Resources
From Category:
The Poetry Zone
Website features poems by teens and pre-teens. Good quality. Submit free. Also hosts regular poetry competitions. Winners receive books and other prizes.
The Poisonwood Bible
In this novel, a dangerously naive American missionary family is swept up into the turmoil of the Congo's independence from Belgium in 1960. Each of the multiple narrators speaks with a poetry all her own, and voices a different way to make sense of this clash of cultures. Despite the violence and injustice that the family witnesses, and in which they become complicit, the world they inhabit is anything but meaningless, though it may be a meaning that does not have the white race, or even the human race, at the center. Kingsolver combines a prophet's rage with a mystic's delight in small miracles such as the jungle's fertile ecosystem and the generosity of starving villagers.
The Politics of Empathy
In this 2015 essay from Solstice Lit Mag, poet Jennifer Jean shares the ethical principles that guided her when writing persona poems in the voices of sex-trafficking survivors. What is the boundary between empathy and appropriation? Consent from subjects, an intent to heal and inspire, and feedback from the community are key considerations.
The Popsicle Planet
Gears shift, thin wheels sip asphalt
as I ride through soda-water
evening air. A flash of orange leaps out
at my periphery, a sizzling circle
wavering towards the dirt.
It takes my eyes, tricks them
with feverish brightness
like a sickness I somehow wish to catch
and suddenly the bicycle
is not merely going, but hunting,
its toothy metal is bored with
the blue glass twilight,
those abandoned barns which tilt
as arrogant antique lampshades
(the stuff which has already touched its frame:
stone, cool, clear, and moon).
It drinks the small streets of the Midwest suppertime
taut rubber whispery, clinging but smooth,
as the hot candy filters
quick through tree tops
and its elusive flavor
is close to dissolution.
But I find the spot
where it oozes completely; sagging,
so pregnant it could split,
its trembling vicious gas scrapes and shines
the dull rock of this town.
I think it is unfathomably huge
But the Universe is even much larger still.
Riding back there is fire
smeared like butter
on the pedals.
Copyright 2006 by Katherine Fleissner
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Katherine Fleissner's "The Popsicle Planet," dazzled me with its playful blurring of sensory boundaries. The 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud once described his innovative poetic method as an "immense and rational derangement of all the senses," exemplified in poems like "Vowels" (Les Voyelles) where each vowel-sound is associated with a color. Similarly, Fleissner's unusual verb choices (a bicycle that drinks) and comparisons (fire "smeared like butter") merge seemingly incompatible physical states to produce a mystical vision, pregnant with meaning and intensity. The gentle surrealism of this poem also invites comparisons to the Beatles' famous psychedelic ballad "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
The first line immediately signals that the author is taking us on a ride through a world that is more dynamic and unpredictable than what our ordinary vision perceives. The bicycle has become a living creature that "sips asphalt" as the normally solid surface of the road takes on a liquid quality. What does it mean for the air to be like soda-water? Perhaps it is sweet, or moist, or effervescent with energy. This intriguing image further blurs the lines between solid, liquid, and gas. Meanwhile, the delicacy of "sips" sets a benign mood. Although the barriers of perception are dissolving, there is still a feeling of safety and control. Soda-water suggests innocence, a drink for children instead of a liqueur.
The tension rises with the lines "a feverish brightness/like a sickness I somehow wish to catch", and the bicycle is now hunting like a "toothy" animal. Crossing over into this new realm of experience could be dangerous, but the alternative may be stagnation and a different form of unreality. In contrast to the hot colors of the "sizzling circle" and "feverish brightness", the world we leave behind is sunk in a cool "blue glass twilight", exhausted as a junked lampshade with no more lightbulb. This quiet, washed-out dimension has its own subtle beauty (as found in the totemic recitation of "stone, cool, clear, and moon"), but is incomplete without the energy that the bicycle's quest represents.
The journey culminates with an almost sexual bursting-forth of something from the earth—something that oozes and trembles, "shines/the dull rock of this town" into life. What does the "it" refer to in the phrase "the spot/where it oozes completely"? In the preceding sentence, "it" was the bicycle, so this line confused me momentarily. Here, the speaker is probably talking about the "hot candy" that drips and dissolves through the treetops in the previous stanza. What's great about this image is that the candy, or oozing substance, is not a metaphor for anything; it's not simply that the sunset clouds are like candy, for instance. Instead, it feels as if the speaker has stumbled upon the source of the undifferentiated proto-matter out of which all these other things are made—what Hinduism might call Brahman, or the underlying essence of the material universe.
