art Editor of The New Yorker magazine. Notable contributors include Art Spiegelman, Hilary Knight (creator of Eloise), and Neil Gaiman.
Top 100 Book Review Blogs for Readers and Authors
Feedspot, a site that aggregates content across the Web, compiled this list of book review blogs that have the highest visibility in terms of Google search ranking, social media presence, and consistent quality of posts. The list includes both general-interest and genre-specific sites such as romance, children's books, and fantasy.
Top Ten Topics for Writers
Basic information on submission etiquette, getting published, writers' conferences and degree programs, avoiding scams, and promoting your work. From the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Torrey House Press
Based in Utah, Torrey House Press is a nonprofit publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction, with a mission to encourage conservation by telling compelling stories about wilderness and nature. Titles include Scott Graham's mystery series set in America's National Parks and an anthology fundraiser to protect Native American sacred lands.
Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon
In this 2018 essay for The Paris Review, literary scholar RL Goldberg recommends contemporary books by transgender and gender-nonconforming writers. Highlighted authors include Eli Clare, Leslie Feinberg, Andrea Lawlor, and Vivek Shraya.
tr. review of translations
Published by Black Lawrence Press, tr. is an international literary journal that is open year-round to submissions of poetry and literary short prose translated from any language into English. Entries should be 1-5 poems or up to 3,000 words of fiction or nonfiction, accompanied by permission from the original author.
Trans Journalists Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide
The Trans Journalists Association has created this free online style guide for editors and journalists who write about transgender people and the stories that affect them. It includes guidance on name and pronoun usage, education about commonly repeated inaccuracies and politically contentious phrasing, and editorial best practices for centering trans voices.
Transcending Flesh in Fiction and Fantasy
Queer fantasy writer Ana Mardoll, author of the Earthside series, discusses how to acknowledge the existence and needs of transgender people when creating a fictional world that includes widespread access to body-modification techniques. This piece was published on xer Patreon page (a platform to support content creators with recurring donations); a complete book of essays on the topic is also available for download on a pay-as-you-wish basis..
Transgender Today
Launched in 2015 on the New York Times website, this evolving collection of personal essays by a diverse group of transgender youth and adults is inspiring and informative.
Transition Magazine
This literary and cultural journal was founded by Ugandan writer Rajat Neogy in 1961, and re-launched in 1991 by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Transition publishes poetry, fiction, and essays from and about Africa and the African diaspora.
Translation Shop
Translation Shop is an online clearinghouse for finding certified translators for your official documents, business communications, or academic papers. Their site representative explains, "We are ATA certified, which offers objective evidence that a translator possesses the knowledge and skills necessary to provide a quality translation."
Transoceanic Twitter
By Alex Deppert
Transoceanic tubes twitter, trigger transition,
timely tighten transcontinental transmission.
Tie Trotsky to Trudy, Tunisia to Tennessee,
trigger transmutation, teeming translucency.
Two trillion text tatters, twittering tirelessly,
trading tirades, trueness, tomfoolery,
towering tom-tom tons, terrible tastelessness,
treasure troves, trenchancy, terrific tastiness.
Textual tadpoles terrify, titillate,
troglodytes, townsmen take to tolerance, transmigrate.
Tackle textual tessellations, tidal text tweezer,
trigger talk-triple-tripe-trips, tipsy text teaser,
technological tongue tongs, titanic travesty,
turning tricks, taking turns toughly, tempestuously.
Transpositions: A Symposium on Christianity and Fantasy Literature
This blog is a collaborative effort of students associated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. Transpositions seeks to create conversations between Christian theology and the arts, and discuss the nature of both art and theology as a transposition of divine reality into earthly form.
Trapped in New Mexico
So...the men want to hear about meat.
About how the carcasses would bleed
when we'd strip away the hides after
slicing a bit at the stomach and feet.
Do they want to hear about hunger,
do you think? The emptiness that
drives an animal to take the bait
moments before cold steel jaws spring
shut
killing
and
maiming
everything they catch in their grip?
