need a prompt?

Need a poetry prompt? There’s a generator for that: the Poetry Prompt Generator. Click on “Generate New Prompt” and up it pops. Don’t like that one? Click again. Nothing there for you? The Poetry Department has plenty of past posts on poetry prompts.

If all those links don’t provide any inspiration, maybe what you need is a visit to The Surrealist Compliment Generator.

on poetry

“One is inside a blind spot.”
Jorie Graham
(b. May 9, 1950)

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photo by Jeannette Montgomery Barron
quote

laureate update

Congratulations to Susan Dingle, who has been selected as Clark County, Washington, Poet Laureate for 2024-2026. Susan follows Armin Tolentino, who has held the position since 2021.

Susan Dingle earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry has been published in several periodicals, and she is the author of two books: In Pilgram Drag (Finishing Line Press) and Parting Gifts (Local Gems).

Dingle hosts Poetry Street PNW, an all-ages open mic held every fourth Wednesday at the Camas Library. A licensed clinical social worker and alcohol and substance abuse counselor, she also has led poetry workshops at the Attic Gallery and Discover Recovery, both in Camas.

Pulitzer

Congratulations to Brandon Som, who has been awarded The 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry for Tripas: Poems (Georgia Review Books).

The finalists in poetry were Jorie Graham, To 2040 (Copper Canyon Press), and Robyn Schiff, Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin Books).

See the complete list of winners and finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes.

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Brandon Som photo

free workshop

Give your poems a post-Poetry-Month jolt with this free, online workshop offered by Bellingham Review. On Wednesday, May 15, 2024, at 6:00pm Pacific, Taneum Bambrick will offer a one-hour generative workshop “On Slime.” Register here.

May 23!

Please be sure to mark your calendar for the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest Awards Ceremony — one of the highlights of the Whatcom County poetry scene — on Thursday, May 23, 2024, at 7:00pm, at the Bellingham Cruise Terminal in Fairhaven.

The evening’s events will include music by the Jansen Jazz Orchestra, readings of Walk and Merit Award poems by their authors, the debut of this year’s beautiful poem placards, chapbooks of winning poems, and more! See you there.

taking the pulse of book buyers

The American Booksellers Association has just released their latest Indie Poetry Bestseller List based on sales at independent bookstores nationwide for the eight-week period ending April 28, 2024. It’s a pretty wide-ranging list with a lot of year-to-year overlap. The ABA maintains their Specialty Indie Bestsellers lists online, so you can see the figures back to 2011. The Poetry list is usually released in early May, so the figures include purchases made during most of National Poetry Month.

Today in Tacoma! (and tomorrow)

Tacoma Wayzgoose is back for another round of letterpress, printmaking, book arts, and, as always, steamroller printing. Events start today, Friday, May 3, 2024, 11:00am to 7:00pm, and continue tomorrow, 11:00am to 4:00pm, at the Moore Library in Tacoma. It’s free!

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linocut by Yoshi Nakagawa

making Mondays better since 2006

Everett Poetry Night was founded by Garrett Rutledge in 2006. Since 2013, it has been under the guidance of Duane Kirby Jensen. After years at Café Zippy, the weekly event is now comfortably settled at The Sisters Restaurant in the Everett Public Market, where Monday night equals Everett Poetry Night.

Doors open at 5:00pm. Open mic signups begin at 5:30. Open mic begins at 5:45. The featured poet reads from 7:15 to 7:45pm. (If there’s no featured reader, the format is all open mic.) Doors close at 8:00pm. There’s no cover charge, though tips and restaurant purchases are encouraged.

Duane plans ahead, with featured readers already scheduled into November 2024. (Find frequent EPN updates on Facebook.) For better Mondays, head to Everett.

Crafting Soundscapes

This is a guest post by Jill McCabe Johnson.

Shortly after six-year-old character Marie-Laure in Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014), goes blind, she begins to learn “What is blindness … Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears.” She takes refuge in her bed and hears her father “in the chair beside her, whittling away at one of his tiny models, his little hammer going tap tap tap, his little square of sandpaper making a rhythmic, soothing rasp.” Instead of exploring her world by sight, she experiences her environs through sounds she’d perhaps barely noticed before. As writers, we often rely too heavily on visual imagery and overlook the other senses, including sound.

Writer and film sound designer Essa Hansen discusses the importance of audio in her Electric Literature essay, “What I Learned About Writing from Making Sound Effects for Movies.” Hansen explains that “in film, sonic details can bring a shot to life.” The same is true for fiction, memoir, and narrative poems. Distinctive sounds such as a pencil sharpener, mourning dove call, idling diesel engine, or thwack of a tennis racquet hitting the ball give us clues to setting and contribute to mood and ambience. Hansen writes, “Sensory variety and detail is not only a powerful tool to bring far-flung worlds to life, but also conveys subtext well. In sound, I’m often trying to give the audience a sense of what something feels like, but (as a sound designer) my only tool to do that is through what you hear.”

Tarn Wilson teaches a method of “Good Noticing,” which utilizes the entire body to pay attention to all the senses through mindfulness. Author of the memoirs The Slow Farm (Ovenbird, 2014) and In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus, 2021), Wilson suggests creating “layers of sound” to craft a sonically rich poem or scene.

Of course, you’ll want to use sound judiciously in your writing. Hansen cautions, “Trying to fill up every moment with energy will make each beat start to lose impact. A quiet sound before a louder one is going to make the loud one hit harder by virtue of contrast. A stretch of silence before a sudden explosion draws the audience’s focus in rather than dulling their attention with continuous loud beats.” Hansen correlates this effect with written narrative and how “the white space of a page can perform similar dynamics.”

Try adding sounds to your current work in progress. If you’re able, go to the place you’re writing about and listen closely, listen deeply. What sounds do you notice that you didn’t before? Maybe the crunch of small pinecones under foot or the whine of a jet in the distance. If the setting in your work is inaccessible because it’s imagined or accessed only by memory, close your eyes and recreate the space in your mind. What sounds do you notice? Start in close. Can you hear a suppressed yawn or nervous swallow? Do you remember how a chair squeaked when you shifted position? Did the furnace kick on in the morning and warm air whish through heater vents? Are there animal sounds from a pet or perhaps birds calling for a mate? A coffee grinder in the kitchen, the jarring ring of a doorbell?

Once you have a list of sounds, assess which will help locate the reader in the scene or add to the emotional state you wish to create. See if the addition of a single sound or sound layering brings your poems or stories more to life. And remember to contrast your sounds with silence, too.

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Jill McCabe Johnson’s third poetry book, Tangled in Vow & Beseech (MoonPath, 2024), was named a finalist in the Sally Albiso and Wheelbarrow Books poetry prizes. Honors include an Academy of American Poets prize, the Paula Jones Gardiner Poetry Award from Floating Bridge Press, two Nautilus Book Awards, plus support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press. She spends her free time writing, hiking, and in close observation of the natural world.

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Photo of Caspian Terns by Joe Meche