I would cut the lines "I think it is unfathomably huge/But the Universe is even much larger still." In a poem that accomplishes its goals through sensation rather than analysis and comparison, this sentence seems out of place and redundant. It spells out a message that is already conveyed more effectively through images alone. Capitalizing "Universe" also shades into New Age sentimentality, that self-consciously prophetic tone that can ruin a poem about a profound subject.
The final lines are striking and memorable. The subject of "Riding back there" is ambiguous—is the fire riding, or is the speaker saying that riding her bicycle is like being on fire? The double meaning makes it more interesting. Starting the line with "Riding" plunges the reader into the experience right away, without the interference of a narrator, underscoring that the goal of this journey was to erase the boundary between the speaker and her surroundings. "Fire/smeared like butter/on the pedals" is wonderfully bizarre, yet entirely appropriate as an image of the richness and creative energy that now clings to her every movement.
Where could a poem like "The Popsicle Planet" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Greg Grummer Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 1
Competitive award from Phoebe, the literary journal of George Mason University, offers $1,000 for unpublished poems (1-4 poems, 10 pages total); brief, imagistic work does well here
Lyric Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 15
Members-only contest from the Poetry Society of America (we recommend joining) offers $500 for lyric poems up to 50 lines
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Position
Witty novel chronicles the romantic travails of the authors of a 1970s sex manual and their four children, who are first mortified by their parents' unabashed passion, then wounded and disillusioned by their divorce. Wolitzer treats her characters' failings tenderly, managing both nostalgia for the Free Love generation's idealism and clear-sighted compassion for the Generation X'ers living in the wreckage of sexual utopia. The style is so light and clever that one realizes only later how many deep truths have been communicated.
The Post Office Poems
This blog is an interactive, ongoing poetry project highlighting Fall City, Washington, and the Snoqualmie Valley, written by an anonymous author and posted weekly on the bulletin board at the Fall City Post Office.
The Practicing Writer
Very useful free monthly e-newsletter for writers of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, featuring articles, interviews, contests, calls for submissions, and more. Editor Erika Dreifus (Ed.M., M.F.A., Ph.D.) is a Massachusetts-based writer and writing instructor with many publication credits, who serves as contributing editor of The Chattahoochee Review. Dreifus says, "Our mission is to support the craft and business of excellent writing."
The Prince and the Dressmaker
By Jen Wang. In this perfectly heartwarming graphic novel, set in "Paris at the dawn of the modern age", a special friendship blossoms between a cross-dressing teenage prince and the working-class seamstress who guards his secret. By day, Prince Sebastian dodges his parents' efforts to set him up with eligible young ladies, while by night, he dazzles as fashion icon Lady Crystallia. Meanwhile, Frances wonders how she can achieve her dreams of success as a fashion designer without exposing her royal client's secret. All ends happily in a tale that is suitable for both YA and adult readers.
The Prophets
By Robert Jones Jr. Set on a Mississippi plantation, this devastating yet life-affirming novel centers on the forbidden love of two young Black enslaved men. Multiple perspectives reveal how sexual violation and erotic entanglement give the lie to the brutally maintained separation of Black and white, as well as the complex uses of Christianity to comfort the oppressed while muting their rebellion. Interspersed with the deadly despair of the plantation scenes are hopeful visions of pre-colonizer African cultures that respected queer identities, a legacy that finds expression in the main characters' pure bond.
The Punji Pit
Well-crafted poetry by Vietnam veteran John A. Moller recounts the experiences of the New Zealanders who fought in that war. We especially liked 'A Gunner Goes Home'.
The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database
Split This Rock, an organization of progressive poets for social justice, curates this searchable database of over 600 contemporary poems by authors such as Richard Blanco, Eduardo Corral, Aracelis Girmay, and Michal 'MJ' Jones.
The Queen of Egypt
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
Flamingos may be glimpsed in flight
through the waters of distant lagoons.
They make waves that stir desire
for elegant company at court.
