The Best American Poetry

November 9: Live via Zoom Tracy K. Smith and David Lehman present The Best American Poetry 2021

Click here to register.

John Ashbery's Typewriter

John Ashbery's typewriter -- a wonderful title for a poem, methinks -- has turned up at Harvard. As the Harvard Gazette reports:

<<<
John Ashbery [pictured left with Jane Freilicher] dove head-first into poetry after arriving at Harvard in 1945. His biographer Karin Roffman described him as “a constant presence” in the Woodberry Poetry Room (formerly at Widener Library until 1949), where he would discover the works of W. H. Auden, the eventual subject of his thesis.

As a student, Ashbery attended readings of the works of W.H. Auden, Morris Gray, and Marianne Moore, discovered local bookshops, and befriended fellow poets, including Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and V.R. Lang. “The great modernist poets were the poets he was imbibing,” Roffman said in an interview with the Gazette. “He was really thinking about the given canon that he was getting in classes at Harvard and then the personal canon he was making for himself.”

The experiences were formative for Ashbery, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, and Harvard has become the center of study on the celebrated poet. The University acquired his papers over a period of years and his reading library — donated by his husband, David Kermani — in 2018. Last month Ashbery’s typewriter, also a gift from Kermani, was installed in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Lamont Library, which will host an event, “Lunch Poems: Adventures with John Ashbery’s Typewriter,” featuring Roffman and Ashbery’s former assistant and editor Emily Skillings, on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

Much of Ashbery’s poetry throughout his career, was written on typewriters, but his love affair with the machines started after graduation. The budding poet didn’t have access to one during his studies likely due to the expense — he even got his thesis typed by someone else who did have one.

Class portrait and information on John Ashbery from the freshmen register during his days at Harvard. "A Sermon: Amos 8:11-14" by John Ashbery.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo
>>>

For more: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/11/john-ashberys-typewriter-installed-at-harvard/

Ed Ochester Retires as Pittsburgh's Poetry Point Person

<<
A toast to Ed Ochester, to whose retirement we raise our glasses in celebration of his editorial achievement (and poeitc prowess). As director of Pitt Poetry, Ed Ochester has published some of our most consequential poets displaying an ecumenicism of taste sharpened by high intellect, wit, and an ear for the language as spoken. The University of Pittsburgh has released the statement abridged here:

We are at once happy and sad to announce the retirement of our beloved poetry editor, Ed Ochester. Ochester has been the series editor and creative force behind the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1978 and published hundreds of collections by established and rising poets.

Ochester became a driving force of American poetry, working with such poets as Billy Collins, Etheridge Knight, Toi Derricotte, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Tomas Transtomer, Gregory Orr, J. Allyn Rosser, David Wojahn, Kate Daniels, Alicia Ostriker, Jim Daniels, Andrei Codrescu, Adrienne Su, Dean Young, and David Lehman. 

In addition to Ochester’s work selecting and editing collections for the Pitt Poetry Series, he established the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize in 1981, one of the premier prizes for a first full-length book of poems. He was also the editor for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for many years.

Ochester is professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. In 2001, Ochester received Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award. Ochester has twice served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, where he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Sugar Run Road, Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, and The Republic of Lies, and was editor of American Poetry Now.

The University of Pittsburgh Press is actively seeking Ochester’s successor. You can read more about the Pitt Poetry Series here.
>>

Tonight at 7 PM (East Coast time): Michael Caine and Poets (including Lally and Lehman)

Organized by Suzanne Lummis: << You won't want to miss this All-Star Line-up. It's a ZOOM event. Click event for link. Please join us! >>

"The Morning Line" by David Lehman: Poetry Feature of the Month on "The Common"

Today The Common published The Morning Line, the title poem of my new poetry collection, as its poetry feature of the month. I wrote the poem on May 22, 2020, having always wanted to write a poem with that resonant title. The phrase dictated the subect matter: chance, gambling, and faith. Here are the opening two stanzas of this extended three-part meditation. -- David Lehman

The Morning Line

— May 22, 2020

1.

