Sat Apr3: 2010 GRAND SLAM and Writing Intensive

ABQ Slam writes

Hey ABQ Slam fam and fans, we have the biggest show of the year and a hella good writing intensive on tap THIS SATURDAY!

SATURDAY NIGHT the top 10 performance poets in the 505 battle for the coveted Albuquerque City Championship as well as a spot on the 2010 ABQ National Poetry Slam team at the 2010 ABQ GRAND SLAM on SATURDAY, APRIL 3 at the OUTPOST PERFORMANCE SPACE.

Among those in the running are Jessica Lopez, Emily Landis, Zack Kluckman, 2009 ABQSlams champ Damien Flores, 2009 Youth champ Reed Bobroff, 2010 Haiku Dethmatch champ Tracey Dahl, former ABQ team members Christian Drake, Joseph Andres Romero and Hakim Bellamy as well as Khalid Bunsunni. Opening the slam will be sacrificial poets Danny Solis (the current ABQ Slam Poet Laureate) and 2010 ABQWOW champ Brooke von Blomberg. 

Poetry Prompt Contest - Deadline April 1

cross posted from Buffalo Poetics

The *Lantern Review* Blog is hosting a prompt contest in honor of National Poetry Month 2010.  Three runners-up and one winner will have the writing prompts that they submit featured on four successive Fridays during the month of April. 

In addition, the winner will receive a signed copy of Monica Youn's new poetry collection, *Ignatz*, thanks to the generous
sponsorship of Four Way Books.  The deadline for entry is 11:59 PM EST on April 1st.  All you have to do is leave a comment on our contest post with your favorite writing exercise and some form of contact information (and if you're really uncomfortable with leaving contact info in a comment, you can also leave your prompt in the comments but email us separately at
editors@lanternreview.com).

Here's the link: *
http://lanternreview.com/blog/2010/03/23/announcing-our-2010-national-poetry-month-prompt-contest/

*Best of luck!

*Lantern Review* Editorial Baord: Iris A. Law, Editor and Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Associate Editor

March Broadsided in Mountainair

Broadsides come early in the month for posting to the not necessarily poetry reading public. I post Broadsides + the copy that comes with them on Mountainair Arts, introduced with a brief note. Here, just note (exhorting readers to take up Broadsiding) + das Ding an sich.

Battling Bards

British Poets Fight It Out For Prestigious Oxford Professor Of Poetry Position by Jessie Kunhardt -  Huffington Post

"The Endgame of one of the most acrimonious literary spats in recent times began yesterday when one of the nation's most divisive poets revered for his "brooding verse" and chastised for being "inaccessible" was announced as a candidate for Oxford University's next professor of poetry."

I'm trying to imagine the general American reading public following a competition among academics and poets for a poetry chair as intently as UK readers have been following this one, made all the more entertaining by resignations, withdrawals, scandals and infighting. 

A sampler...

• Geoffrey Hill nominated Professor of Poetry at Oxford after scandal‎ - 2 days ago, Oxford dons have nominated a new candidate to become the university's poetry professor after the first woman to hold the post resigned
• Who now for Oxford Professor of Poetry? - Telegraph, May 28, 2009 ... Tom Payne reflects on the Oxford Professor of Poetry fiasco now that Derek Walcott and Ruth Padel have ruled themselves out of the race ..

• Fallout from the Oxford Professor of Poetry Debacle - May 14, 2009 ... The nearly unanimous response to Derek Walcott's withdrawal as a candidate for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry

Todd Moore, 1937-2010

Todd Moore reading at 2006 Picnic

Memorial page, St Vitus Press and Poetry Review, Theron Moore

another memorial page with audio files, poems, essays, articles, 

interviews, tributes, book list ~ from Monsieur K of the outlaw poetry network

Facebook page

Interview with Todd Moore, Lummox Press, 1997

1 essay about Dillinger/ 1 about the poet as outlaw, Lummox 2000

another blog post, at Lilliput Review's 

poetry blog

and poems, letting the thing speak for itself

Headlines & News from the other P&W

Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

Reading Proficiency Stagnates Among America's Schoolchildren, DNA Poetry, and More | Daily News | Poets & Writers

Poetry anthology seeks submissions

from Synchronized Chaos

ANTHOLOGY. Try this on for size. Take these six words—Anteros, crippled, spindles, stairwell, threshold, and whirligig—and incorporate them into a poem for possible inclusion in an exciting and daring anthology.

There are no minimum or maximum length requirements for individual poems. We, however, have a three-poem limit for submissions. The only requirement is that you incorporate all six words into one poem. We are most interested in fresh and surprising poems that seamlessly integrate the list words.

Submissions will only be accepted via e-mail. Please e-mail submissions to:
(replace (at) with @) by May 15, 2010.

Please visit for more information.