Should I tell about the owl I saw
upon a riverbank? One crisp morn,
early spring, as I ran the traps?
Ran steel traps on the riverbank.
The broken thing sat with one leg snared
and the other leg free, bobbing,
bobbing, bobbing...so I tried to drive
a .22 into its wise old brain.
Turns out I drowned it with a heel
there in the icy water passing.
Yes, I drowned it with a heavy heel
to bring to an end our suffering
early in the New Mexico spring.
Copyright 2005 by Lana Loga
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Trapped in New Mexico" by Lana Loga, assaults the reader from the outset with the brutal facts of survival in a predatory world. The plain-spoken, repetitive lines summon echoes of old folk songs where nature's laws harshly repay human violence. Here, the trappers themselves are trapped, victims of a fate that their own actions brought down on them. Even the noble owl, an unintended casualty, is implicated in the cycle of predation. His hunger and our own may be equally irresistible, culpable and deadly.
The first line effectively sets the tone of the poem. "So...the men want to hear about meat." The female narrator throws down a challenge to those who prefer not to face the bloody realities undergirding their existence. She is determined to make them see the cost of the life she leads. Setting herself up in opposition to "the men" establishes her basic stance of alienation and aggression. In her world, men and women, human and animal, are at war. The only gesture of sympathy in the poem is an act of violence; she reaches across the divide to kill the owl even as she becomes one with it. "I drowned it with a heavy heel/to bring to an end our suffering".
"Do they want to hear about hunger,/do you think?" The narrator's moment of solidarity with the owl at the end of the poem gives this question a new meaning. Perhaps the same "emptiness that/drives an animal to take the bait" also tempts humans to think they can safely seize the benefits of a way of life that ultimately kills their souls. I sensed an implicit political dimension to this poem, a lament that oppressed creatures would turn on one another instead of joining forces to choose a less destructive way of life.
I loved the rhythmic, incantatory language of "Trapped in New Mexico." Like the refrain of a ballad or the two-part structure of Bible verses, the repeated yet slightly varied phrases "as I ran the traps/Ran steel traps on the riverbank" and "Turns out I drowned it with a heel...Yes, I drowned it with a heavy heel" lift the poem into the realm of legends and archetypes. Loga also makes effective use of intermittent rhymes and assonances (meat/bleed/feet, grip/traps, passing/bobbing/suffering) to drive the poem forward.
I wasn't sure about her decision to change the line length during the pivotal moment, the phrase "shut/killing/and/maiming". On the one hand, the abrupt stylistic shift highlights the importance of these words. On the other hand, as I've said before in this space, I find that single-word lines more often dissipate than enhance the energy of a phrase. Also, in a short free-verse poem such as this, the inclusion of different styles sometimes gives the impression that the author is not in complete control of her material, that she has not settled on a form and tone for the poem. The other stanzas are so intense and economical with words that another line in the same style could still deliver the powerful effect that she intended. One possibility is to put the words "shut, killing and maiming" on a single line, creating a one-line stanza like "Ran steel traps on the riverbank."
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: June 17
https://newmillenniumwritings.org/awards/
Twice-yearly contest offers $1,000 each for poetry, fiction and essays; style and content of "Trapped in New Mexico" are good fit for this prestigious journal
Mad Poets Review Competition
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.madpoetssociety.com/
Enjoyable journal publishes accessible yet well-crafted poetry that makes an emotional connection with the reader; top prize $100
SSA Writer's Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
http://www.ssa-az.org/
Society of Southwestern Authors offers $300 prizes for poetry, fiction and nonfiction; follow formatting rules carefully
The Writers Bureau Poetry & Short Story Writing Competition
Entries must be received by July 31
https://www.wbcompetition.com/
$1,000 in each genre in this contest from a British online writing school
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Travesties: A Queer Journal of Uncanny Arts
Travesties is an online literary journal for LGBTQ authors, publishing poetry and art that is "queer in all senses of the word". Texts are paired with spooky pink illustrations for a magical and macabre vibe. Editors say, "We want pieces that are bizarre and bountiful, that have striking imagery and delicious sound." Unpublished work preferred but not required. Send 1-5 poems or up to 10 pieces of artwork.
