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

img_3688 CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

Opportunity Knocks

AMETHYST ARSENIC is open submissions of poetry. Payment: $10. Featured poet receives $50. Deadline: March 31, 2017. Details HERE.

COLD CREEK REVIEW, a literary journal is a fledgling quarterly that accepts poetry, fiction, nonfiction and art.  “… we are partial to submissions that demonstrate examples of troubled emotions…We want your submission to leave us paralyzed and distressed. We challenge you to alarm us.”  This publication also plans to produce a special biannual – The Shallows – which does not share the same theme as the review. For details on both publications. link HERE.

ODYSSA MAGAZINE “accepts submissions for every monthly issue in the section “Story,” “Go,” “Family,” and “Think.” …. The look for fiction up to 700-1,000 words and buy first electronic and online rights exclusive for three months.  Each issue has a theme.  More detail HERE.

MUNSTER LITERATURE CENTRE publishes a biannual journal, Southword, which features poetry, fiction and reviews. Details HERE.

THE JOURNAL OF COMPRESSED LITERARY ARTS  seeks “compressed creative arts” including fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, mixed media and visual arts that are “compressed in some way. ” Publications are weekly. Details HERE.

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL seeks submissions of poetry and story for numberous publications.  Christmas and Holiday Collection – 2018, deadline October 31, 2017. Miracles and More , deadline August 31, 2017.  My Crazy Family! – June 30, 2017. My Kind (of) America – March 31, 2017. Positively Happy! – May 31, 2017.  Stories of Redemption – August 31, 2017. Details HERE.

PURITAN MAGAZINE seeks submissions of fiction, poetry, essays, interviews and reviews all year round and from anywhere in the world. Details HERE.

MUGWUMP, a literary revolution – Arocentric Anthology: Afrofuturism – publishes fiction stories in diverse settings, featuring diverse people. Payment: 1 cent/word. Deadline: March 31, 2017. Details HERE.

THE BeZINE, a publication of The Bardo Group Beguines, a virtual arts collective, is a digital publication that is published on the fifteenth of each month. The deadline is always  on the tenth. Submit via email to bardogroup@gmail.com.  Each issue is themed and the themes for each month are included in Submission Guidelines.  Please read the guidelines, one or two issues AND the Mission Statement before submitting. Special issues are April for interNational Poetry Month and September when we host a virtual 100,000 Poets for Change (100TPC) event for reader participation. This year 100TPC will be on September 30 and the September issue will post on the fifteenth as usual. The site was established in 2011 and the Zine is in publication now for three years. The theme for March 2017 is Science in Culture, Politics and Religion with a deadline upcoming on March 10. Submissions of poetry, essay, fiction and creative nonfiction, music videos, photography and art are welcome.

COMPETITIONS

Opportunity Knocks

THE POETRY SOCIETY (UK) “awards £16,000 in prizes each year. Poets at all stages of their careers are celebrated, and prizes also include ways to support writers’ development: courses, books, membership and publication. The competitions and prizes are a central part of The Poetry Society’s work.” Details HERE.

Award Winning British Poet, Myra Schneider (b. 1936), Writer, Writing Coach, Consultant to Second Light Nework of Women Poets
Award Winning British Poet, Myra Schneider (b. 1936), Writer, Writing Coach, Consultant to Second Light Network of Women Poets

SECOND LIGHT POETRY COMPETITION FOR LONG AND SHORT POEMS BY WOMEN 2017 – Deadline Tues, 15 August.
JUDGE MYRA SCHNEIDER will read all entries. Myra Schneider’s latest and recent books are Persephone in Finsbury Park (SLP), The Door to Colour (Enitharmon); What Women Want (SLP); and the writing resource, Writing Your Self (with John Killick). Myra is a Poetry School and Second Light regular tutor. More at Myra Schneider website. £300 First Prize for each of Long (no upper limit) and Short (max 50 lines) poems. £150 Second Prize (1 poem from either category). £75 Third Prize (1 poem from either category) Winning & Commended Poets published (in full or extract) in ARTEMISpoetry. Winners offered a London reading.
Entry: £6 each per long poem. Short poems: £4 each or £9 for 3, £14 for 8. Enter by post (2 copies) or online.
**Members are entitled to one free entry into the competition. Join now to be eligible.** (See About Second Light/Joining. Recommended ladies. I’m a member.) more: Rules & Entry direct link to payment at [Anne Stewart’s] poetry p f online shop, The results of the competitions will be posted on the website by 30th September. Once winning poems (or extracts) are published in ARTEMISpoetry. Second Light Network was founded and is managed by Dilys Wood.