Men are easily persuaded,
my lord, by feathers, jewels and eyes
till they are possessed by their passion.
I am amused to be thought divine
when secretly stained with intimate blood.
And I raise my skirts to shit.
[Men are shocked to hear this.]
Yet still a moth to a candle flies,
eager wings approaching the flame.
Life so fragile soon passes,
and no-one mourns what is gone.
When the wind parts the curtains
the world reveals its curiosity.
Someone looks in to see my life.
The Question Authority
By Rachel Cline. This slim, incisive, timely novel of the #MeToo Movement explores the long aftermath of a popular teacher's serial predation on tween girls in a 1970s Brooklyn private school. Two middle-aged women, once childhood best friends, find themselves on opposite sides of another sexual misconduct case because of the different psychological strategies they employed to cope with their victimization. The Question Authority fearlessly examines the gray areas of consent, understanding that young women routinely overestimate how much choice and objectivity they could really bring to a relationship with an older male mentor.
The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind
Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, & Max King Cap, eds. An essential anthology of poetics and politics in the 21st century, this essay collection from Fence Books grew out of Rankine's "Open Letter" blog that solicited personal meditations on race and the creative imagination. Contributors include poets Francisco Aragón, Dan Beachy-Quick, Jericho Brown, Dawn Lundy Martin, Danielle Pafunda, Evie Shockley, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and many more, plus contemporary artwork selected by Max King Cap. The writers span a variety of ethnic backgrounds, points of view, and aesthetics, united by honest self-examination and political insightfulness.
The Racket Journal
The Racket is a reading series and weekly online literary journal based in San Francisco. They accept poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and artwork. Written submissions should be 750 words maximum. Browse their archive to get a sense of their aesthetic.
The Radiant
Austere moments of beauty illuminate this collection whose theme is finding peace in the midst of suffering. Though battered by a lover's betrayal and the onset of multiple sclerosis, the speaker of these poems is renewed by the transcendent qualities of nature and her own courage in seeing clearly. Winner of the 2003 Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.
The Rainbow Letters
The Rainbow Letters was started by adult children of gay and lesbian parents as an online forum to share their stories and make connections to others with similar backgrounds. Their mission has now expanded to publish letters written by anyone from the LGBTQ community around the topic of family. This project is intended to help as many people as possible express themselves and feel seen, heard and valued by their peers and society at large.
The Raw Art Review
The Raw Art Review: A Journal of Storm and Urge publishes poetry, flash prose, and artwork that convey passion with strong original imagery. Launched in 2018, the journal publishes quarterly. There are periodic contests for online features, chapbook and full-length poetry manuscripts, and story collections.
The Reader Teacher
Scott Evans a/k/a "Mr. E", an elementary school teacher in Wales, reviews and recommends children's books for parents and teachers on his site The Reader Teacher. His main focus is middle-grade fiction (ages 8-12).
The Real Politics of Lipstick
Winner of the 2010 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Competition, this collection of prose poems and flash fictions is indeed about the "realpolitik" of our sexuality as it collides with poverty and loss and makes a beautiful explosion. Dead fathers return as jaunty ghosts, budding teenagers remind mothers of the sexy stockings they renounced, tough girls find power in submission and abandonment. This is the honky-tonk woman as sacred prostitute, speaking in tongues as men "plowed away the weight of hard hurt lives" in union with her body but not, perhaps, her elusive soul. Small typeface makes the page look less inviting, but close reading will be rewarded.
The Reanimation Library
Unique online archive of quirky diagrams and illustrations from outdated reference books, which the library makes available for writers and visual artists to appropriate in their own work (within the bounds of copyright law). Interested in tennis manuals from 1948? How about 'Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit'? For those with an offbeat sense of humor, the possibilities are endless. The library was started in 2002 by Andrew Beccone, contributing editor of the literary journal jubilat.
The Rebis
The Rebis is a print journal celebrating the connections among Tarot, art, and creative writing. Each issue so far has had a theme based on one of the Major Arcana cards. Check website for submission periods. Editors say, "The Rebis commits to amplifying and centering underrepresented voices, paying artists and writers fairly for their work, and redistributing profits to social justice causes."