tree turtle
tree turtle is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer, educator, and activist, whose work explores the intersection of black, LGBT, Buddhist, and working-class identities. tree turtle's work has appeared in journals such as Fence Magazine, The New Formalist, Prick of the Spindle, Ploughshares, and many others. Eight works of couture book art were published by Widows Nails Press, a project of Marcel Christian Labeija, who was also an affiliate of the famed Nuyorican Poets Café.
Trenches on the Web
World War I reference site maintained by the Great War Society. Their online newsletter, the St. Mihiel Trip-Wire, features historical research, book recommendations and links to materials about World War I. The site also includes a historical overview of the war, an extensive links directory, discussion forums, and information on battlefield tours.
Trip Wires
By Sandra Hunter. With startling breadth of vision, this short story collection reveals the raw and tender material of our common humanity across borders—from a Sudanese refugee in Glasgow, to the survivor of a Colombian paramilitary kidnapping, to young soldiers in the Middle East whose emotional armor is breached by defiantly joyful children. The standout tale "Brother's Keeper" channels Flannery O'Connor to expose the underside of white Christian benevolence toward Africans. For immigrants and wanderers everywhere, gratitude takes a backseat to homesickness, and rescue is not the same as safety. Hunter restores these displaced persons to the center of their own life story.
Tripping with the Top Down
By Ellaraine Lockie. Prolific poet Ellaraine Lockie has a gift for revealing the spirit of a place with a perfectly chosen character sketch or a quirky interaction that invites us to think twice about how we move through the world. In her work, travel produces enlightening friction between an unfamiliar environment and the unnoticed edges of ourselves. This collection, her 13th chapbook, takes us along on her tour of the American West, from her Montana birthplace to her native California and points between.
Trish Hopkinson Poetry Blog
Poet Trish Hopkinson is the author of the chapbooks Emissions and Pieced into Treetops, as well as many poems published in literary journals. On her blog, she shares interesting writing tips, articles, calls for submissions (no-fee only), and other information to help promote good writing.
Trumpet
By Jackie Kay. Lyrical writing distinguishes this multivocal novel about a trans male jazz musician in 1950s-'90s Scotland and the many ways that people process the revelation of his queer identity after his death.
Tu Books
Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low, publishes diverse middle-grade and young adult novels. Their motto is "Where fantasy and real life collide". Science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and genre-bending works are welcomed. Editors say, "Tu Books was created for a specific reason. The present and the future belong to everyone and to limit this reality is a fantasy. Adventure, excitement, and who gets the girl (or boy) are not limited to one race or species. The role of hero is up for grabs, and we mean to take our shot."
Turkey City Lexicon
Critters Writers Workshop, a writing resource for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror authors, offers this primer for SF workshops to identify and avoid bad prose habits. Types of problems are listed somewhat randomly, with amusing titles like "Squid in the Mouth" (inside jokes that readers won't understand), "Fuzz" (using the word "somehow" to gloss over plot holes), or "The Jar of Tang" (an entire story contrived solely to reveal a twist).
Turning Off the TV in Your Mind
In this 2024 post from his Substack, speculative fiction writer Lincoln Michel (Metallic Realms) contends that fiction that tries to imitate a television camera fails to take advantage of techniques specific to the written word. These include interiority, the ability to skip over mundane actions, nonlinear time, and visual descriptions that tell you something about the observer's personality as well as what is being observed. "The problem is that if you're 'thinking in TV' while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints."
Tweetspeak Poetry
Tweetspeak is a friendly online poetry community with a clean, sophisticated design. They offer a variety of features to help people engage with poetry, including writing prompts, book clubs, audio recordings, and craft essays.