You can pick horses on the basis of their names
and gloat when Justify wins racing’s Triple Crown 
or when, in 1975, crowd favorite Ruffian, “queen 
of the century,” goes undefeated until she breaks down 
in a match race with Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. 
Who could root against Ruffian? 
Did patriotic Englishmen cheer 
when Sir Winston won the Belmont last year? 

I rejoiced when Monarchos, a ten to one bet, became 
the second horse ever to break the two-minute mark
at the Kentucky Derby. Why did I pick it? I liked the name.
Those two minutes in May 2001 and the giddy hours after 
now seem a little like a garden party in England in July 1914 
as the nineteenth century approached the finish line 
and collapsed.

Please click here to read the rest of the poem.

Poems on Dylan & Bukowski: only two days left to get your entries in

On September 02, 2021 we accounced

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan": A Contest

As we head into Labor Day weekend, we announce a new contest:

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" 

With this as your title, write a maximum of 14 lines (verse) or 140 words (prose).

Post your entry in the comments field.

Entries will be judged on the criteria of excellence, lucidity, wit, and brevity. Prizes, including a copy of The Best American Poetry 2021, will be given to the best and to the briefest coherent piece of writing. 

Judge: Jim Cummins 

Contest end date Sept 30

Previous BAP contests were judged by Mark Strand, Paul Violi, and Mark Bibbins.

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest1winner.html
http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest2winner.html

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest3winner.html

See the winners for 2007 and 2009.

To see the entries, check the comments field here -- and click here for a couple of others:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/when-charles-bukowski-met-bob-dylan-terence-winch.html 

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2021

Find your copy here.

Now published: "The Morning Line" by David Lehman

September 15, 2021. Pittsburgh, PA. -- The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the publication of David Lehman's new book of poems:

<<<
The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity in poems that proffer candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age.

"The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range," writes Major Jackson. "Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified."

A poetic ventriloquist, Lehman expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky's “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.  

The Morning Line includes such tours de force as “Tales Told To Tevye,” which The New Yorker published in its flash fiction series, and “The Complete History of the Boy,” a loving look at the growth of a son’s mind. The title poem is a prose meditation on gambles, wagers, risk, and the high stakes of the Corona virus pandemic.  >>> 

You may order the book from online vendors or directly from the University of Pittsburgh Press:
https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966616/
$18 paperback.

Praise for The Morning Line:

“’Everyone was supposed / to be miserable:’ but here are these poems—poems that, like Emerson before them, are most serious when they’re most playful, most profound when they sound childlike.  David Lehman is a writer of many kinds of poetry, many kinds of prose, but whatever he writes is unmistakably his—and ours. Lehman lets us become who we are, which sounds as if it should be easy: we need him, and, until he writes even more, The Morning Line is his best book.

--James Longenbach

In The Morning Line, David Lehman engages us at his most companionable. His voice is inclusive and intimate, his intelligence inexhaustible, embracing subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith. These poems bring us into conversation with Baudelaire, Catullus, Mayakovsky, Voltaire, and Elaine Equi, are often humorous and always joyful. Reading David Lehman is an antidote for loneliness.

--John Hennessy

Ever the bon vivant and sophisticate, David Lehman is too savvy to write boorish poetry, purely sentimental lyrics furiously sodden with all the lumps life hands us. Instead, he hears the melodies and plays the keys. The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range. Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified.

-- Major Jackson

Vincent Katz, Guest Author September 13-17

photo © Vivien Bittencourt

This week we welcome back Vincent Katz as our guest author. Vincent is a poet and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016) and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), which received a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002; reprinted 2013), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010 to 2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, he collaborated with Sarah Sarhandi on the opera While There's Light, based on his translations of Propertius. He lives in New York City.

Find out more about Vincent Katz here. 

Welcome back, Vincent.