The Reformatory
By Tananarive Due. This gripping ghost story was inspired by a real-life ancestor of the author's, who died in a reformatory in the Jim Crow South. "Haints" are the least of Robbie Stephens' problems when he's sent to a sadistic juvenile prison for a trumped-up offense against a white boy in the rural Florida of 1950. The town's white power brokers want to use him as a pawn to bring his father out of hiding; Klansmen and police alike are gunning for Robert Senior because of his work organizing millworkers and registering Black voters. Meanwhile, Robbie's teenage sister and her 80-year-old godmother are discovering that even NAACP lawyers aren't a match for the racist judicial system. Freeing Robbie will require supernatural intervention.
The Rejection Survival Guide
Novelist and nonfiction writer Daniella Levy shares advice on this blog about staying hopeful and self-affirming in the face of the rejections that all writers experience. Her "Creative Resilience Manifesto" reads, in part: "I cultivate hope. I refrain from the use of prophylactic pessimism to numb myself to disappointment. I invite myself to feel everything." Levy is the author of By Light of Hidden Candles (Kasva Press), a historical novel about Spanish Jews during the 16th-century Inquisition.
The Rest of the Iceberg
This chart from education blog Janine's Music Room will be useful for writers who want to create accurate, well-rounded characters from a culture other than their own, as well as teachers with a diverse classroom population. Beyond surface differences like folklore, clothing, and holidays, consider cultural distinctives such as body language, manners, concepts of justice, family roles, notions of modesty, and sense of humor.
The Right Stuff
No one understands the American alpha male like Wolfe, who brings his boisterous journalistic voice to the story of the first astronauts. Published in 1979, this book has aged well, and reads now as a commentary on the brevity of fame as well as an incomparable glimpse into the Cold War zeitgeist.
The River in the City
By Paul Martin
How strange to see the river here
in the city, far from the green
country of long summers and swimming.
If only I could reach down
and touch it, let it shape
itself around my wrist
so as to remember me
as it moves under the dark bridge
past the looming blast furnaces.
Reprinted from Floating on the Lehigh (Grayson Books, forthcoming 2015); originally published in Southern Poetry Review
The Romance Novelist’s Guide to Hot Consent
In this article on the feminist sexuality website Jezebel, six successful romance writers discuss the importance of building consent into your scenes of seduction and intimacy, and how to write it in a way that feels natural and appealing. This piece is a must-read for fiction authors in all genres.
The Savvy Self-Publisher
At the website of Poets & Writers magazine, publishing veteran Debra Englander has interviewed numerous self-published authors about their experiences creating and marketing their books. Each interview is supplemented with expert opinions about the success of the author's self-publishing plan, adding up to a valuable case study on all aspects of self-publishing.
The School Magazine
A project of the New South Wales Department of Education (Australia), the School Magazine publishes poems, stories, articles, and plays that have literary and academic merit for elementary-school readers, typically ages 8-12. The four magazines under their publishing umbrella, each for a different age group, are titled Countdown, Blast Off, Orbit, and Touchdown. This is a paying market. See website for their values and content suggestions.
The School Reading List
The School Reading List is a UK-based resource site that recommends books, magazines, and newspapers for children and young adults, sorted by grade level. For British students, there are also resources for taking school entrance exams.
The Sea Letter
Launched in 2018, The Sea Letter is a print and online journal that publishes poetry, short fiction, chapters of longer works, and original photography and art. Submissions are accepted year-round. Payment is $50 for poetry and short fiction, $25 for art.
The Self Publisher
The Self Publisher is the writing resource site of novelist and writing coach C.S. Lakin. Her blog features useful articles on such topics as copyrighting your work, building an author website, how to price your books, and getting Amazon reviews.
the Shade Journal
In July 2016, queer black poet Luther X. Hughes transformed his blog into an online literary journal, with this mission statement: "the Shade Journal is an online poetry journal focused on the empowerment of queer people of color (QPOC); publishing poems that inspires, devastates, and howls–work that challenges form and upsets the canon, but understands its rigorous and traditional roots. the Shade Journal believes there is something divine about being a queer person of color in a world designed to destroy these bodies." Follow on Twitter @ShadePoetry.
The Shadow Gross National Product
By Barbara de la Cuesta
Where does it all go?