Twisted Road Publications
Twisted Road Publications is an independent literary press founded in 2013 by Joan Leggitt. They publish up to four books a year, with a special interest in work by or about marginalized groups (e.g. people of color, LGBTQ people). The press accepts un-agented manuscripts. Authors in their catalog include Pat Spears, Nance Van Winkel, and Glenda Bailey-Mershon. "We seek to publish gifted writers whose works are under-represented by corporate marketing. We are partial to the writer who possesses a gift for compassionate, sharp-eyed truth-telling, rendering fully formed characters and stories that get under our skin. Ones that push hard to discover the kind of truth that exposes the reality of our deepest humanity."
Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing
In this earthy, revelatory poetry collection from Main Street Rag Publishing, bodies eat, sweat, climax, and die. Some of them are stuffed. All are handled with reverence. Humorous or embarrassing moments open up suddenly into a vision of fellowship that levels social distinctions.
Two Haiku from Journey to the Clear Light
By Robert Paul Blumenstein
the owl grew many
all the fluffy chicks survived
squirrels not too well
tender purple cones
singing in pine bough cradle
tomorrow's giants
Two Medicine Lake
By Cris Mulvey
Walking onto the frozen lake
beneath these chiseled mountains,
snow puff-powdering the purple air,
ravens rustling by, carrying light
like a drink in the curve of their backs,
the ragged cry of their cackling
deepening the thrum of silence:
I am a pine seed stuttering
onto a stainless platter,
the air around me
the color of bluebirds’ feathers
twirling into an ocean of sky.
Two Sides of a Ticket
By Helen Leslie Sokolsky. This distinctive poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press contains a portrait gallery of urban characters. Their alienation is healed, momentarily, by the author's mature and compassionate re-imagining of the lives she glimpses in passing. These narratives show us recognizable scenes made fresh by Sokolsky's original metaphors.
TypePad
Paid blogging service starting at $8.95/month. Higher tiers offer more data storage, bandwidth, number of blogs per user, and customization options.
UCLA Children’s Book Collection
The UCLA Children's Book Collection online archive offers free downloads of over 1,800 digital titles, from classics like Little Women and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to lesser-known public domain works from the 19th century and earlier.
Unbeknownst to You, My Brother
By Lucia May
Downtown the coroner speaks
with averted eyes about the bullet
and its path from your hand to your head.
He whispers his request
to kindly remove my child from the room.
For your funeral your wife dresses
in plastic shoes and a tight ruby dress.
You don't know that she will never give
our mother your ashes in the cardboard box.
She will scatter them to your son's horror.
You don't know that one morning
our mother will be found
lying in a field in the muddiness
of her stroke.
Your young son sits in the back row
during the service at the funeral home.
You don't know that he too will die
at your age.
In my Bible
there is no holy card from your funeral
but I have saved a yellow lined
memo sheet from the coroner
with the heading William J. Brown.
In my handwriting is
One spent, 5 extra
Smith and Wesson
The coroner, Dr. Edelstein, wrote
S&W Revolver
357 Magnum
Ser # S-305856
The minister glanced down to his notes
during the final prayer
to remind himself of your name.
#
(Reprinted from Blond Boy (Evening Street Press, 2014); originally published in The Awakenings Review, Fall 2012)
Unbound
UK-based site applies the principle of "crowdfunding" to book publishing. Agent-recommended authors pitch their book ideas on the site. If you like their idea, you can pledge to support it. If they hit the target number of supporters, the author can go ahead and start writing. If the target isn't met, you can either get your pledge refunded in full or switch your pledge to another Unbound project. Pledging readers get backstage access to the creative process, including updates on the book’s progress, exclusive interviews, draft chapters, information about the author's backlist, and discussions with the author and other supporters.
Unbridled Books
Founded in 2003, Unbridled Books publishes fiction of high literary quality that also appeals to a broad audience. In an interview at the literary journal Ploughshares, editors Fred Ramey and Greg Michaelson expressed a preference for books that exude a spirit of hope and survival, not excluding dark subject matter but not ending in a place of despair. Authors in their catalog include Elise Blackwell, Ed Falco, Marc Estrin, Emily St. John Mandel, and Richard Kramer.
