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POETS HELPING POETS

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” Robert Graves

The rewards are mostly in the writing and reading but also in helping fellow poets and promoting poetry and other arts as game-changers and life-saving graces. Imagine a world where everyone could indulge their chosen artistic expression. It would be a better world. I often think about all the people who are on the run: running from wars, conflicts, environmental injustice and climate disruptions. I wish for them, of course, health, safety, housing, stability, food, education. But I also wish for them to have paper and pencil, art supplies, carving tools and so on. This is all by way of telling you about one of last week’s delights. I am always tickled to learn about poets supporting the work of others, especially good but lesser know and outsider artists.

Marta Pombo (Moments) wrote to tell me about “My Best Literary Review.” She wrote, “I am a poetry lover and would like to help Mario Savioni, a poet friend of mine, to get more recognition. …  In order to help him I wrote a paper reviewing his entire literary work, which basically consists of poems and prose-poetry short stories. All the people who have read my review said they liked it. They also told me it is well written.”

KUDOS TO MARTA: She clearly worked hard on this review. HERE it is. See what you think.

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SUNDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS: Calls for Submissions, Contests and Other News and Information

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

 

CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

Opportunity Knocks

THE CINCINNATI REVIEW, University of Cincinnati accepts submissions starting on September 1 and going through March 1. miCRo submissions for its weekly online flash features, hybrid works and poetry are open all year. No submission fee. No payment. Tip jar. Details HERE.

ENTROPY MAGAZINE publishes quite a wide range of material including poetry. Guidelines HERE.

INTO THE VOID, Gripping, Unflinching, Award-Winning Literature & Art publishes short stories, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, poetry and images. The deadline for Issue 9 ends June 7. Details HERE.

NARRATIVE publishes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Calls are open for General Submissions, Story of the Week, Poem of the Week, iStory, iPoem, Six-word Stories, Cartoons and Graphic Stories. Paying market. Submission fees can be as high as $22. Details HERE.

SPLIT ROCK REVIEW has an open call for submissions to its Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology. Deadline is June 30, 2018. Calls for journal submissions of poetry, short creative nonfiction, graphic narratives and comics, artwork and cover art for its fall issue close on July 31, 2018. Details HERE.

THE STRAND MAGAZINE publishes mystery and suspense. Query by email strandmag@strandmag.com. Website HERE.

YEMASSEE, The Official Journal of the University of South Carolina Since 1993, reads year-round for poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Details HERE.

ZETETIC: A Record of Unusual Inquiry publishes prose and poetry and is a paying market.  Details HERE.

The BeZine

Call for submission for the June issue.

THE BeZINE, Be Inspired, Be Creative, Be Peace, Be. Submissions for the June issue – themed Sustainability –close on May 10 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.  

New rules: Please send text in the body of the email not as an attachment. Send photographs or illustrations as attachments. No google docs or Dropbox or other such. No rich text. Send submissions to bardogroup@gmail.com.

Publication is June 15th. Poetry, essays, fiction and creative nonfiction, art and photography, music (videos or essays), and whatever lends itself to online presentation is welcome for consideration.

No demographic restrictions.

Please read at least one issue and the Intro/Mission Statement and Submission Guidelines. We DO NOT publish anything that promotes hate, divisiveness or violence or that is scornful or in any way dismissive of “other” peoples. 

  • June 2018 issue, Deadline May 10th. Theme: Sustainability
  • September 2018 issue, Deadline August 10th, Theme: Human Rights/Social Justice
  • December 2018 issue, Deadline November 10th, Theme: A Life of the Spirit

Deadline for the June issue is extend to May 20th.

The BeZine is an entirely volunteer effort, a mission. It is not a paying market but neither does it charge submission or subscription fees.

Previously published work may be submitted IF you hold the copyright. Submissions from beginning and emerging artists as well as pro are encouraged and we have a special interest in getting more submissions of short stores, feature articles, music videos and art for consideration. 

CONTESTS

Opportunity Knocks

New:

THE SWANEE REVIEW, First Annual Fiction & Poetry Contest will open July 1 – 31, 2018 for a set of 1-3 poems or a short story of up to 10,000 words. Cash award: $1,000 and publication. Details HERE. The poetry judge is Dan Chiasson.

SEQUESTRUM LITERATURE & ARTS 2018 New Writer Awards for fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Cash award and publication. Submission fee. Deadline: October 15, 2018.  Details HERE.

Reminders:

MAGMA POETRY will announce the details for its pamphlet competition soon. Watch the site for information.

TARTS FICTION AWARD of Livingston Press at the University of West Alabamayearly deadline is December 31st. The entry fee is $20. Standard royality contract. Details HERE.

TERRAIN.ORG, 9th Annual Contest in Poetry, Nonfiction and Fiction is accepting submissions through September 3. $15 submission fee. Cash award: $500 to first place. Publication for first place winner and finalists. Jane Hirschfeld is the poetry judge. Details HERE.

