“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” Ursula K. Le Guin
These responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt, the lesser being of a lesser god, June 13 certainly take us through time and geography, touch lightly or deeply on theme, all while warming our hearts and spinning our minds along the way. Enjoy! and Thanks! to Paul Brookes, Irene Emanuel, Sonja Benskin Mesher and Marta Pombo Salés. These poets seem always up for a challenge.
Thanks also and a warm welcome to The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt to Debbie Felio, Carol Mikoda and Anne G. Myles, accomplished writers all. Debbie’s work was featured before on The Poet by Day but not for Wednesday Writing Prompt, so here she is introduced in this context.
Join us tomorrow for the next Wednesday Writing Prompt. All are welcome to share their work on theme.
Least of These
I find myself
in losing self
amid the grander
moments in creation
for why would I
settle as the larger
of the lesser
among so little
grant me the serenity
to seek the enormity
of a great God’s creativity
lesser me at the edge
of Grand Canyon’s
cragged colors
lesser me in the depths
and breadths
of roaring oceans
lesser me in the wonders
of rainbows and cloud banks
snowstorms and tornados
lesser me counted
as one of millions
stars and galaxies
never am I so grand
as when the Grandest
includes in His resume
the lesser me.
© 2018, Deb Felio
DEBBIE FELIO is a poet/witness living and writing in Boulder, Colorado
Death’s Immensity
Stand next to one wall, let’s say
the north side, of a massive
building. Look up into the
sky, noticing only a
few puffs of clouds. Sweep your eyes
back down, catching sight of this
wall — gray, smooth, unending — and
recall it.
Instantly, the personal fantasy of
existence disintegrates,
leaving only wisps. Lungs
empty,
breath sucked away.
Only flatness,
a loss of all
color and detail.
Once again,
know Death
and be
paralyzed.
© 2018, Carol Mikoda
CAROL MIKODA teaches writing and new teachers in upstate New York. She lives in the country where she walks in the woods, studies the sky to photograph clouds, and grows vegetables and flowers. She also sings and plays piano, guitar, and bass. Although she enjoys travel, her cat, Zen Li Shou, would rather she stayed home.
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Scaffold
For Mary Dyer, Quaker martyr, d. 1660
1.
The only woman to be taken to the scaffold twice.
In October, you watched your friends drop,
then they let you go. In May you came back
and the second time it was for real.
Both times they marched you the last mile
flanked by soldiers, drummers, ministers —
the charivari of execution. You said
It is the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world.
I hunt online to see what you saw before you,
gaze lifted, sure and unrepentant:
the raw wood architecture of terror
set up on Boston Neck,
a strange delicacy in it perhaps;
its silence, its certainty, full stop.
The light that was the frailest metaphor
pouring through the noose.
2.
Scaffolding, as educators call it,
means how you model or demonstrate
the way to solve a problem,
how you build on students’ experiences
adding support, until in time
they can do it for themselves.
When the terror of the present gripped me
I wanted to write your story,
attempt to interweave it with my own,
tell what happened while it was possible.
By the time I reached the end, I hoped
(though I no longer believed what you did
as I’d tried to many years ago
and it almost crushed me)
you would teach me to be brave.
3.
Before they led imaginary
John Proctor to the scaffold,
before he thought better of it,
before he chose the honor of his name,
he bellowed in desire
I want my life!
4.
The poet said in workshop:
The scaffolding of a poem is its skeleton.
Consider the poem as a body;
what’s keeping it upright?
What are the rules that keep it alive,
that build its world?
I couldn’t help but smile.
I saw that after all it was this I got:
in middle age as you were,
you helped bring me back to poetry
and left me there, lesser, grateful,
heart pounding with desire
to walk and keep on walking
in my own recovered light.
© 2018, Anne G. Myles
ANNE G. MYLES, originally from the east coast, and now Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, specializing in early American literature. You can find some of my earlier academic thoughts about Mary Dyer in her Wikipedia entry, as I recently learned to my surprise. I have been drawn back to my lost origins in creative writing in the past year or so, and poetry (the form in which I was trained) even more recently, including but not limited to working on a series of Mary Dyer poems. I hope to begin sending work out soon. I have a blog about matters related to my recovering my creative voice at “How public — like a Blog –,” annegolda.blog
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My god is
Imperfect, a perfect image for me.
