For last week's "Next Line, Please" contest over the Amercan Scholar, David Lehman challenged readers to submit poems with secret messages embedded in them. He announced the winner on Tuesday, June 16. He also announced his summer hiatus, during which Angela Ball will run the show. In addition to being a talented poet and distinguished professor, much loved by her students at the University of Southern Mississippi, Angela is an imaginative editor, who has assembled special issues of Mississippi Review and Valley Voices.
Here's what Lehman had to say about this week's winner:
“Conscience versus Consequence”
To say I am impressed with the ingenuity on display in this week’s entries is to risk understatement. I’ll just say that the decision to pick a winner gets more difficult each week—and that the association of poetry and secrecy remains a fruitful one. I opted for a tie this time between two acrostic poems that could not be less alike: Christine Rhein’s clandestine investigation of secrets and Millicent Caliban’s high-spirited tip of the cap to the nation that was born on the 4th of July.
Continue reading over at the American Scholar.
-- sdh
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