-- sdl

Happy new year, everyone! L'shanah Tovah!

Chaucer Gets Canceled (part III)

Two excerpts from Calls to cancel Chaucer ignore his defense of women and the innocent – and assume all his characters’ opinions are his [plus a link to TheConversation.com

 

July 19, 2021 8.12am EDT

Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the dangers – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death.

In his July 2021 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the removal of Geoffrey Chaucer from university curricula. Edwards says he believes this disappearance may be propelled by a vocal cohort of scholars who see the “father of English poetry” as a rapist, racist and antisemite.

The predicament would have amused Chaucer himself. Jewish and feminist scholars, among others, are shooting down one of their earliest and wisest allies. This is happening when new research reveals a Chaucer altogether different from what many current readers have come to accept. My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.

***

As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem “The House of Fame.” He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

Chaucer’s own words demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that when his much underestimated Prioress tells her antisemitic blood libel tale, Chaucer is not endorsing it. Through her own words and actions, and a cascade of reactions from those who hear her, he is exposing such guilty and dangerous actors as they deploy such lies.

And was he a rapist or an abductor? It’s unlikely. The case suggests he might well have been targeted, perhaps even because of his work. Few authors have ever been more outspoken about man’s inhumanity to women.

It is bizarre that one of the strongest and earliest writers in English literature to speak out against rape and support women and the downtrodden should be pilloried and threatened with cancellation.

But Chaucer knew the complexity of his art put him at risk. As his character the Squire dryly observed, people all too often “demen gladly to the badder ende” – “They are happy to assume the worst.”

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part II)

These "Letters to the Editor" appear in the TLS of July 23, 2021 

It is indisputable that Chaucer was charged with “raptus” and that one of the meanings of the term (but not its only one) is “rape”. The question of his guilt is far less clear. The body of scholarship, both inculpatory and exculpatory, is extensive. But ultimately the issue remains unresolvable in any conclusive way. More widely, does the charge itself mean that the possibility, and only the possibility, that a writer had, or might have had, an unpleasant personal life mean that his works should not be studied?

Should “me too” become “you too”? The writers in the Chaucer Review ask “whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by moral insufficiency.” The grounds of “moral insufficiency” are never defined and are not demonstrated. These “feminist scholars” are not trying “to deal with Chaucer in new and important and – yes – difficult ways”, as Tom Bailey asserts. (He never explains what these “ways” are.) Their explicit aim is to expunge him from both canon and curriculum. Just like the University of Leicester. Different forms of political correctness create improbable bedfellows

A. S. G. Edwards
Enfield

I am the medievalist who resigned from the editorial board of the Chaucer Review in protest against the prefatory statements made by the two guest editors of Issue no 54.3 (2019), on “new feminist approaches to Chaucer”. I have as good a claim to the title of feminist as these two editors, as is shown not only by my published works but also by the fact that the permanent editors of the Review dedicated a subsequent issue in this feminist series (55.4, in 2020) to me and Carolyn P. Collette, as “feminist scholars who ave done so much to shape the study of Chaucer and direct its future”.

The issue here is not feminism; it is literary criticism. The guest editors declare flatly that “Chaucer does not share our beliefs, we know. His historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence”. This is not “quiet questioning”, as Tom Bailey puts it, but self-righteous assertion, which dictates to the reader what she is supposed to find in Chaucer before she turns the first page. And of course she will not so much find it as bring it there. To approach Chaucer with this mind-set is to substitute a grotesque caricature for the humane values that distinguish him from many other writers of his time, and that students, in my experience, are quite capable of appreciating.