EVENTS

  • WRITER’S DIGEST ANNUAL CONFERENCE, NYC, August 10-12, 2018.  Details HERE.
  • SEWANEE WRITERS’ CONFERENCE, hosted by the University of the South, July 17-29, 2018. Details HERE.
  • THE BREADLOAF WRITERS CONFERENCE, August 15 – August 25, 2018. Details HERE.
  • OPEN MOUTH POETRY FESTIVAL, November 1-3, 2018, Fayetteville, Arkansas. Workshops. Readings. Details HERE.
  • ART and DHARMA, Cultivating Awareness through Creative Expression, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, May 19, 2018.  “Experientially explore our inherent potential for spacious awareness by weaving together music, visual art, textile and other mediums. There will be periods of sitting, walking in nature, and time for our creative expression. Through mindfulness practices and play, we hope to deepen our awareness of the moment-to-moment ebb and flow of life as it awakens our senses. We welcome artists and those who don’t consider themselves artists! Bring your interest, curiosity, love of the Dharma to this day. Participants are encouraged to bring their own artwork as part of this experiential day. Starting at $75 PAWAN BAREJA, PHD, has a body-oriented counseling practice based on Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) work for coping with trauma and life changes, and is also an assistant in SE Trainings. She is currently in the Spirit Rock Teacher Training program. Register here https://calendar.spiritrock.org/events/art-and-dharma/
  • CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS CEREMONY, June 11, 2018, 415-869-5939 bookawards@commonwealthclub.org
  • And on May 19th in Morocco :

Accessible anytime from anywhere in the world:

  • The Poet by Day always available online with poems, poets and writers, news and information.
  • The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, online every week (except for vacation) and all are invited to take part no matter the stage of career or status. Poems related to the challenge of the week (always theme based not form based) will be published here on the following Tuesday.
  • The Poet by Day, Sunday Announcements. Every week (except for vacation) opportunity knocks for poets and writers. Due to other Sunday commitments, this post will often go up late in the day.
  • THE BeZINE, Be Inspired, Be Creative, Be Peace, Be – always online HERE.  
  • Beguine Again, daily inspiration and spiritual practice  – always online HERE.  Beguine Again is the sister site to The BeZine.

Reminder:

WEDNESDAY WRITING PROMPT

  • responses to the last prompt – A Hunger for Bone – are due by Monday, 8 p.m., May 7.

KUDOS TO

  • MICHAEL ROTHENBURG, cofounder of 100,000 Poets for Change. Michael’s novel, The Drums of Grace, is being issued as  an audiobook! Johnny Lee Schell, blues hall of fame guitarist, will produce the recording at Ultratone Studios (Eric Burdon, Loudon Wainwright III, Taj Majal). Michael says, “This is a dream….” … “Music as the healing force of the universe is the poet’s regard. It certainly is Michael Rothenberg’s in his fantastic prose dystopia where natural beauty is beyond the control of encroaching fascism. A fable not too distant from our contemporary climate of fear politics. Rise Up!” Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
  • PC VANDALL (PC VANDALL) for the publication of two poems in PRISM International.
  • THERESA LOLA (poet.), named joint winner of the prestigious 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize.
  • DEBASIS MUKHOPADHYAY (debasis Mukhopadhyay, between ink and inkblot) for recent publications in Better Than Starbucks (May 2018). Late last year his collection, Kyrie Eleison or all robins taken our of contest, was published.
  • RL SENDRA (aka Sendra the Poet) for the publication of his chapbook, Getting Up and Falling Down (poetic salve for a difficult world).

OTHER INFORMATION & NEWS

YOUR SUNDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS may be emailed to thepoetbyday@gmail.com. Please do so at least a week in advance.

If you would like me to consider reviewing your book, chapbook, magazine or film, here are some general guidelines:

  • send PDF to jamiededes@gmail.com (Note: I have a backlog of six or seven months, so at this writing I suggest you wait until June 2018 to forward anything.Thank you!)
  • nothing that foments hate or misunderstanding
  • nothing violent or encouraging of violence
  • English only, though Spanish is okay if accompanied by translation
  • your book or other product  should be easy for readers to find through your site or other venues.

TO CONTACT ME WITH ANNOUNCEMENTS AND OTHER INFORMATION FOR THE POET BY DAY: thepoetbyday@gmail.com

TO CONTACT ME REGARDING SUBMISSIONS FOR THE BeZINE: bardogroup@gmail.com

PLEASE do not mix the communications between the two.

Often information is just that–information– and not necessarily recommendation. I haven’t worked with all the publications or other organizations featured in my regular Sunday Announcements or other announcements shared on this site. Awards and contests are often (generally) a means to generate income, publicity and marketing mailing lists for the host organizations, some of which are more reputable than others. I rarely attend events anymore. Caveat Emptor: Please be sure to verify information for yourself before submitting work, buying products, paying fees or attending events et al.