Unbroken Awareness
My life is now a floating shell
I am a vessel on that river.
The storm, the ship, the sea,
Whose shores we lost in crossing.
I can see the milky distances—
In your eyes, but you cannot see me.
A thin melon slice of first moon,
Melting into songs and slivers of ice.
You could feel small creatures dying.
Cowering humans in their burrows.
Fighting for lives other than theirs.
Aware they could not escape.
Each of us came into being
Knowing who we are,
What we are supposed to do
But why do you try to hold back—
The sands, falling in the hourglass?
I am now unconscious.
In a way—, but mute.
A little pearl of awareness,
But this pearl is not me.
Knowing yet unable.
I am now timeless!
All times and in all futures
I am a universe of windows
I cannot be touched again
I am in an endless dream
But I can see you outlined
Looking beyond what you know
One day the seeds would return
And life would continue.
Copyright 2007 by Tendai R. Mwanaka
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem comes to us from Zimbabwean poet Tendai R. Mwanaka. Its themes of ego-less awareness and awakening wisdom reminded me of Buddhist beliefs about the interconnectedness of all life, transcending boundaries of self and other, human and animal, or the living and the dead. The speaker's lyrical insights are comforting even when mysterious, because of their tone of tranquility and faith that eventually the listener will reach full understanding. The poem itself is a "pearl of awareness", polished and pure.
In the opening lines, the narrator seems to be reporting back from the other side of death. "My life is now a floating shell/I am a vessel on that river." Transformed by emptying, simplified, the speaker is content to be borne along by larger forces. The identity that once bounded his entire experience is seen from outside as merely one object in a wider landscape. It was a container for an awareness that now soars above it. (I regret having to assign a gender to the speaker when the whole point of the poem is to transcend such identity markers, but the limitations of English prose grammar require this.)
Contrast this open vista to the confined perspective of "Cowering humans in their burrows." Yet the speaker picks up on and encourages the listener's first stirrings of insight that other selves exist: "You could feel small creatures dying" and perhaps also the line "Fighting for lives other than theirs". This latter phrase could mean several things in the context of this poem. Are the human-creatures fighting to protect someone beyond their own selfish interests—the beginning of the empathy that leads to "unbroken awareness"? Or are they misunderstanding what is "theirs", clinging to an identity that they mistake for the fullness of life? As the speaker later says of himself, "A little pearl of awareness,/But this pearl is not me."
Mwanaka uses sound effectively to enhance the meditative mood of the poem. Listen to the S sounds in the first stanza, which replicate the feeling of identity dissolving: "The storm, the ship, the sea,/Whose shores we lost in crossing." They are joined by the hum of M sounds in the dreamy, beautiful images of the next stanza: "A thin melon slice of first moon,/Melting into songs and slivers of ice." Whiteness pervades the poem: pearls, milky distances, ice, moonlight. Because of this tactile richness, the poem never feels too abstract even though it puts across complex philosophical ideas.
The kernel of the poem, which reads like a miniature poem in itself, is the aphorism that is the fourth stanza:
Each of us came into being
Knowing who we are,
What we are supposed to do
But why do you try to hold back—
The sands, falling in the hourglass?
There are two ways of thinking about the significance of an individual life. One is the futile path of denying and resisting change and death, for fear that the self's evanescence makes life meaningless. The other is to recognize that change and death do not defeat the overall pattern of which each life is a unique part.
The speaker would like to communicate this comforting notion to those left on the other side, but there are limits on their ability to hear him. From their side of the veil, he appears "mute", "knowing yet unable." The next stanza reassures us that his condition is actually one of joy: "I am now timeless!/All times and in all futures/I am a universe of windows". Although we cannot fully experience this connection now ("I cannot be touched again"), he has faith that we will come to enlightenment someday, too ("I can see you outlined/Looking beyond what you know").