EVENTS

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THE THIRD DUBLIN WRITERS CONFERENCE sponsored by The Society of Authors is scheduled to be held at The Gresham Hotel, O’Connell Street, Dublin 1 from the 23rd-25th of June 2017. Seventeen speakers are scheduled.  Details on conference, programme and to purchase tickets are HERE.  The Society is offering a lower early-bird registration rate.

HALI POETRY WORKSHOP WITH RUSS GREEN hosted by Long Island Poetry on March 8, 150 Brightside Aven, Central Islp, New York 11722. Russ Green is a guest poet with The BeZine.

SECOND SATURDAYS AT CYRUS with Terri Muuss and Patricia Spears Jones, hosted by the featured poets and Matt Pasca.March 11, Cyrus: Chai & Coffee Company, 1 Railroad Plz., Bay Shore, New York 11706.

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH is celebrated on April in the United States. Look for announcements of events and celebrations on this site throughout the rest of this month.

interNATIONAL POETRY MONTH at The BeZine is April. We will feature a special issue and submissions are encouraged. Deadline is April 10.

NEWS

ABOUT THE POET BY DAY

51kdxwtdml-_sx331_bo1204203200_The recommended read for this week is Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Pulitzer Prize winning Megan Marshall who studied with Bishop at Harvard. This biography is richly spun,  energetic, engaging and even inspirational despite the breathtaking depth of Bishop’s losses, her sense of marginalization and her head-long push into alcoholism. Indeed, some of the inspiration comes because with all her loses, Bishop managed to hold poetry tight. Her poems were for her a charm “against the loneliness they often expressed.” The book covers Bishop’s relationships with other poets and her romantic interests, the last was for me the singular wearisome downside, much overrided though by the book’s pleasures and values. It is laced with Marshall’s own stories and together the lives of these two bare witness to the power of words to give shape, sense and meaning to life. We come away with a strong sense of Elizabeth Bishop, one of America’s most extraordinary poets. A page-turner. A must read or everyone who loves and writes poetry.

By shopping at Amazon through The Word Play Shop and using the book links embedded in posts, you help to support the maintenance of this site. Thank you! (Some book links will just lead to info about the book or poet/author and not to Amazon.)

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SUNDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS: Opportunities, Competitions, Events and Other Information and News

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“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Albert Camus

CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

Opportunity Knocks

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY has a rolling deadline and is now reading for its third volume of poetry from emerging and established poets.  Guidelines HERE.  Submissions HERE.

ALLEGRO POETRY, a quarterly magazine is open for submission for its twelfth issue. Deadline: January 31. Details HERE.

DRIFTWOOD PRESS “is devoted to finding fiction, poetry, graphic narrative, photography, craft essays, interviews, and other cross-genre work of the highest caliber.” Quarterly issues are released on the first Monday of every third month. The editors read all year round and there is a reading fee. Guidelines HERE. Submissions HERE.

SPLIT ROCK is an online lit mag established 2012 in Minnesota. “While we are proud of our Northwoods roots, SRR provides a venue for writers and artists of any background, in any stage of their careers, to showcase their best work. We seek poetry, creative non-fiction, fiction, book reviews, graphic narratives, comics, visual poetry, digital literature, and hybrid forms that explore place and the natural environment, though we welcome any work that presents a unique vision and aesthetic. We love innovative writing that finds new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the stuff of everyday life.” Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.  Details HERE. 

