Tupelo Press scholarship for NMSPS members

from NM State Poetry Society president Shirley Blackwell, via Paul White,   Santa Fe Poetry and Prose Meetup Group

It pays to be an NMSPS member: Check out this scholarship offer for NMSPS from Tupelo Press

Dear   Members,

The Conferencia del Encanto (registration form here) has captured attention across the country. In support of our efforts to host the Convention, Jeffrey Levine, owner of Tupelo Press in Massachusetts, is offering $300 scholarships to Tupelo Press' upcoming poets' conference in Truchas, NM (between Santa Fe and Taos) to the FIRST TWO NMSP MEMBERS WHO QUALIFY. You can check out this conference and the preparatory session for it here.

The Truchas conference will be led by Jeffrey and our own Veronica Golos, the Walking Rain (Taos) chapter member who is presenting one of our June National Convention workshops in tandem with member Bonnie Rose Marcus, events director at Poets & Writers. Applicants for the Truchas events, which occur June 18-21 and 21-24, will be asked to submit 5 poems to Tupelo Press, and Jeffrey Levine will use them to select TWO NM SOCIETY MEMBERS TO WIN THE $300 SCHOLARSHIPS. Jeffrey is flying in on June 16 to announce the winners at the Conferencia del Encanto's Gala Banquet that evening Tupelo Press publishes about 40 titles a year from top notch authors, so this is an opportunity to meet an East Coast publisher of note.

The deals don't stop there, however. Jeffrey will be sending me--for our Conferencia del Encanto hospitality bags--200 coupons, each of which offers a $100 DISCOUNT ON FUTURE Tupelo Conferences. These coupons go to the first 200 Federation members who register for La Conferencia del Encanto. I am letting NMSPS members know about this before I tell the rest of the Federation. Right now, we have 120 registrants for the Convention, and the pace of registration is picking up. The rest of those coupons will go to the next 80 who register, and I would like for that to be you, members of the hosting Society.

So, New Mexico members, if you have been waiting to register--this is reason not to wait any longer.

I will send this notice to the National Federation officer in charge of Conventions on Friday, and if he is true to form, the message will go to all the other State Poetry Societies on Saturday.

I wish all of you the best of luck and good poetry
Shirley Blackwell, NMSPS President

via Paul White (paulwhitesf@gmail.com),  Santa Fe Poetry and Prose Meetup Group

Today's reminder: go sit under the apple tree

…at James McGrath's Apple Orchard in La Cieneguilla with other #NMpoetry friends. Dale Harris, writes 

Hello Poetry Friends, 

Wanted to let you know about a delightful poetry reading today, Sunday May 5, 2 - 4 pm at James McGrath's Apple Orchard in La Cieneguilla. just south of Santa Fe. I'll be reading from my new book "Dream of Dragonfly" accompanied by Ingrid Burg, flute maker extraordinaire, for some of the poems. 

Other featured poets are Daniel Forest , Stewart Warren, and Cynthia West, with music by Dogstar (Lou Blackwell, Greg Candela, Debbi Miller-Gutierez & Stewart Warren.) James has been hosting poetry readings in his orchard for many years. It is a beautiful spot and a pleasure to be there in such good company. 

For driving directions and more on the poets, please go to Stewart Warren's Poetry in the Orchard page. "Dream of Dragonfly" is for sale online at Amazon and the Create Space as well as from my backpack when we see each other around town!

Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America

…a discussion of poetry in the American school curriculum and the deadly, stultifying effect of explicating set pieces to death instead of enjoying. True, I remember it - don't you? Still though, this may be less of a problem in parts of NM with its robust slam, youth slam and poetry in the schools programs. These, however, are more urban than rural. How well do these programs reach furthest corners of outlying school districts? In Mountainair, for example, not even the arts council has supported poetry well. Perhaps the community blogs need this more than Picnic... coals to Newcastle and such. 

Sappho, Edwin Austin Abbey,

Library of Congress, 

What went wrong? Somehow, we blew it. We never quite got poetry inside the American school system, and thus, never quite inside the culture. Many brave people have tried, tried for decades, are surely still trying. 

Let us blame instead the stuffed shirts who took an hour to explain [a] poem in their classrooms, who chose it because it would need an explainer; pretentious ponderous ponderosas of professional professors will always be drawn to poems that require a priest. 

Still, we have failed. The fierce life force of contemporary American poetry never made it through the metal detector of the public-school system. 

....But largely, c’mon — you and I both know — real live American poetry is absent from our public schools....This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations. 

....If anthologies were structured to represent the way that most of us actually learn, they would begin in the present and “progress” into the past....The second part of the fix is rather more complicated: in addition to rebooting the American poetic canon as a whole, we must establish a kind of national core curriculum, a set of poems held in common by our students and so by our citizens. In the spirit of boosterism, I have selected twenty works I believe worthy of inclusion...

Read all of the Suggestions for and commentary on Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America, by Tony Hoagland | Harper's Magazine

Pinsky translates Parker

Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky and his band perform "Horn," a poem set to music about hearing jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker play.

   

 Full video available free at Fora.tv

Why Write Sestinas?

Oh yes, why write sestinas?In addition to "why not" and "it's national #poetrymonth's #napowrimo, here are more reasons, shamelessly reblogging  Camille Guthrie's post on Harriet: The Blog. Now, someone, rewrite the following as a series of sestinas...

Supernova remnant from NASA’s Chandra x-ray observatory

• The challenge of the form: six stanzas with six end-words that have to repeat in a particular rotating pattern (twice in the three-line envoi at the end) like playing ping-pong with six balls and six other players. Sestinas are tricky.

• The repetition of the end-words gives you a chance to mull over the themes that obsess you. In Wuthering Heights, I noticed that Emily Brontë lingered over the words: heaven, hell, windows, revenge, power, heart—a perfect opportunity to make a sestina out of those lines when I have other things to do. A sestina lets a poet go Gothic.