"Unbroken Awareness" stood out among critique submissions for its assured pacing, luminous imagery and wise insights. Clear without over-explaining, it is a good example of poetry that works as both spiritual message and enjoyable lyric.
Where could a poem like "Unbroken Awareness" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
National Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Prestigious, competitive awards for poets aged 18+ from a leading UK-based poetry organization; top prize 5,000 pounds; online entries accepted
The Plough Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Contest to raise funds for UK arts organization offers two prizes of 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems; 2007 judge is UK poet laureate Andrew Motion; enter by mail or online
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Prizes of $100 for prizes for poetry, stories, prose poems, personal essays, humor, and literature for young adults; previously published works accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Under the Arbor
We came for love
When the light was fleeing
Under the arbor, by a tree.
We sat in silence
On my coat of leather
Under the sky, near the earth
The night was tender
Warm and bright
With you and I, the garden wall.
We came for love
When life was fleeting
Under the arbor, by a tree.
Our ageless day
Yet the inevitable night
Has entwined us forever
With a longing for life.
Copyright 2005 by J.T. Milford
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Under the Arbor" by J.T. Milford, has the timeless quality of an old English ballad. Though not strictly formal verse, the poem develops a song-like cadence through the use of repeated speech patterns and grammatical constructions in each stanza.
The style and theme of "Under the Arbor" reminded me of Lord Byron's "We'll go no more a-roving". What gives these deceptively simple lines so much power? Perhaps it is the immediacy and sincerity of the feelings that the poet shares with us. There is no self-conscious drama, no aesthetic affectation. No matter how many poets and lovers have made the same observations, the ecstasy and the loss are felt afresh by everyone who falls in love.
Similarly, in "Under the Arbor," the scene becomes more poignant for its lack of detail. The lovers are every lover, the arbor is every pastoral scene where the changing light and turning seasons reminded us of life's fragility. This theme comes through in Milford's deft reworking of the first stanza in the fourth: "When the light was fleeing" becomes "When life was fleeting."
The poem uses just the right amount of repetition to create a musical structure without becoming monotonous. The first two lines of stanzas 1-4 have two stressed beats each, but the number and pattern of syllables varies slightly. Lines ending in "silence", "leather" and "tender" relieve the pressure of having each line end on a stressed syllable, which can give a poem a leaden tread. The third line of stanzas 1-4 feels like two shorter lines because it falls into two parallel halves, usually a pair of prepositional phrases. But the poet breaks that pattern slightly in the third stanza, "With you and I, the garden wall," allowing the heart of the poem, "you and I," to stand out more from its context. The three-line structure creates the sensation of two halves joined to form a greater whole in the third line.
I was less enamored of the concluding stanza, which deviated from the pattern of the preceding stanzas without a clear rationale, and lacked their careful pacing. I also felt that the move from physical details (the arbor, the light, the wall) to more abstract images ("ageless day," "longing for life") diminished the impact of the scene. In the first four stanzas, I was seeing through the poet's eyes, whereas in the last stanza, he was telling me what he thought. Sensation is more powerful than second-hand interpretation.
More importantly, I wasn't sure what he was trying to say. The "ageless day" and "inevitable night" appear to contradict one another. These lines could be read as saying that their love made the day seem timeless, yet all along they know night is inevitable. But how has the coming of night "entwined [them] forever/With a longing for life"? Is it that they cling more tightly to each other because they know that the passage of time brings loss? If the point is that they are united forever by love, the last line pulls the reader in a different direction: are they longing for life, or each other?
My suggested rewrite below flows more naturally from the preceding stanzas, while preserving most of the images and clarifying the main idea:
We longed for life
Though night descended
Entwined forever, in ageless day.
The last line could bear a double meaning. The lovers' bond makes day out of night, and night and day are also entwined, just as the lovers' ecstasy is always intermingled with awareness of mortality.
Where could this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
http://www.firstwriter.com/competitions/poetry_competition.shtml
Top prize of 500 pounds plus a free subscription to this useful resource site for writers. Submit online only
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