Sonatas memorized
Clarinet lessons
Sixteen years worth
Thirty years of
Diaries kept faithfully
Novels in drawers
Out of print
Foreign travel
Photos of
Sketchbooks filled
With long ago nudes, and
Poems on napkins and in
Albums
Painful letters,
Initials carved in trees—ah these
Last longest...
Chemistry notes
Separations negotiated...
Or excruciatingly ripped away
Like bandages from wounds...?
The town dump, you say
Or senescent memory
Or, more sentimentally, in memory
Of friends, descendants...
Not what I mean.
I mean the exquisite learning
Such efforts
Such efforts are said
To alter synapses but
Synapses short circuit don't they
Blow out
In that final effort?
But no,
It must, I say,
All be preserved
Somewhere
In the germ plasma
I say
In the sub atomic particles
I say
Awaiting confirmation
From cosmologists,
Biologists.
They are my
Theologians.
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal
By Jonathan Mooney. In this affecting and funny road-trip memoir, the author decided to fight his internalized ableism as a former special-education student by traveling through America in an old schoolbus to meet other neurodivergent and learning-disabled people. His personal experiences are interwoven with historical background on the social construction of conditions such as autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia, with suggestions for how we might frame cognitive differences in a less judgmental way.
The Short Story Reading Challenge
This group blog features reviews of short stories and story collections, plus essays on the form.
The Side of the Road
By Dawn Schout
You are relief from cement, stones,
a soft place to land,
trod only by shoes, no youthful bare feet.
You may not be decorated
with daisies, but you'll get
other gifts: the first
slice of bread, apple cores,
empty boxes,
sweat from runners,
flavorless gum, strands
of hair longer than grass,
spit, words we no longer want
to read, bandages holding blood,
all we have to offer,
these little pieces of us.
The Smart Approach to Contest Submissions
In this essay from May/June 2013, the staff of Poets & Writers Magazine gives seven simple steps to make your contest submission choices more efficient and well-targeted.
The Smoke of Dreams
By Reena Ribalow. This stately, melancholy collection of poems is steeped in sensual memories of bittersweet love, be it for a holy city or a forbidden affair. Her roots are planted in Jerusalem, sacred and war-torn, harsh and captivating. Her more personal poems show the same mix of pleasure and pain in romantic relationships. One way or another, history is inescapable.
The Sparrow
Members of a Jesuit-led expedition to another planet face the ultimate test of their wisdom and endurance when they encounter two intelligent alien species, one of which uses the other as both servants and prey. This well-written novel and its sequel, Children of God, raise profound questions about the spiritual meaning of suffering and the unforeseen consequences of our actions.
The Sport of Kings
Bucephala to the Nile, all lands southeast from Thrace.
In ten short years those kingdoms fall. Alexander rules.
Macedonia's king. In pictures he walks his horse and cools
the stallion's flanks, sweat-flecked by the conquest's pace.
Astride his horse, a Draft/Moor's Arab blend,
the Emperor of the West subdues Italy, then Spain.
In 768 Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne.
From that year, European culture and the thoroughbred, descend.
Now I, beside my horse, with nylon braided tethers,
hold one of history's haltered legends by his lead.
I walk my trotter slow through clover fields
to dry the first heat's sweat from his chestnut withers.
His in-suck of air, high-pitched like a wind-raked reed,
subsides. His flaring nostrils slow. His labored breathing yields
as we meander through tall grass, above deep-buried peat.
In service to his king, El Cid walked beside his mount.
And did not knights, who served too many kings to count,
lay hands, like mine, on horses' ribs, to feel the pounding beat
of equine hearts? King Arthur, seeking Holy Grail,
sometimes walked to spare his horse...
and so nobility and noble bloodlines, in due course
came down to this...a race along a rail.
In the paddock I re-install his harness, adjust the girth,
and settle in the sulky for the race's second round.
While lining up to post, I think of things
like bloodlines reaching back. No, I'm not royalty by birth,
nor lineage, yet in each race we've run, I've found
a link to all of history in this sport of kings.
Copyright 2006 by Barclay Franklin
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Barclay Franklin's "The Sport of Kings", appealed to me because of its positive outlook and conversational adaptation of the sonnet form. While the meter is irregular and approaches free verse in spots, the rhyme-scheme is that of a pair of Italian (Petrarchan) sonnets: two sets of abba abba cdecde.