Humbled by its mistakes.
My god is a mistake.
A wrong answer,
Differently abled.
Its winters often in spring.
Its summers sometime in autumn.
My god is a fracture, a flaw.
Gender fluid. Defined by its
Inhumanity, it is complete
in its incompleteness. Aspires
not to aspire. My god is contradiction,
counter intuitive. Fresh in its decay.
Its more is always less. Thank god.
© 2018, Paul Brookes (The Wombwell Rainbow, Inspiration * History * Imagination)
Gust Is Deaf, Hills Are Blind,
trees can’t walk properly,
Flowers twitch haphazardly.
Grass is mute, rivers are dumb.
Nature is differently abled.
Mountains are too tall,
struggle to talk when they can’t
bend a knee, get down to those smaller
who are in awe when all mountains need
is to speak face to face , dispel their myth.
Same with water that rushes by,
no time to stand and stare, moments pass
before they have time to fully comprehend.
Flux needs a still moment but has to go on.
Still waters wish they could rush.
All hankers after what it Is not,
Cannot accept their place as their lot.
© 2018, Paul Brookes (The Wombwell Rainbow, Inspiration * History * Imagination)
© 2018, Irene Emanuel
. the robe.
kept in a box, precious.
lifted down for those to see,
that care.
did the understanding come,
the idea that all old things
are wanted, needed for their story.
not discarded on higher ground,
where dust and moth abound.
the lesser garment became prefered,
as the last shall become the first.
we shall look at the photographs.
© 2018, Sonja Benskin Mesher (poetry and illustration below)
.. bad night dreaming ..
dreamed of devastation, flew miles low
over concrete . skeletons, bones of the thing.
all is dust, as dust we have become. slow.
grey. nothing moves here no more. no sighs.
they have forgotten us. we have forgotten them.
are we now the bones of what we were?
bad night dreaming.
© 2018, Sonja Benskin Mesher
Confidence
With ebbs and flows
like sea and lake waters
the ground was trembling,
magnificent earthquake
confidence was at stake.
Wanted to do your best
so never felt at rest
you are too self-demanding
so confidence faded.
Too much self-exigency
leave me please, let me be
tell it now.
That parent, sister, brother,
that relative of yours
or that good friend or lover
if not, the teacher you had
someone said: great, keep up
or someone said, instead,
I think you have no talent
you will not earn a living
you are now wasting your time.
Your confidence fluctuating.
Ghosts of self-exigency
ghosts of negative people
let them vanish.
Hateful comparisons,
like storms amid the sea
till everything seems awash,
like strong winds on Earth
till each house looks swept,
mercilessly taken.
What light dwells in your soul
what thoughts in your mind
this is not to be disregarded,
disrespected or dismissed.
From your uniqueness, your creation
comes as a true revelation.
Let the ghosts of comparison
fade away from the sea
from the land you inhabit.
As the sun shines on you
so will confidence.
© 2018, Marta Pombo Sallés (Moments)
“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.” W.H. Auden
Originally published d in The BeZine.
When we move on in the arc of our lives – to center – we cross the threshold into that place from which all things emanate – the sacred space of poetry and indeed all art and creativity. We leave behind the cacophony of assumptions and received wisdom to rest in Rumi’s field – a place he says is “beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing.” We cross the threshold into a w-h-o-l-l-y, place – a place Rumi tells us the “world is too full to talk about.” The ideal of this field reminds me very much of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, where all the hallelujah’s – broken or whole – are equal. And so it is with us and with our poetry, which as a spiritual practice brings balance and sacredness into our lives.
This business of taking up our pens involves more than learning the technical rudiments, the history of our craft and its key players. It requires of us a trust in ourselves. It requires letting go of the expectation of understanding everything. We learn to embrace mystery and ambiguity. We learn to sit with process and to sit with the poems we are drawn to or the poetry we write . . . or, perhaps which writes us. We allow the visions, the word-play, the colors, tones and cadence to work on us. Whether we share our poems with others or not, whether we are amateur or professional, is irrelevant. What matters is that we go on the hero’s journey and we come back with a gift.
