14th Annual Juried Reading / Poetry Center of Chicago

14th Annual Juried Reading

Literary activist and award-winning poet E. Ethelbert Miller will be the final judge for The Poetry Center of Chicago's 14th Annual Juried Reading Competition. First prize winner will receive $1,500; second prize, $500; third prize, $250; five finalists will receive $50. Poetry by the eight finalists will be published in a chapbook by Dancing Girl Press, and all eight poets will be invited to read at an award ceremony in the spring of 2008.

The Juried Reading is open to all poets residing in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Poets may be unpublished or have published no more than one full-length book of poetry, not including self-published books. All submissions are blind; the jury and the judge will have no access to identifying information about the submitting poets.
Click here for more information and full competition guidelines

On the Lighter Side

This is too funny.... "We Want The Funk"

"In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things." ~ Rita Dove

I heard Charles Simic talking about the great thing in writing poetry is discovering things about yourself. How true!

Poetry Revision Part 2

I am revisiting the "revision" subject of my earlier post with a few thoughts.

For my own part, I have been hanging on to my own work longer lately. I think there is value in revisiting work after a bit of a break from it. I read where the Roman poet Horace believed one should wait nine years. I'm not sure you can call any specific period of time extreme in the context of a single piece of work, but I'm not planning any such length as a matter of personal procedure. I do believe that we create a distance from the work when we put it away and bring it back out later. That distance can improve our perception of what we are saying.

In an article written by Nina Shengold, titled Perennial Voyager - John Ashbery at Home, Ashbery speaks of endless revisions in his younger days. Today, he days, " If I'm not pleased with something, I tend to discard it rather than reworking it to death." I'm a huge Ashbery fan, but I don't see myself trashing a lot of stuff... or do I?

If one looks though my journals, there are quite a few instances where I have something with a squiggly sort of strike through the text. I suppose these are throw-aways, though I haven't thought much about them in that context. There are certainly many other things I've started that are not completed poems yet, I have not given them the disapproving strike through. These I will on occasion go back to and rework. I did one this weekend, which I started last May. There are however, times when I will indeed abandon a piece of writing that I believe has failed the very basic level of having viability. Then I have tons of material that are like little unborns already on life support... while I've thinking of a cure.

I would of course like to believe that I could create successfully without revision. I won't however kid myself on this point. Few of us are John Ashbery's. Still, in a way, what he is doing is revision by elimination. With the number of successfully completed books he has, I'm sure he is not concerned with the quantity of work he is producing, even at his age.

Write, patience, reading, rewriting, patience, writing, reading..... it is all a part of the process.

Leo Tolstoy said.... "Music is the shorthand of emotion."

I think then, Poetry is the DNA of the soul.

Recommended Reading

Couple of works that appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Volume 7 that I particularly liked...

• June Snow Dance by William Doreski
• Falling Star by Kimberly L. Becker's

The whole volume is worth reading... but I especially liked these two.

Autumn Sky Poetry

words

The Public Has Spoken

The Results are in click here. My sentiments exactly!