In an Italian sonnet, the transition in line 9 (known as the "volta") to a different pattern of rhymes is supposed to mark the beginning of a new topic or line of reasoning. We see this clearly in the third stanza of Franklin's poem, where historical reflection gives way to the present-day activities of the speaker and his horse. A similar shift occurs between the fifth and sixth stanzas, as we move from King Arthur and the history of racing to the contemporary scene once more. This transition feels more muted because it is a return to a theme we have already visited, rather than an entirely new turn, and also because past and present were already commingled in stanza four. Because the author has taken some liberties with the meter and thematic structure we expect from a traditional sonnet, the casual reader may not notice how elegantly he has structured the interplay of past and present in this sequence.
When writing about the distant past, especially when a great swath of history must be surveyed in a few lines, the temptation is to fall back on stock images or a dry recitation of facts. The first two stanzas sometimes fall prey to the latter error. However, the poem as a whole has the vividness of lived experience because of Franklin's reverent attention to the equine personality, physical behavior and emotional bond with the human rider.
Taking a "horse's-eye" view of history is a creative way to awaken our feelings of personal connection to these remote events. A familiar legend can be given fresh life by reinterpreting it through the perspective of a formerly minor character. Examples include Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet), Virginia Woolf's novel Flush (the love story of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as told by her dog), and W.H. Auden's poem sequence The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. Often, this technique is used satirically, to puncture the authority of the official version and bring out insights that it had repressed. (See, for instance, T.P. Perrin's "Thersites" from our 2005 War Poetry Contest.) "The Sport of Kings" has a gentler intention, to humanize the past and evoke the fairy-tale atmosphere of kinship between man and beast.
We don't dare identify with Charlemagne or Alexander the Great, nor imagine that we could see the world through their eyes, but we can vicariously participate in their glory through the more accessible role of the king's horse. (It's appropriate that the poem begins with the word "Bucephala", the city that Alexander founded in honor of his horse, Bucephalus.) Although the world of the kings is lost to us, the timeless nobility and beauty of the horse, before which even King Arthur bowed, is a historical constant that overcomes the divisions between past and present, or king and commoner.
This poem is strongest when describing the physical sensations of horse and rider, and weakest where it becomes wordy with historical exposition. Lines like "he walks his horse and cools/the stallion's flanks, sweat-flecked by the conqueror's pace" are full of compressed energy and hard consonants. Notably, the stressed syllables are more closely packed together in this line, as compared with "In 768 Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne./From that year, European culture and the thoroughbred descend." This prosy sequence did not have the same well-wrought tightness and personality. This was one spot where I felt the limitations of Franklin's decision not to stick to a particular meter.
Could some extraneous information be cut here? I'm not sure we need to single out a particular date, when the other historical events are not so specified. "768" adds a lot of syllables that break the roughly iambic meter we've heard so far. Moreover, the abstraction "European culture" sounds too academic and lengthy in a lyric poem such as this. Suggestion: "Pope Leo crowns him the Frank king, Charlemagne./From thence Europe and its thoroughbreds descend." This revision allows a double meaning for "thoroughbreds" as horses and also their noble riders. Among the other lines I would tighten is the last line, where eliminating the "of" in "all of history" nudges the meter back toward iambic pentameter. One could also consider cutting the "we've run" in the penultimate line for the same reason.
Other fine moments in "The Sport of Kings" are the alliteration in the third stanza ("hold one of history's haltered legends by his lead") and the lovingly observed mechanics of how this powerful beast moves and breathes. The lines from "I walk my trotter" to "deep-buried peat" are the heart of the poem, with every word rightly placed in a fine sprung rhythm and woven into a compelling texture of sounds. This is no abstraction, but a flesh-and-blood animal, gracing us with his mysterious presence. By the time the narrator leans in to feel the horse's great heartbeat, the reader cannot help but hear it too.