When we write, we are like Rilke’s “Swan” …
“when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.”
Sacred space always reveals the unexpected. We are always changed, though the change may be subtle. What might come up are the daily concerns – how to make it through the day – or the current pain: the loss of a loved one, abandonment, ills of body and mind, concerns for children … Joy! and Gratitude! As we grow “more like a king, further and further on,” our sacred space may reveal something about the greater mysteries…
“does it matter after all, the curiosities
when fish and water are one
when light and dark are indistinguishable
when we are neither content nor discontent
when questions cease and ideologies melt
when there is no helping and no taking
. . . there is this” [© Jamie Dedes]
And “this” is well represented by the Buddhist ensō illustrated above. It is meant to express that moment when the mind is still, allowing for creation. It symbolizes enlightenment. I’m sure all faiths have similar concepts. From a Christian perspective – perhaps the discussion would be about the “gaze of faith” and claritas (Thomas Aquinas) – “intellectual light,” illumination. In Buddhism, traditionally this ensō is done as a part of spiritual practice and it is a kind of meditation in the way that all creative efforts are meditation.
“Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: ‘I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.’ Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare to ‘give away’ on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath these thoughts and gradually come in touch with our own riches.” Henri Nouwen REFLECTIONS ON THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION (unpublished) http://www.henrinouwen.org
So trust that through your poetry you will enter that field where there is no right doing or wrong doing and …
“The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. “ [Love After Love, © Derrick Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)
© 2016, essay and photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Ensō (c. 2000) by Kanjuro Shibata XX under CC BY-SA 3.0
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” Bertrand Russel
CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS
Opportunity Knocks
ALT-MINDS LITERARY PRESS, creativity from alt-healthy minds has an open call for fiction, non-fiction/memoir and poetry related to mental health, which will close on July 1. Payment: $50 CDN for fiction and nonfiction and $20 CDN for poetry, Details HERE.
GULF COAST, A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND FINE ARTS publishes poetry and translations of poetry, stories, essays, interviews and reviews, art and critical art writing and online “exclusives.” (There’s also a guest blogger in residence program.) Reading fee: $2.50 Details HERE.
HCE REVIEW literary and art journal is a quarterly online literary journal of students in MA and MFA Creative Writing courses at the University College of Dublin. The journal publishes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and visual art from established and emerging and welcomes submissions from around the world. Currently they are only accepting submissions of art and the deadline is December 31, 2018. Watch for 2019 calls for writing submissions. Details HERE.
MASON JAR PRESS has an open call for submissions of novellas. $5 submissions fee or free with purchase of a Mason Jar Press book. Submissions close on August 31. Details HERE.
NEWSTATESMAN welcome submissions from established and emerging poets. Details HERE.
NOURISH POETRY call for submissions for ballad, sonnet, couplet, tanka, tanka-sequence, villanelle, haiku and free verse closes on June 20. Details HERE. Children’s poetry is also of interest.
ONE STORY, Read Learn Connect a literary magazine, which publishes one story at a time. The next submission reading period begins on September 1st and runs through November 14th. Length: 3,000 – 8,000 words. Payment $500 and 25 contributor copies. One Story also publishes One Teen Story. Details HERE.
PLOUGHSHARES at Emerson College reads submissions of fiction, nonfiction and poetry from June 1 through January 15 each year. There is a $3 “service” fee for submissions. If you have a subscription, there is no service fee for submissions. Payment is $45 per printed page with a minimum of $90 per title and a max of $450 per author. Payment includes two contributor copies and a subscription. Details HERE.
THE REMEMBERED ARTS JOURNAL, Modern Life, Awakened Art has an open call for submissions of poetry and creative writing including poetry, short stories, and essays and performing arts, crafts and visual arts. The theme for the fall issue is: splendor.
“In the competitive, compartmentalized, modern world, it can be easy to neglect the creative impulses that make us human. We put aside our sketching and scribbling to pay our bills, raise our children, serve our communities, and pursue our ambitions. The Remembered Arts Journal is a forum for reviving almost forgotten artistry. Its purpose is to encourage readers and contributors rediscover the joy of creating and sharing works of art.”
