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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

This week our prose series resumes with excerpts from Gregory Orr's A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, just out from W.W. Norton & Company:

"This small book represents one poet’s informal exploration of language and self in relation to the impulse to write lyric poetry. I think of it as a series of brief provocations presented in the hope that they will lead the young poet or reader toward an active response of his or her own. If it encourages you to write poems, or if it clarifies your personal engagement with and excitement about poetry, then it will have succeeded."

Look for it here.

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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2. Sponsor Messages

 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest
26th year. $5,000 in cash prizes, including $2,000 for the best story and $2,000 for the best essay. Submit short stories, essays, and other works of prose on any subject, up to 6,000 words each. All entries that win cash prizes will be published on WinningWriters.com. Both published and unpublished work accepted. Fee per entry is $20. Submit by April 30. Final judge: Dennis Norris II. Winning Writers is one of "101 Best Websites for Writers" (Writer's Digest). See guidelines, past winners, and enter online via Submittable at winningwriters.com/tomstory

 Instant Messages
Instant Messages is a new kind of writing, a mash-up of straightforward and accessible poetry, koan-like brain teasers, the delicate observations of Haiku, surprise one-liners, daily mumbling, text-based art, and aphorisms of penetrating insight. All wrapped together in a common theme: things and experience are “messages,” where meaning awaits. Follow on Instagram!

“Bite-sized wisdom on an invisible stick” —Billy Collins

"Wonderful, surprising, often profound—made me daydream.” —XJ Kennedy

 Vermont College of Fine Arts MFAs in Writing
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditinal low-residency MFA in Writing program—now celebrating its 35th year—along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.

 2018 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry
The Beloit Poetry Journal invites submissions for the 2018 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry to be judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. A prize of $1,500 will be awarded for a single poem, which will appear in the journal. The editors will consider all entries for publication. Submissions open March 1 and close April 30. See www.bpj.org for more details.

 Passager Poetry Contest: Writers Over 50

Deadline: April 15, 2018
Reading fee: $20, check or money order payable to Passager/UB includes a one-year subscription (2 issues). Winner receives $500 and publication. Honorable mentions will be published. Submit 5 poems, 40 lines max. per poem. Cover letter, bio, SASE for results. No previously published work.
Send hard copy or use Submittable. No email submissions. Send to:
Passager Poetry Contest
1420 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

Questions? contest@passagerbooks.com
www.passagerbooks.com

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Lynn Melnick's Landscape with Sex and Violence reviewed by Laura Wetherington. (Hyperallergic)
• Rebecca Foust introduces "Walking Through the Grass at Night," by Ellery Akers. (Women's Voices for Change)
• New collections by Tom French and Annemarie Ní Churreáin reviewed by Caitriona O'Reilly. (The Irish Times)
• Elizabeth Lund reviews new collections by Li-Young Li, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye. (The Washington Post)
• "To the Future Readers of Lucie Brock-Broido" - Stephanie Burt's tribute to the poet and teacher. (Paris Review Daily)
• Stay, illusion" - A tribute to Lucie Brock-Broido by Carol Muske-Dukes. (Los Angeles Times)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, 61 (Columbia University School of the Arts and The New York Times)
• And more...

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4. New Arrivals

These new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.

• dying in the scarecrow's arms, Mitchell L. H. Douglas (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch, David Bottoms (Copper Canyon Press)
• Search and Rescue, Michael Chitwood (Copper Canyon Press)
• Fort Necessity, David Gewanter (University of Chicago Press)
• How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens, Joan Richardson (University of Iowa Press)
• The Hatch, Joe Fletcher (Brooklyn Arts Press)
• Acacia Road, Aaron Brown (Silverfish Review Press)
• Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, ed.s (Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast)
• Pantoums, Dennis Daly (Dos Madres Press)
• Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene, Lynn Keller (University of Virginia Press)
• AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper, Giovanni Singleton (Canarium Books)
• Screwball, Anne Kawala, tr. Kit Schluter (Canarium Books)
• The Cold and the Rust, Emily Van Kley (Persea Books)

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5. This Week’s Featured Poets

The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:

Monday - George Bilgere
Tuesday - Wayne Miller
Wednesday - Mark Halliday
Thursday - Caitlin Roach
Friday - Chelsea Rathburn
Saturday - David Tomas Martinez
Sunday - Abdourahman A. Waberi / tr. Nancy Naomi Carlson

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6. Featured Poets March 5, 2018 - March 11, 2018

These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:

Monday - Li-Young Lee
Tuesday -Adrian Blevins
Wednesday - Evie Shockley
Thursday - Robin Becker
Friday - Lee Sharkey
Saturday - Ada Limón
Sunday - Barbara Hamby

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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.

Bruce Bond, "Hackberry"
Andrew Motion, "Fog in Naskeag Harbor"
Miguel M. Morales, "This Is a Migrant Poem"
Mary Durkin, "also Amelia daughter of the above"
L. S. Klatt, "The Wilderness After Which"
Thomas McCarthy, Two Poems
Len Krisak, "Tiberius"

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8. Poem From Last Year

also Amelia daughter of the above

There are enough hollow gaping tree trunks with bees and rare beetles
in Abney Park Cemetery
to keep Graham Sutherland and Georgia O'Keeffe going together
in hollow gaping tree trunks
for the many long years it took to age the grave stones, rot the bodies
and weather Sir Isaac Watts on his plinth outside the derelict cruciform chapel
in London yellow-stock with bath-stone facing and octagonal steeple, scaffolded now,
beside the single common lime with nineteen separate trunks,
which has significant regenerative powers. 

 

Mary Durkin
PN Review
January / February 2017