One wonders whether the guest editors (or Tom Bailey) have actually read Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, in which he opens his retelling of the rape of Philomel with passionate questioning of God – why did he allow the birth of the rapist Tereus, whose mere existence pollutes the world and the minds of all who read his story, even the mind of God himself? As for Chaucer’s alleged rape (about which there cannot be absolute certainty), his sensitivity to the paramount need for female consent, as well as the wide range of meanings covered by the word “raptus”, are evident, for example, when Troilus refuses Pandarus’s urging that he should “ravysshe” Criseyde, because, says Troilus, “ravysshyng of women” caused the present sufferings of Troy; so he insists he will not “ravysshe hire” – that is, elope with her – unless she wishes him to (but of course she prefers her own plan). I also cannot refrain from quoting Hector’s superbly dignified response to the Greek envoys who request the exchange of Criseyde for the Trojan captive Antenor: “‘Syres, she nys no prisonere,’ he seyde; / ‘I not [do not know] on yow who that this charge leyde, / But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle, / We usen here no wommen for to selle’”.

Of course, these matters deserve fuller discussion, which my published work on Chaucer has tried to provide. But the final issue with the guest editors’ manifesto is that they wish to close down discussion, to “move past Chaucer”, and “demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency”. To those of us who deeply admire and love Chaucer, the charge of “moral insufficiency” rebounds on its makers.

Jill Mann
Cambridge

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part I)

Two excerpts from "Gladly wolde he lerne? Why Chaucer is disappearing from the university curriculum"
By A. S. G. Edwards

Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 2021

It was announced in January that the University of Leicester was to remove Chaucer from the English curriculum. Along with the rest of medieval literature, and some from later periods, he was to be replaced with courses on “race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity”. The announcement prompted widespread and ineffectual protests. Several medievalists at Leicester have now lost their jobs, and incoming students will henceforward be denied the opportunity to study the father of English poetry (among much else).

The reason initially given by the University for this decision was economic: these courses were not popular with undergraduates. This assertion has been questioned and the University has not presented evidence to substantiate its claim. It has been frequently asserted in the media that the real motive is a desire to “decolonize” the curriculum, a suggestion that the University has denied.

***

This is a passage from a recent essay by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu in the Chaucer Review, a scholarly journal:

<<<
[Chaucer’s] historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence. Many feminist scholars now ask … whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency. And perhaps that will be the conversation of future years, of future incarnations of medievalist feminism.
>>>

This is critical thinking in the age of Donald Trump. (I know of one eminent Chaucer scholar who resigned from the Editorial Board of the Chaucer Review over these words.) It is also another form of the impulse felt by Leicester’s administrators: the desire to remove Chaucer from the university curriculum and find “a new object of study”. But here the motives are based on pseudo-ideological grounds that seem close to personal loathing. It is easy to respond with simple arguments that refute the simplistic assumptions of these academics: to point out that the depiction of character and event by a writer is not an invariable or necessary reflection of the author’s own assumptions. But to have to do so is a stark demonstration of the ways in which thought has been replaced by kinds of unreflective dogma in some parts of academe.

The actions of radical feminists and of the University of Leicester are different forms of political correctness, one striving for “relevance”, the other seeking to suppress literary history by the invention of grounds for seeing it as offensive. Both seek a simpler academic world shaped by the doctrinaire. The proper study of Chaucer involves the appreciation of difficulty, of complexity, as, of course, does the literary and historical analysis of any significant literary figure or work. This ought not to need to be said. But difficulty and complexity have become danger words in academe. They impose on both teacher and student the pressure of effort. In the case of Chaucer, the extent of that effort is compounded by the extent of the linguistic and cultural distance that separates us from his writings. It is attractive in various quarters to find reasons not to make such effort, to assume that students are afraid of difficulty and that teachers should not challenge them. A scholarly world where we seek not to disturb or be disturbing is one in which Chaucer will not be welcome as a subject for study

A. S. G. Edwards is General Editor (with Julia Boffey) of a new edition of The Works of Chaucer, which is forthcoming.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312 

Announcing the Gunpowder Press Latinx Poetry Chapbook contest [by Emma Trelles]

Gunpowder Press invites Latinx poets who are current residents of California  (age 18+)  to submit to the first Gunpowder Latinx Poetry Chapbook contest. The deadline to submit is September 30, 2021.

