Poets & Writers Blogs

On a recent Tuesday night, a group of budding poets squeezed around a plate of chocolate chip and circus animal cookies in the soon-to-be-remodeled West Hollywood Library in California. They were there for The Poetics of Your Life, an autobiographical poetry workshop led by P&W-sponsored writer Steven Reigns and founded on the premise that a safe writing space is the best place to excavate memories.

“I’ve used my own writing to make sense out of things that have happened in the past,” he explained. He laid down his class rules, which included “No criticism of anyone’s writings…even your own” and “What happens in class, stays in class” or “the Vegas Rule.”

After reading and reflecting on poems by Dorianne Laux and Deborah Paredez, and warming up with a group erasure poem, he issued the first prompt: Write about a fire in your life. The responses were both literal and metaphorical, ranging from a car fire to a self-inflicted iron burn to a dancer’s internal fire.

Following his reading a poem called “Wedding Dress,” in which poet Michael Waters warmly recalls wearing his wife’s bridal gown for Halloween, Reigns asked the group to write about a time they’d cross-dressed or worn an item of clothing belonging to the opposite gender. Whether it was about slapping on a fake mustache for a costume party or falling in love with previously off-limits designer ball gowns, everyone produced poems of self-discovery.

With just a few minutes left of the two-hour workshop, Reigns encouraged anyone who wanted to share but had been too shy to step forward. A small handful did, and their poems clearly moved the group. Reigns then issued a last, last call, and it happened again. 

Major support for Readings/Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Photo: Steven Reigns with workshop participants. Credit: Cheryl Klein.

Fiction International, a California-based journal emphasizing both literary innovation and progressive politics, has pushed its June 1 contest deadline to August 31. Through the remainder of the summer, the magazine is accepting submissions of short stories on the theme of "Blackness" for a one-thousand-dollar prize, and all entries will be considered for publication.

According to contest coordinator Joel Cox, the theme is "deliberately elastic," encompassing, for instance, "skin; sleep; death; meditation; apocalypse; birds falling from the sky, blanketing the sun; love unloved; the obverse of white."

"Contestants can take 'Blackness' wherever they choose," Cox says. The editors, including final judge Harold Jaffe, "will cede to them."

In the video below, Jaffe presents one of his latest texts, Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2010) at Google's San Francisco office.

The twenty-third annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night in New York City. Coinciding with this year's Book Expo America, the awards event brought out over four hundred attendees in celebration of LGBT literature.

Adam Haslett was honored for his novel, Union Atlantic (Nan A. Talese), the follow-up to his story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday, 2002), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Eileen Myles, author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, won the award in lesbian fiction for Inferno (A Poet's Novel) (OR Books).

Anna Swanson and Brian Teare took the prizes in poetry, Swanson for her debut collection, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books), and Teare for Pleasure (Ahsahta Press). Two novelists won in debut fiction, Amber Dawn for Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press) and David Pratt for Bob the Book (Chelsea Station Editions). The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet (Harper Perennial) by Myrlin Hermes won in bisexual fiction, and Holding Still For as Long as Possible (House of Anansi Press) by Zoe Whittall received the transgender fiction prize.

Barbara Hammer and Julie Marie Wade were also recognized for their memoirs, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life (Feminist Press) and Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press), respectively. A complete list of winners, including honorees in drama, anthology, and young adult literature, is posted on the Lambda Literary website.

In the video below, fiction winner Haslett presents a dramatic reading of passages from Union Atlantic.

New York City author Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story has won the twelfth annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize honoring fiction written in the humorous spirit of the prize's namesake, British author P. G. Wodehouse. Judge Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival—at which the prize was announced—called the novel "great literature" and "wild comedy."

"Shteyngart's writing is thrilling," Florence told the Guardian. "He's a staggeringly clever satirist who manages to create worlds and people of perfect coherence and outrageous misfortune."

Shteyngart's prize is a double magnum of Bollinger champagne, a set of Wodehouse books, and a pig named after his book (the Gloucestershire Old Spot will join a herd that includes fellow swine with names such as Solar, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye).

The shortlisted titles this year were Serious Men (John Murray) by Manu Joseph, Comfort and Joy (Penguin) by India Knight, The Coincidence Engine (Bloomsbury) by Sam Leith, and The News Where You Are (Penguin) by Catherine O'Flynn.

Last summer's trailer for Super Sad is below, featuring Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill, Edmund White, Jay McInerney, and Shteyngart's student, James Franco.

Camille Rankine, Program & Communications Coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation, gives us the rundown on the longtime P&W-supported literary organization's workshops for poets of color.

Since 1999, Cave Canem has offered tuition-free, multiple-session workshops in New York City that provide emerging writers with opportunities to work with accomplished poets, such as Tracy K. Smith, Tyehimba Jess, and Kimiko Hahn, to name a few. Limited to an enrollment of twelve to fifteen, the workshops offer rigorous instruction, careful critique, and an introduction to the work of established poets—all within the supportive, safe environment that characterizes Cave Canem's week-long retreat.

“Participating in a Cave Canem workshop…was a major stepping stone in my development as a poet,” says one workshop student. “Cave Canem has given me the confidence, inspiration, direction and community that have proved to be invaluable. . .I will always be grateful to this community of poets and now, friends.”

This year, Cave Canem inaugurated Poetry Conversations, open-enrollment writing workshops for poets of color in the early stages of their writing. Fall and spring sessions are held at Cave Canem’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at The Hill House Association Center.