Where could a poem like "The Sport of Kings" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes up to $100 in various genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpt
Wells Festival of Literature International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by June 30
A good contest for both emerging and intermediate poets, this award offers 1,000 pounds and a reading at Wells Poetry Festival in Wells, Somerset, in October; fees in UK currency only
Oregon State Poetry Association Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 28
Twice-yearly contest offers prizes up to $100 in categories such as open-theme, formal verse and humor
Surrey International Writers' Conference Writing Contest
Entries must be received by October 25
Canadian literary conference offers prizes of C$1,000 each for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, by authors aged 18+
Robert Frost Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
$1,000 and public reading at festival in Massachusetts for poems in the spirit of Robert Frost
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Sports Museum
The Sports Museum is a nonprofit educational institution housed in the TD Garden in Boston, which draws on the heritage and values of the New England sporting tradition to help build character in kids. Their programs include the annual Will McDonough Sports Writing Contest for youth in 4th-12th grades.
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
By Theodora Goss. Suspenseful but basically light-hearted, this series opener is a fun feminist talkback to the Victorian literary tradition of mad scientists who viewed women as raw material for monstrosities. The daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde team up with the Bride of Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne's poisonous Beatrice Rappaccini, and other not-quite-human women from Gothic fiction to track down a secret society that is performing murderous experiments. The third-person narrative includes frequent first-person intrusions by the characters, teasing each other or disputing how the story is framed. Some might find this editorializing a little too cutesy, as it does lower the dramatic stakes by reassuring the reader that the whole team survives to the end of this adventure. However, the style has the serious purpose of offering an alternative to the solitary hegemonic perspective of the male genius, as well as highlighting its monstrous heroines' common origins in the Victorian Gothic fear of hybridity. Not enough plot threads are resolved at the end, in order to leave an opening for the next book—a structural weakness, but one that does not unduly diminish the reader's warm feelings as the book closes.
The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe: And Other Stories of Women and Fatness
This important anthology from The Feminist Press spans a century of women's short fiction. The large women who populate these stories may be sensual goddesses, lesbian feminists, sideshow performers, battered wives, or troubled teens, but each poses a question about our discomfort with embodiment and female power. A bonus feature of this anthology is an excellent critical essay by Koppelman, a literary historian and the leading expert on short fiction by US women. View her author page at The Feminist Press website for other themed anthologies in this series.
The Submission Grinder
The Submission Grinder is a donation-based tool for poetry and fiction writers to search for publications to submit their work; view anonymized response time statistics based on other writers' submissions; and track their submissions. It is a project of Diabolical Plots, an online journal of speculative and horror fiction.
The Taxidermist’s Cut
By Rajiv Mohabir. Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for this ambitious, passionate debut poetry collection: a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. (Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana's sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida.) The poet is willing to lay his own veins bare in order to create an artifice that is painfully and beautifully true to life. This book won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize.
The Teen Mag’s List of Literary Magazines Accepting Writing and Art from Teens
This 2023 article from The Teen Mag lists reputable journals and funding opportunities for teen authors and artists, including the YoungArts and Scholastic competitions.
The Telepathic Bruise
he punched and i heard them
voices internalised by men i hear them still
1. happenstance
tell me everything
fade only with the bruise
life normalising
truth deposed
hiding placed behind backs
blackened eyes weep, waning back to flesh colour
i hesitate so too, the voices doubt
myself into their existence
clever intuition away
i see only the smiling faces, regret tears
they say 'sorry.' but tell me nothing
i believe in monsters
hold on
that's just my imagination
this time was different
the truth-whispering.
constant scolding, scouring
i hear them all in my crouched ear covering
i touch my face and find no wound
but still the throaty rumblings
but still the voices
echoed lodgements
fitted in sand, silver and lime
all purpling from a bath tap
a telepathic bruise
each day now i welcome the truth
i no longer need them to harm me
self-harming becomes salvation
i know what you're thinking
she's mad
one punch too many
hear now, i can hear you now
i thank you for your honesty
little voices in your mind are now little voices in my mind
trust only in my violence
not in my ribbons
eventually they dim
i refine my art, accordingly
a bashful thought
a bash filled art
i am no treasure
2. circumstance
i return from diversion
without my brushes or turpentine hair
i return to him no longer his prodigy
yet still
he defines my art
and sweaty wakings the night stories
the nightmare now becomes me
and the first completes the pattern
he punches and i hear them
i breathe in the death
the death shouts at me
i screw up my face in sanity
listening
Copyright 2007 by Belinda Smith
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, Belinda Smith's "The Telepathic Bruise", uses a fragmented stream-of-consciousness style and unusual juxtapositions of images to convey the psychological disintegration of its abused narrator. As the poem progresses, we become increasingly uncertain who is being addressed and at what point in time we find ourselves. This disorientation reflects the ongoing power of trauma to blur past and present in terrifying flashbacks, as well as the abuse victim's tragic propensity to repeat the pattern in new relationships. The speaker's sense of self has shrunk to a timid lowercase "i" who struggles to differentiate herself from a chorus of internal and external voices. By the last two lines, however, some hope has emerged that she is beginning to find stability and clarity of understanding.