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Martín Espada, the first Latino to be awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Reading at Fall for the Book 2014, Puerto Rican -American Poet, Martin Espada (b. 1957) – photo courtesy of Slowking4 under GFDL 1.2

“Even the post political poem is an act of faith.” Martin Espada

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is presented annually to a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant singular recognition. It is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets and, with a prize of $100,000, one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. The award is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and will be presented to Espada at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 11.

“Martín Espada’s work and life tell the real and lived story of America, in which the importance of poems and legal rights go hand in hand,” said Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “A tenants’ rights attorney before he became a celebrated and cherished poet, Espada’s passions are as compelling and apt as his precisions—both now more timely than ever.”

Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He earned a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a JD from Northeastern University. As an attorney, he served as supervisor of Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts, outside Boston. As a poet, an essayist, an editor, and a translator, he has dedicated himself to the pursuit of social justice, fighting for the rights of Latino/a communities and reclaiming the historical record from oblivion. His greatest influence is his father, Frank Espada, a community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer who created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project and founded East New York action in the ’60s.

“To receive a lifetime achievement award in the form of the Ruth Lilly Prize is a great honor that causes me to reflect: on my father, as artist and activist, who died four years ago; on Jack Agüeros, the first poet I ever met; on the days I sat outside the courtroom, scribbling poems on legal pads; on the people in the poems I write, Whitman’s ‘numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known.’”

Espada’s latest collection of poems from Norton is Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990).

He has received a Shelley Memorial Award, a Robert Creeley Award, a National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, a PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. Collections of Espada’s poems have been published in Puerto Rico, Spain, Chile, France, Germany, England, and Turkey. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of a Mexican American studies program outlawed by the state of Arizona and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Martin Espada’s website is HERE. His Amazon page is HERE. Follow the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine on Facebook at facebook.com/poetryfoundation or on Twitter @PoetryFound.

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A Hunger for Bone, a poem . . . and your Wednesday Writing Prompt

For Ann who died of a rare cancer of the bone and for Mary Kate who chose the day and the way.

A Hunger for Bone

we scattered your relics, charred bone
blithe spirit, to be rocked by waves,
to be rocked into yourself, the rhythm
enchanting you with sapphire spume,
sighs merging your poetry with the ether,
rending our hearts of their shivered memories,
shattering the ocean floor with your dreams
lost in lapping lazuli tides, dependable ~
relief perhaps after pain-swollen years of
suckle on the shards of a capricious grace

those last weeks …
your restless sleeps disrupted by
medical monitors, their metallic pings
not unlike meditation bells calling to you,
bringing you to presence and contemplation,
while bags hung as prayer-flags on a zephyr,
fusing blood, salt, water
into collapsing veins, bleeding-out
under skin, yellowing and puce-stained,
fetid air filled, we came not with chant,
but the breath of love, we tumbled in
one-by-one to stand by you

to stand by you
when death arrived
and it arrived in sound, not in stealth,
broadcasting its jaundiced entrance
i am here, death bellowed on morphine
in slow drip, i am here death shouted,
offering tape to secure tubing, handing
you a standard-issue gown, oversized –
in washed-out blue, for your last journey
under the cold pale of fluorescent light

far from the evergreen life of your redwood forest,
eager and greedy, death snatched
your jazzy PJs, your bling and pedicures,
your journals and pens, your computer and
cat, death tried your dignity and identity
not quickly, no … in a tedious hospital bed,
extending torment, its rough tongue salting
your wounds, death’s hungering, a hunger
for bones, your frail white bones –
but you, in your last exercise of will, thwarted death,
bequeathing your bones to the living sea

 – for Ann Emerson, treasured friend and San Francisco Bay Area poet

© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved 

A Tiny Froth of Smile and Grumble

You floated into our lives ~

an autumn leaf
edged in gold,
a tiny froth
of smile and grumble,
a lifetime
of grit and grizzle

Your mind over-larded
……lost
……in the never-land
……of ninety years

such a small body
……such pain

So bravely, little autumn leaf
….you chose
………the wind
…………….on which to slip away,
…..leaving us
the emptiness of your chair
and our wistful hearts

– for Mary Kate, elderly friend and treasured role model

© 2017, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

WEDNESDAY WRITING PROMPT

Sometimes we deny the truth that we are all living with dying. The reality may hit us with the death of a friend, a sibling, a parent, a school mate. The more fortunate, like my elderly friend Mary Kate who faced it head-on and chose to stop eating, go peacefully, but for others like my painfully ill friend Ann, my sister who committed suicide, and my mother who feared God’s judgement, that final peace is hard-earned. Tell us about your own experience and thoughts of living with dying. Serious stuff, I know, but part of life.

Leave your poem/s or a link to it/them in the comments section below. All poems shared on theme will be published here next Tuesday. You are encouraged to join in no matter the status of your career: novice, emerging or pro. You have until Monday evening, May 7 at 8:00 pm PDT to respond.

If this is your first time participating in Wednesday Writing Prompt, please send a short bio (NOT your poetry) and a photograph to thepoetbyday@gmail.com.  These are always published for new contributors by way of introduction.

Thank you! 🙂

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