Regardless of level, in Cave Canem workshops emerging poets hone their craft and experiment with new ways of approaching the page. Each workshop series culminates in a public reading by participants. On May 25, 2011, at 6:30 PM, participants in Writing Across Cultures: Poetry as Cultural Voice, a P&W-supported workshop for Arab American writers and poets of color, conducted by Nathalie Handal, will share new work in a reading at Cave Canem’s space in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Photo: (left to right) Graduate Fellow Hallie S. Hobson, Cave Canem Executive Director Alison Meyers, and Camille Rankine. Credit: Ruth Ellen Kocher 

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Poet Traci Brimhall has appeared a number of times in our Recent Winners pages over the past few years. She has found notable success in the realm of contests, receiving awards including a fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing that took her to Madison for a year of teaching and writing; a grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; the First Book Award from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, for Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010); and the recently announced Barnard Women Poets Prize for her second collection, Our Lady of the Ruins. (The volume, selected by Carolyn Forché, will be published by W. W. Norton.) We asked Brimhall, who is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University, a few questions about how she approaches contests and what advice she has for writers considering competitions.

How many contests have you entered? How many did you enter before winning your first award?
I entered seventeen contests before I got the call that my first book, Rookery, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. My records for my second book, Our Lady of the Ruins, are less accurate. Although I submitted to a handful of contests, the first response I received was the acceptance from the Barnard Prize, so I don't have the other contests listed on my submission spreadsheet. I believe it was seven or eight contests, plus some open reading periods.

So you’ve also submitted book manuscripts to publishers, outside of a competition?
I sent out Our Lady of the Ruins to a few open reading periods. I was certainly less aware of them when I first started sending out Rookery, but now that I've started screening for a couple of different book prizes, I think first book contests offer the advantage of limiting the pool of submissions. With open reading periods, a manuscript goes up against poets with two, three or ten books under their belt. That does not necessarily mean their work is stronger than yours, but the fish in that pond are certainly bigger.

What do you look for in a contest?
When I was still in my MFA program [at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York], I started paying attention to publishers. If a book took the top of my head off, I looked at the press. If I read a poem in a journal that made me clutch my pearls, I would look up that poet's bio and see if they'd published a book, and, if so, where. When I started looking at submitting my work to a contest, I'd already been paying attention to where poetry I admired was being published, and that's about all I looked for in a contest. Of course, I read many poets with brilliant work from presses that I knew wouldn't be interested in what I was doing, but on the whole, I just wanted to metaphorically sit at the table with poets who left me in awe when I read their poems.

How did you know your manuscripts were ready to go out?
Part of it is knowing when you're ready to break up with the work. With Rookery, I felt ready to move on, but I kept coming back to the manuscript to tweak poems or reorder. So I broke up with the manuscript a section at a time. I looked at the poems in each section and then wrote breakup poems where I tried to have it out with my obsessions so I could be done with them once and for all. Of course obsessions follow you wherever your work goes, but I did feel like I put my obsessions' belongings on the lawn and told them to get lost. Each breakup poem became the final poem in each section of the book. With Our Lady of the Ruins, I felt like that manuscript broke up with me. As much as I wanted—and still want—to keep writing those poems, the magic is gone. And who knows why. I was living in my car when I wrote most of them, and maybe the change in my life and my energy affected the way I was writing. Maybe I'd said all I needed to say. It was interesting to discover that the second manuscript functioned very differently than the first. Compiling and ordering one book didn't seem to teach me what I needed to know for the second. I hope I can be lucky enough to have my own work surprise and move me a third time.

How do you select individual pieces to submit to a competition—if this is ever something you do?
I've never had much luck with individual poem contests. I don't often submit to those because the contest fees are usually about fifteen dollars, and if I have a manuscript ready or one that's about to be ready, I'd rather spend twenty-five dollars sending that out. If I didn't have to budget in order to afford contest fees, I would probably submit to a lot more places, but fifteen dollars is four small lattes or a new book, and I'd rather have coffee and poetry than a small chance at winning a contest.

What is the most rewarding aspect of receiving an award?
The most satisfying thing lately has been the validation after a lot of discouraging feedback. I had a teacher tell me to throw away the poems in the second book and start over. I've had editors respond with a strong negative reaction to poems from the second book. One even said I didn't have any talent. Of course I wrote the poems anyway. I love those poems. I loved writing them. I look forward to reading them thirty more times in galleys and then beyond that. But it's hard to hear that poems I believed in were received poorly, and it was amazing to get the email from Saskia Hamilton at Barnard that said Carolyn Forché selected the book for the prize.

Have you ever had a negative experience as a result of winning a prize?
It's definitely surprised me that not everyone is happy for other people's good news. My good news has changed some friendships and even ruined one. Sometimes the good news doesn't feel worth it, because my greatest joy in poetry after writing a good poem is the community. Being a poet means that I share something in common with thousands of amazing strangers around the country, and whenever I travel for a reading or conference, I meet people who are passionate about the same things I am. A few years ago, I was told to think my competition is Shakespeare, Keats, and Dickinson, not anyone publishing in literary journals. If that's my competition, I don't ever have to worry about winning anything, I can run the race for the goddamned pleasure of it. And isn't the pleasure of it why people start writing in the first place?

What piece of advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
I really do think it's a great way to try and find a home for your work. Since judges change most years, you can always try again, whereas if an editor at a press says no, that's probably a fairly firm no. Many contests are judged blindly, often without acknowledgments pages, which means they're truly looking at just your poems. I also enjoy submitting in general, whether it's a manuscript or individual poems. I like the sense of possibility it gives me. The more you send out, the more times you will probably hear no, but then one day, you'll get that letter or that call that finally and joyfully says yes.

In the video below, vocalist Jennifer Lien performs Brimhall's poem "Aubade With a Broken Neck" from Rookery.