Call for Poets

from Carlos Contreras, crossed posted from NM Slam

This is a call out to the poetry community... .  Do you do slam, write poetry, write haiku, perform regularly, or are looking for a place to debut?  Make Chroma Art Center at 600 1st Street that place...   When? April 2nd from 630-9pm Where? 600 1st Street, North East Corner of 1st and Roma downtown Why? Come be part of Chromas 2year Anniversary, and open studio night!!!!!!   Poets that are interested will read, poetry, and will be allowed to "freestyle" if they wish.... poets will be placed in the gallery, lobby, and throughout the basement hallways, we are also looking for Haiku poets to ride the elevator and spit haiku throughout the night to elevator riders.....   You in? email and tell me how i can get ahold of you we will go from there. Carlos Contreras, soothxsayer@yahoo.com

why local poetry matters

Local iQ Cover, 1.18.10

Local IQ's cover story, why local poetry matters [a brief oral history] completely omits the Poets and Writers Picnic despite including Dale Harris and other picnic readers past present and future. Here's hoping she negotiated a separate story and maybe even a cover.

Dale Harris

Yeats for St Padraig

 

What else? Yeats:

I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Wed Mar 17: MASPoetry slam & open-mic

Reposted from ABQ Slam 

The March/St. Patrick's Day 2wenty10 edition of MASPoetry slam and open-mic takes place TOMORROW NIGHT, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17 at Winning Coffee Co., 111 Harvard SE (across from UNM).

It's the SECOND TO THE LAST QUALIFYING SLAM OF THE SEASON, which wraps up with the GRAND SLAM on April 3 at the OUTPOST PERFORMANCE SPACE. 

Tomorrow's event features the world-famous poetry slam as well as the open-mic, PLUS A SPECIAL TWIST: The GAELIC Word of the Day. Use the GAELIC Word of the Day in your poem and you get an extra point. 

Call for poetry submissions

Cave Wall Press (http://www.cavewallpress.com) seeks previously unpublished poetry

The poetry journal Cave Wall is accepting open submissions - April 15, 2010 (postmark deadline). Please send 3-6 previously unpublished poems to the following address:


Cave Wall Press, LLC
P.O. Box 29546
Greensboro, NC 27429-9546


We read submissions blind, so your name should NOT appear on any poems. Include a cover letter listing the titles of poems you're submitting.


Be sure to include an SASE for response.


Recent and upcoming contributors include: Julianna Baggott, Sandra Beasley, Kelly Cherry, Camille T. Dungy,Claudia Emerson, Jeffrey Harrison, A. Van Jordan, Rebecca McClanahan, Carl Phillips, David Rivard, Natasha Trethewey, Katrina Vandenberg,Robert Wrigley.


You can find more information on our website: http://www.cavewallpress.com

2009 NBCC Award to Rae Armantrout

Cross-posted from PennSound:

All of us at PennSound couldn't be happier to hear last night's news that Rae Armantrout's Versed had been awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In their official citation, the NBCC praisedVersed for "its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading," while in a recent blog post highlighting finalists, James Marcus observes that Armantrout's work is "playful, poignant, and metaphysically alert?never more so than in Versed [...] whose vigilant, often beautiful poems seem to reset the reader?s mental instrumentation."

When Science & Poetry Were Friends

When Science and Poetry Were Friends - The New York Review of Books

Call for Submissions: Current Events Poetry

Online Journal Seeks Current Events Poetry: http://www.newverse news.com


THE NEW VERSE NEWS covers the news of the day with poems on issues, large and small, international and local. It relies on the submission of poems (especially those of a politically progressive bent) by writers from all over the world.


The editors update the website every day or two with the best work received. What's best? A genuinely poetic take on a very current and specific news story or event.


See the website at http://www.newverse news.com for guidelines and for examples of the kinds of poems THE NEW VERSE NEWS publishes. Then paste your submission and a brief bio in the text of an email (no attachments, please) to <nveditor(at) yahoo.com> (replace (at) with @). Write "Verse News Submission" in the subject line of your email.

Current events-related poetry submissions sought: cross posted from Synchronized Chaos 

Modern Haiku

cross posted from Miriam's Well. Publication information for Modern Haiku. Miriam Sagan is a featured reader and workshop faculty at the 2010 Poets and Writer's Picnic. She writes:

Haiku may be like stars in the sky–or ants at a picnic–but in any case where there is one there are usually many. Charles Trumball, who has been the editor of MODERN HAIKU since 2006, estimates that as a rule, for one issue, he receives submissions of:


2,763 haiku and senryu
70 haibun
12 sequences


He accepts about 7%, a somewhat larger percentage than other excellent journals. In any case, the current issue, Volume 41.1 Winter-Spring 2010 is a handsome one. From the abstract painting in red and black on the cover to the selection of haiga (haiku and images) in the Poetry Gallery section, MODERN HAIKU presents as both traditional and yes, modern, in its approach. MODERN HAIKU stands out over of the years for its informative and intellectual essays, and for a selection of haiku that is never limited to pure imagism. These haiku also mean something. Here are a few.