The deadline for the fall issue is July 1. Details HERE. This journal nominates for the Pushcart Prize.
SONORA REVIEW, a publication run by students in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. This review publishes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. $3 submission fee. Payment: two contributor copies. Details HERE.
SPRING SONG PRESS is currently open for submissions for it’s NobleBright Fantasy Anthologies: Oak and Iron/through July 1; Steam and Lace (steampunk)/opens August 1 and closes November 1. Details HERE.
STINGING FLY’s (reminder) latest reading period will close on July 12th. This journal publishes Irish and international writers of poetry and fiction. Details HERE.
TETHERED BY LETTERS (TBL), a nonprofit literary publisher and writer’s resource, describes itself as “passionate about educating budding authors and increasing literacy rates across the globe. We run several FREE programs to help cultivate the next generation of great literature: For more, visit our Education or Writing Resource Center.” Open year-round for submissions of short fiction and creative nonfiction, poetry, and graphic stories or comics to f(r)online. Details HERE.
WILDNESS publishes poetry, fiction and nonfiction in its bimonthly online journal and reads submissions on a rolling basis. The editors nominate for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best American and other prizes. Details HERE.
Call for submission for the September issue.
THE BeZINE, Be Inspired, Be Creative, Be Peace, Be. Submissions for the September issue – themed Social Justice – close on August 10 at 11:59 p.m. PDT .
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 September 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.
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.
The Poet by Day
WEDNESDAY WRITING PROMPT
Reminder
Response deadline is Monday, June 18th at 8 p.m. PDT. All poems shared on theme will be published on this site on Tuesday, the 19th. Details HERE.
Opportunity Knocks
AMBIT MAGAZINE 2018 POETRY COMPETITION is to be judged by Malika Booker. Entry deadline is July 15. Cash Awards. Publication. Details HERE.
BLUE MOUNTAIN ARTS will close this year’s first of two Poetry Card Contests on June 30/deadline. Cash awards. Online display. Details HERE.
CANTEBURY FESTIVAL POET OF THE YEAR COMPETITION 2018 closes on Monday, 18 June 2018. National and international entries are welcome. Entry fee. Cash award. Details HERE. Tight deadline but you can submit by email.
THE McLELLAN POETRY PRIZE 2018 closes on Thursday, 21 June 2018. Entry Fee. Cash award. Details HERE.
THE MASTERS REVIEW, a platform for emerging writers is hosts a summer short story award, which will close or entries on July 31, 2018. The winning story will be awarded $3000, publication, and agent review. Second and third place stories will be awarded publication and $300 and $200 respectively. Further detail HERE.
NEW AMERICAN POETRY PRIZE will open for submissions on September 1 and close on January 15. $25 entry fee. Award: $1,000. Details HERE. Also noted: “We’re accepting submissions for the 2018 New American Fiction Prize. Winner receives $1,000, publication, and book promotion. Final judge is novelist, story writer, teacher, and memoirist John McNally. Submit at our fast and easy online submission manager.”
6th Ó BHÉAL FIVE WORDS INTERNATIONAL POETRY COMPETITIONS is open for the current week through June 19. The five words are: terror, magpie, spot, incandescent, wall. How it works: “Every Tuesday around noon (UTC), from the 17th of April 2018 until the 29th of January 2019, five words will be posted on this competition page. Entrants have one week to compose and submit one or more poems which include all five words given for that week. The 2018/2019 (6th) competition runs for 41 weeks.” Entry fee. Details HERE.
THE POETRY KIT SUMMER COMPETITION 2018 is open for entries through Monday, 27 August 2018. Entry fees. Cash award. Details HERE.
RUMINATE’S KALOS VISUAL ART PRIZE is open for entries. Entry fee. Cash award and publication. Deadline: September 18. Details HERE.
WRITER’S DIGEST POETRY AWARDS – Deadline October 1. Entry fee. Cash awards. Details HERE.
Accessible anytime from anywhere in the world:
If you would like me to consider reviewing your book, chapbook, magazine or film, here are some general guidelines:
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.
Then and Now
DEBBIE FELIO is a poet/witness living and writing in Boulder, Colorado. This poem – profound for the way it showcases the insanity – is Debbie’s response to Baruch, The Baker. 
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 