The poem is divided into sections titled "happenstance" and "circumstance". These words have such similar meanings that it initially seems odd to use them as separate section headings. Isn't it like giving two chapters of a book the same title? One is forced to meditate more attentively on the subtle distinctions between them, just as the narrator must look closely at the patterns of abuse in her life to distinguish reality from nightmare, unchangeable past from potentially changeable future. "Happenstance" is a fate outside one's control, suggesting the speaker's passivity and helplessness. "Circumstance" is more open-ended. Her circumstances are merely the facts of her life right now. Do they, too, simply happen to her, or might she have the ability to change them?
The opening lines declare the subject matter of the poem, leaving Smith free to descend into the speaker's disorganized thoughts without fear that the reader will lose the storyline. With the words "tell me everything," we may relax, picturing a therapist and the beginning of a healing confession. However, our expectation of a stable, benign presence is disappointed. Immediately the erasure of truth begins. The bruise fades, and the pressure to deny the abnormality overwhelms her. If she were to tell everything, she would not be believed. She is not given a way to make sense of her experience. "they say 'sorry.' but tell me nothing".
Smith's unconventional speech pattern and word use in the second stanza make this section more compact and memorable. "the voices doubt/myself into their existence/clever intuition away". I was struck by this paradox of doubting something into existence. Doubt makes the real speaker insubstantial while enfleshing the ghosts in her mind. Smith is almost using "clever" as a verb here—the voices are "clever-ing", or tricking, her intuition with the manipulations of a mind run amok. Other unusual phrases that give the poem intensity and texture are "crouched ear covering" and "echoed lodgements/fitted in sand, silver and lime/purpling from a bath tap". Familiar objects are shattered like a Cubist portrait, revealing new angles and unsuspected violent energy.
What makes the bruise "telepathic"? It predicts the future (or one possible future); it communicates without words; it makes connections between different personalities within the speaker's mind, and between her consciousness and that of her abusers. It is even a source of dark power, like a superhero's (or super-villain's) mind-control technique: "little voices in your mind are now little voices in my mind/trust only in my violence/not in my ribbons". These suggestions, of course, do not exhaust the possible meanings of this provocative phrase.
The dark-humored pun toward the end of the first section ("a bash filled art") hints at how the speaker may escape the cycle of abuse. She is speaking the truth that was suppressed in her relationships, but indirectly, through the tools and symbols of art. But don't trust the "ribbons," the artful exterior, she warns; her work is radioactive with violence, even if sublimated into a more acceptable form.
In the second section, "circumstance," the external facts of the speaker's life may be similar but she feels that her attitude is different. "i return to him no longer his prodigy". This man, not previously introduced in the poem, could be an abusive parent, a controlling lover, and/or a domineering artistic mentor. His exact identity almost doesn't matter, because the whole theme of the poem is how she has replicated this relationship in many guises. Despite her new sense of empowerment, he still "defines my art" and haunts her nightmares. But now she is not running away from the pain. Instead of splitting into different voices, the speaker in this section has a unified, if bruised, self. She faces her demons "in sanity", which is a tiny but real step away from "insanity". Let the death shout all it wants—she is listening.
Where could a poem like "The Telepathic Bruise" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: February 28
Writers' resource site offers prizes up to $500 and online publication for poems up to 40 lines; low fee
Connecticut River Review Annual Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Long-running award from Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems; no simultaneous submissions
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Irish literary publisher offers prizes up to 1,000 euros, anthology publication and reading at West Cork Literary Festival; enter online only
Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31 (don't enter before March 1)
Prestigious award offers $300 for unpublished poems by women, from the journal Calyx; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Telling Room
Based in Portland, Maine, the Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center for youth aged 6-18. Their programs seek to build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real audiences for their students. The website includes a list of magazines, contests, and conferences for young writers.