From Janelle Barrena:
winter crocus–
she's outlived
everyone she loves


And Allan Burns writes:
a willow reveals
the underground stream
Dharma Day


I also liked the tension and contrast in David Caruso's haiku:
above the trees
beyond my reach
her balloon, her certainty


Subscriptions are $35.00 a year (3 issues); Modern Haiku, PO Box 33077, Santa Fe, NM 87594-3077. http://www.modernhaiku.org

46 New Writing Contest Deadline. Poets & Writers (the mag)

The deadlines for 46 writing contests fall between March 15 and April 15, including (on March 15) poetry and fiction prizes from The Pinch, a literary journal published by the University of Memphis.             View the Calendar

Creeley on Bunting

CREELEY ON BUNTING via languagehat.com by languagehat on 3/1/10

Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Basil Bunting, one of my favorite poets; I've devoted three posts to quoting him (1, 2, 3) and several others to discussing him. He's obviously one of Mark Woods' favorites too, because wood s lot commemorates him every year, and today's post is particularly full of rich links and quotes. I'll just pass on one, A Note on Basil Bunting by Robert Creeley (from his Collected Essays, available in their entirety online—bless you, University of California Press!):

I am curious to know if an implicit quality of language occurs when words are used in a situation peculiar to their own history. History, however, may be an awkward term, since it might well imply only a respectful attention on the part of the writer rather than the implicit rapport between words and man when both are equivalent effects of time and place. In this sense there is a lovely dense sensuousness to Bunting's poetry, and it is as much the nature of the words as the nature of the man who makes use of them. Again it is a circumstance shared.
...

But the insistent intimate nature of his work moves in the closeness of monosyllables, with a music made of their singleness:

Mist sets lace of frost
on rock for the tide to mangle.
Day is wreathed in what summer lost.
(Briggflatts)

Presumptuously or not, it seems to me a long time since English verse had such an English ear—as sturdy as its words, and from the same occasion.

Posted via email from Meanderings

a 2010 Poetry Calendar

with a distinctly international flavor, cross posted from The Other weBlog, at The Other Pages, a charming aggregator site with no description or mission statement but featuring mostly poetry (Poets Corner for poetry in the public domain, UniVerse for contemporary) and art with a strong leaning to photography and digital images.  January 18-23 Palm Beach Poetry Festival (Florida, U.S.)  http://www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org  January 28 Het Huis van de Poëzie (Netherlands)  http://www.huisvandepoezie.nl/2010/  February 3-5 Kritya (Mysore, India)  http://www.facebook.com/pages/kritya/246618691339  March 10-13 Split This Rock Poetry Festival (Washington, D.C., U.S.)  http://www.splitthisrock.org/festival2010.html  March 17-21 Stanza (St. Andrews, FIfe, Scotland)  http://www.stanzapoetry.org/2010/information.php  March 25-28 DLR Poetry Now (Dún Laoghaire, Ireland)  http://www.poetrynow.ie/  April 9-11 Wenlock Poetry Festival (Shropshire, England)  http://www.wenlockpoetryfestival.org/  April 11 Robert Frost Key West Poetry Festival (Florida, U.S.)  http://robertfrostpoetryfestival.com/  April 15-18 Austin International Poetry Festival (Texas, U.S.)  http://www.aipf.org/html/info.php  April 22-25 Seacoast Poetry & Jazz Festival (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, U.S.) http://jazzmouth.org/  April 23-25 Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival (Multiple locations along the Texas/Mexico Border http://www.vipf.org/  April 23-24 Hocking Hills Poetry Festival (Logan, Ohio U.S.)  http://powerofpoetry.org/home.htm  April 29-May 2 Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival (Geonoa, Nevada, U.S.)  http://genoacowboyfestival.com/  April 30 - May 2 Strokestown International Poetry Festival (County Roscommon, Ireland) http://www.strokestownpoetry.org/  July 2-11 Ledbury Poetry Festival (Herefordshire, England)  http://www.poetry-festival.com/  August 6-9 London Poetry Festival  http://londonpoetryfestival.com/  August 27-29 Queensland Poetry Festival (Brisbane, Australia)  http://www.queenslandpoetryfestival.info/  September 3-5 Australian Poetry Festival (Sydney, Australia)  http://www.poetsunion.com/apf  September 4-13 Overload Poetry Festival (Melbourne, Australia)  http://overloadpoetry.org/  (October, Dates TBD) Dodge Poetry Festival (Newark, New Jersey, U.S.)  http://www.dodgepoetry.org/  October 4-9 Poetry Africa (Durban, South Africa)  http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/Poetry_Africa.htm  October 8-11 Houston Poetry Festival (Texas, U.S.)  http://houstonpoetryfest.info/page3.html?ifrm_2=page12.html  October 17-18 Belfast Poetry Festival (Maine, U.S.)  http://www.belfastpoetry.com/   2010 Poetry Event Calendar (still waiting on dates for the Dodge Festival, Istambul Festival, and information on events in Asia, Canada, and South America)