Poems may be submitted in English or Spanish. Selected manuscripts will be published in both English and Spanish.

We especially encourage poets living on the Central Coast in Santa Barbara, Ventura, or San Luis Obispo counties to submit. Special attention will be given to poets who have not yet published a full-length collection.

Two manuscripts will be selected for publication in bilingual editions. The winning poets will each receive $250.00, 10 copies of the published chapbook, and an invitation to read at the Mission Poetry Series in Santa Barbara in 2022. 

For all of the guidelines, in English and in Spanish, visit https://gunpowderpress.submittable.com/submit

Gunpowder Press invita a los poetas Latinx que residen en California (mayores de 18 años de edad) a participar en el primer concurso del Gunpowder Latinx Plaquette de Poesía.

Los poemas pueden estar escritos en inglés o español. Los manuscritos seleccionados se publicarán en formato bilingüe: en inglés y en español.

Invitamos especialmente a los poetas que viven en la costa central y en los condados de Santa Bárbara, Ventura, o San Luis Obispo. Se prestará atención especial a los poetas que aún no hayan publicado una colección completa.

Se seleccionarán dos manuscritos para publicación en ediciones bilingües. Los poetas ganadores recibirán $ 250.00 cada uno, 10 copias del poemario publicado, y una invitación para leer en la Mission Poetry Series en Santa Bárbara en 2022. Para más detalles, visita https://gunpowderpress.submittable.com/submit

Andrew McCarron, Guest Author July 26-30

This week we welcome Andrew McCarron as our guest author. Andrew is a teacher and writer born and raised in the Hudson River Valley. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology, chairs the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics Department at Trinity School in Manhattan, and teaches in the English Department. His books include: Mysterium, a poetry collection (Edgewise Press, 2011); Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle & Paul Violi, a collection of critical biographies (Station Hill, 2016); Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan, a study of the Nobel Laureate’s religious identities (Oxford University Press, 2017); and The Ballad of Sara and Thor: A Novella (Station Hill, 2017). He is currently completing a creative biography on the late classicist William C. Mullen.

Welcome, Andrew. 

-- sdl

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Daniel Nester, Guest Author July 19-23

This week we welcome back Daniel Nester as our guest author.  Daniel is the author most recently of Harsh Realm: My 1990s, a collection of poetry and prose poems coming soon from Indolent Books. His previous books include Shader, a memoir; How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction; and The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited. His first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On, are hybrid collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared New York Times, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Bennington Review, The Hopkins Review, Word For/Word, Court Green, Love’s Executive Order, Barrelhouse, and other places. He edits Pine Hills Review, the online literary journal of The College of Saint Rose, where he is  professor of English.

Find out more about Daniel here. Follow him on Instagram @danielnestermfa

Welcome, Daniel. 

-- sdl

2021 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize Winners

MARSH HAWK PRESS

• Chapter One
 
• Contact

2021 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize Winners

Chosen by David Lehman

The MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE
($1,000.00 Cash Prize and Publication of the Book, along with the Duotrope Prize)

“Rasa” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer

David Lehman writes: The author writes that “Intimacy means profoundly interior — / countless sets of keys and cryptic codes.” The book is intimate in this sense. The author celebrates the power of the imagination to multiply metaphors, as in “Tarzan Audade,” with its striking opening lines (“It’s never a good sign when the patron saint / of betrothed couples is also the saint of the plague.”) and “No Alphabet,” orchestrated by the reiterated “If not” that begins the poem. The poet’s fruitful exchanges with Freud, in such poems as “To Charette with a Man,” “Patron of Embalmers,” and ‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does,” delighted this reader.