OTAGO UNIVERSITY PRESS is an academic publisher in New Zealand publishing books on New Zealand and the Pacific with emphasis on history and natural history, biography (memoir), literature and the arts, and the Maori and Pacific. Submission guidelines HERE.

HAYMARKET BOOKS is a nonfiction publisher of “a wide range of progressive and radical political activists.”  Send proposal.  Details HERE. No poetry or fiction.

PULP LITERATURE seeks poetry and there is no reading fee for poetry.The editors are not accepting submissions of fiction right now. Details HERE.

GOBLIN FRUIT seeks “poetry that we can call ‘of the fantastical,’ poetry that treats mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a fantastical way.”  Pays on publication. Submissions through March 3.  Details HERE.

CONTESTS/COMPETITIONS

Opportunity Knocks

CALGARY POETRY MAGAZINE open internationally for submission in English only. Reading fee. Deadline July 30, 2017. Details HERE.

WEGLE FLOMP HUMOR POETRY CONTEST year sixteen. Deadline April 1, 2017. Details HERE.

PULP LITERATURE short fiction (up to 750 words) contest. Looking for “short, sweet and sassy”.  Deadline February 15, 2017.  Details HERE.

EVENTS

ROLLING WRITERS ~ WRITERS NOT WRITING ~ Local lit-lights do other stuff: “The Octopus Literary Salon 2101 Webster St @ 22nd, Oakland, California 94612 February 4, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.Youssef Alaoui (instrumental music), Judy Clement Wall (house artist ~ our Toulous Lautrec!), Sharon Coleman (dance), Paul Corman-Roberts (drums), Jamey Genna (acting), Sarah Kobrinsky (dance), Charles Kruger (magic), Lisa Martinovic (singing original song), Colleen McKee and Ruth Crossman (singing duet), Deborah Steinberg (singing), Sandra Wassilie (Shakespearian monologues), Jon Sindell (Shylock speech, original song)” (510) 844-4120

TUPELO PRESS BAY AREA POETRY CONFERENCE – Tupelo’s fifth poetry Conference. Two-day small group sessions. There are three sections: Sat/Sun — March 18-19, 2017 — Portola Valley; Thurs/Fri — March 23-24, 2017 — San Francisco; and, Sat/Sun — March 25-26, 2017 — Berkeley. Details HERE.

news

two-years-eight-months-and-twenty-eight-nightsTHE NEW OBAMA FICTION PICKS the Rushdie book to the left is one, Off the Shelf

THE 38TH BLUES AWARDS, 2017, The Blues Foundation

PLANS TO PRIVATIZE U.S. PUBLIC BROADCASTING, Fortune Magazine

PLANS TO ABOLISH U.S. NATIONAL ENDOWMENTS FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES, The Poet by Day

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP FROM THE U.S. PRESS CORP, Columbia Journalism Review

SUNDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS

Submit your event, book launch and other announcements at least fourteen days in advance to thepoetbyday@gmail.com. Publication is subject to editorial discretion.

51wydtd4cel-_sx334_bo1204203200_The WordPlay Shop offers books and other tools especially selected for poets and writers.

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WRITERS AND THEIR CAFÉS

coffee-break-1454539196ejwWRITERS AND CAFÉS go together like coffee and a biscotto. Perhaps the connection started in the place where coffee houses first evolved, Ottoman Turkey. There it is said the men met over small, sweet cups of Turkish coffee to socialize and entertain one another with backgammon and poetry.

Later, when coffee came to Europe, the Viennese cafès were de facto office sites of many well-known writers. The Austrian journalist, Alfred Polgar (1873-1955), admired for his witt at Vienna’s Café Central, wrote that coffee houses were “a place where people want to be alone, but need company to do so.” Maybe writers needed the noise and the caffeine to keep up the will and energy to face one white page after another.

CAFÈ CENTRAL, Vienna

Boris Vian (1920-1959), the French polymath (his abiiities included writing and poetry) claimed that “if there had not been any cafés, there would have been no Jean-Paul Sartre.” That’s an exaggeration of course, but one with which we might agree makes its point. I’ve read that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hung-out in Paris at Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. The former was also a favorite of Rimbaud.