The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD
($250.00 Cash Prize)

“Morning Music” by Lera Auerbach

David Lehman writes: In the title poem and such others as “Beethoven’s Choice” and “The Strings,” the author reveals a deep and heartfelt knowledge of music, which is one source of the manuscript’s unity. Another is the bravely autobiographical dimension in the “Zuihitsu” poems that frame the collection. The poems have a Russian feel, as if they participate in a tradition established by Akhmatova and Mandelstam.

The ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL AWARD
($250.00 Cash Prize)

“Vanished” by Richard Mullen

By my quick count there are 146 eight-line poems here, each complying with the requirements of an ad hoc form. The poems constantly keep one surprised and alert, as when “Thackeray, the author” considers himself “a nocturnal anomaly at his desk” and suddenly, without warning, we face “the field beyond the graves. “The humor is likeable and subtle: ” ‘I believe in science,’ she sobbed into a pillow.”

FINALISTS

Brandon Magby, Dwaine Rieves, Deborah Schupack, Adrie Kusserow, Gregory Mahrer, L.J. Sysko, Sally Derringer, V. Joshua Adams, Mary Pinard, Erik Reece, Robert Clinton, Jan Shoemaker, Joseph Harms, Partridge Boswell 

John Hennessy, Guest Author June 14-19

This week we welcome John Hennessy as our guest author. John is the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books )and Coney Island Pilgrim (Ashland Poetry Press) He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and the forthcoming anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and serves as poetry editor for The Common. Find out more about John here. 

Welcome, John. 

-- sdl

Congratulations Emma Trelles, Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA

Ed note: Emma Trelles has been generously contributing here since the early days of this blog. We are thrilled to share the news that she has recently been made Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA. You can read all about it in the profile below. Congratulations Emma!

SHAPING CHAOS: Trelles views her work as an attempt to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of life. | Credit: Erick Madrid

The position of poet laureate of Santa Barbara, initiated in 2005 and first held by the late Barry Spacks, offers an opportunity and a challenge. Granted, this city is an unlimited source of inspiration, but how do you improve on paradise? What can a poet give to the city that has everything?

When Emma Trelles became the ninth person to hold the laureateship this spring, the city found an answer. The daughter of Cuban immigrants and a native of Miami, Trelles has been a journalist in South Florida and a professor at Santa Barbara City College. Her book Tropicalia, which received the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize in 2010, overflows with the emotional intelligence and rhetorical clout of a lifelong poet.

In describing how her writing reflects her background, Trelles uses the Cuban Spanish metaphorical verb resolver, which means “to make things work despite obstacles.” In a recent email, she said that her poems “document the bright green fly at the center of a succulent or the experience of walking home at dusk with a bag of street tacos.” Writing about the world she sees and her responses to it gives her a “way of understanding it or at least giving its chaos a recognizable shape.”

“Writing poems is my way of trying to make things work, if only for a little while,” she explains. “My people are hopeful realists, and I think I am too.”

While Trelles initially developed this clear-eyed yet extravagant vision amid the lush landscapes and plural contradictions of Miami, her style suits the nuances of Santa Barbara’s ravishing Spanish-themed dreamscape equally well. Supremely attentive to the natural environment as it bumps into or brushes up against the artifice of urban life, she has found much to admire and even more to consider in the seven-plus years she and her husband have lived in Santa Barbara. From dive bars and noise bands to Tennyson and García Lorca, and from Afro-Cuban Santería to the Brazilian counterculture of Tropicália, Trelles brings an extraordinary range of contexts to bear in her work. In ways both overt and subtle, her voice is one that Santa Barbara needs to hear.

Continue reading here. 

-- sdl

Heidi Seaborn, Guest Author May 31-June 4

This week we welcome back Heidi Seaborn as our guest author. Heidi  is the author of [PANK] Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), the acclaimed Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019) and the 2020 Comstock Review Chapbook Award-winning, Bite Marks. Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Financial Times, The Greensboro Review, The Offing, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox and elsewhere. She’s Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal  and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Find out more about Heidi at her website: heidiseabornpoet.com

Welcome back, Heidi.

-- sdl