We are told that Pushkin found courage in coffee – not alcohol – before his last and fatal duel in 1837 at The Literary Café in St. Petersburg. Byron, Casanova and Henry James had their favorite coffee houses in Vienna. Lorca met Dalí at the Cafe de Oriente in Madrid, and Kafka worked on Metamorphosis at the Café Stefan in Prague. Oscar Wilde was famous in coffee houses throughout Europe, though perhaps not for having pen in hand.

HEMINGWAY, HADLEY and Friends, American Ex-pats in Paris

The connection between writers and coffee houses was well established by the time the lost generation was meeting in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway wrote about Cafe La Rotonde and Le Dome Cafe in The Sun Also Rises. He also frequented the Dingo Bar along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes.

The Pedrocchi Cafè  (1831) in Padua, like many of the old coffee houses, is still in operation and is one of the world’s largest. It was Stendhal’s home-away-from-home …

… and so the affinity continues into recent times. The Elephant House in Edinburg is the “birth place of Harry Potter.”

THE ELEPHANT HOUSE, Edinburg, “the birthplace of Harry Potter”

Photo credits ~ Header photograph courtesy of Keven Phillips, Public Domain Pictures.net. Next photo courtesy of morgueFile. Cafè Central and Hemingway and Friends are in the public domain and via Wikipedia. The Elephant House Cafè is courtesy of Nicolai Schäfer licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license via Wikipedia.

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POETRY ON THE BIG SCREEN: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

81vv8gxuvl-_sy445_ Well, here it is Friday and the new year is upon us. This is the last of the holiday break movie reviews. Up this time is Mrs.Parker and the Vicious Circle.

Jennifer Jason Leigh won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (1994), the National Society of Film Critics Awards (U.S.) (1995) for best actress, and second place for best actress by New York Film Critics Circle Award (1994) for her portrayal of Dorothy Parker, poet, writer, screenwriter (A Star Is Born, among others), caustic wit and founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, the vicious circle. Parker is probably the only member of the Round Table still well-known and not just by those of us old enough to remember her. Witness: The Portable Dorothy Parker is one of three in the 51qrl0o4m1l-1-_sx329_bo1204203200_Portable series that remains continually in print. The other two are the Bible and William Shakespeare.

The Algonquin Round Table, named for the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, was a meeting place for a circle that included  New York writers, critics, screenwriters and actors. During their daily luncheons the members engaged in clever and pithy witticisms and wordplay, shared across the U.S. by the columnists in the group.

“Ducking for apples – change one letter and it’s the story of my life.”

The movie is well-larded with Parker’s quips and short wry poems. It centers on the Algonquin years, circa 1919 through 1929, and her many glamorous but disappointing love affairs.

“I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.”

Some members and associates of the Algonquin Round Table: (l-r) Art Samuels, Charles MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott
Some members and associates of the Algonquin Round Table: (l-r) Art Samuels, Charles MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott

The movie gives us a peek in on the clever but often cruel bon mots shared by the likes of – among many others – Harold Ross, the famous (or sometimes infamous among writers) editor of the New Yorker, the humorist William Benchley (Parker’s best friend), critic and social commentator Alexander Woollcott, playwright and director George S. Kaufman, and author and playwright Robert E. Sherwood.

It’s rather fun that Peter Benchley, grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and Wallace Shawn, son of long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn, are among the cast that includes such lights as Campbell Scott, Jennifer Beale, Matthew Broderick, Martha Plimpton (distant cousin of George), Keith Carradin, Jon Favreau and Peter Gallagher.

“My land is bare of chattering folk;
the clouds are low along the ridges,
and sweet’s the air with curly smoke
from all my burning bridges.”

Jennifer Jason Leigh is superb in the role of a complex woman who is at once smart and sexy, brittle and vulnerable. The cast is outstanding. The clothing and setting perfect. Both thumbs up on this one.  I suspect those who are familiar with the background of the Table and its members will get the most out of the film but given Parker’s witticisms and Leigh’s performance I think all will enjoy Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle.

♥

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