Bellingham Review

Bellingham Review, a nonprofit literary arts magazine affiliated with Western Washington University, will begin accepting submissions for their annual spring publication on September 15, 2011. (Bellingham Review also runs three contests each year during a separate submission period.)

The editors welcome submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, author interviews and black-and-white photography. With this edition, for the first time, Bellingham Review will accept submissions electronically, through Submishmash.

Before submitting, pick up a copy of Bellingham Review at Village Books, read a selection from the Spring 2011 issue online and, of course, study and follow the submission guidelines.

You can also Like and follow Bellingham Review on facebook.

summer poem…

Click this line to read Daylight on a Summer Branch by Ruby Powers.

You CAN take it with you…

Need a poetry fix?

There’s an app for that.

Enjoy the day’s selection from Poetry Daily on your iPhone and iPad with the free Poetry Daily app.

Or, for something a little more traditional, iTunes also offers a $ .99 download of an American poetry app with ‘5,000 poems by 50 of America’s greatest poets.’

OuLiPo

There are so many ways to begin a poem.

Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo) is a rule-based-writing movement founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. The idea of OuLiPo is to generate text that conforms to specific constraints.

Poets.org weighs in on OuLiPo with a description and an essay by Mónica de la Torre. A more extensive essay by Christopher Higgs puts OuLiPo in historic context with Dada and Surrealism.

If you’re fluent in French, have a look at the official OuLiPo website.

In 2006, the literary magazine Drunken Boat published a special feature on OuLiPo that includes theoretical text and OuLiPo-works.

Among the many OuLiPo constraints (listed here, in French) worth trying are: the lipogram (text that omits a single letter, most famously A Void by Georges Perec, a 300-page novel written, and later translated, entirely without the letter E); the related univocalism (text that uses only a single vowel); larding (text that expands exponentially by adding a new sentence/line/phrase between two existing ones); snowball (a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer); tautograms (text in which every word begins with the same letter); and N+7, described below.

A definitive work in English seems to be Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Matthews & Alastair Brotchie. Here’s a review.

One of the most popular OuLiPo forms is N+7 (sometimes shown as S+7), which consists of replacing a noun in the text with the 7th noun following it in the dictionary. There is an amazing/amusing automated N+7 generator online, which begins with your text (N+0) and generates variations from N+1 through N+15. Copy one of your poems into the text box, click Submit text and see what happens. Are these the beginnings of new poems?

off-the-page poetry…

A recent workshop with Nance Van Winckel at Egress Studio inspired a number of local poets to think more about the possibilities of off-the-page poetry. You can read about Jennifer Bullis’s experience at the workshop on her new blog, Poetry at the Intersection of Mythology and Hiking.

Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, poetry takes to the streets with the Haiku Roadsign project. Read all about it and see more photos on the Haiku Roadsign blog.

on poetry…

“Poetry is a verdict that others give to language that is charged with music and rhythm and authority.” Leonard Cohen

found poetry…2

Yesterday’s post on found poetry was itself found and reposted by finder of found things, Susan Bourne, who offers a collection of many bits of found poetry on her all found arts blog.

The Found Poetry Review is all about, you guessed it, found poetry. In addition to definitions, examples and information about fair use standards, the publication also has several pages of prompts.

Flickr, the photo-sharing site, also has a Found Poetry group.

Here are a couple of nice sites on altered books, one of the many faces of found poetry: Karen J. Hatzigeorgiou’s Karen’s Whimsey (click through to look inside each book) and Katey Schultz Writer @ Large.

And speaking of altered books, Brian Dettmer is an artist who creates a kind of visual poetry out of old books. (You may have seen his work on display at the Bellevue Art Museum in 2009.) His vision and craftsmanship are dazzling. Have a look.

found poetry…

If your own words don’t seem to be flowing, or if you want to tickle out a new point of view as a starting (or ending) place, or if you’re captivated by a word or phrase you see in print, it might be time to explore found poetry…

Here’s a good description of found poetry from The Academy of American Poets.

Here’s How to Write Found Poetry, courtesy of Creative Writing Now.

The Academy of American Poets also offers some insight on Chance Operations, a related poetic form most notably inspired by the Dada Manifesto of poet Tristan Tzara.

Sources are everywhere: magazines, newspapers, catalogs and, yes, even discarded books. Try it!

poetry prompts…9

What should I write about, you ask yourself. In this, the 9th post of links to poetry prompts, more answers to that desperate query:

Dr. Delia Marshall Turner generously lists 105 potential topics on her Ideas for Poems page.

Retired teacher Cathy Chavez offers some simple formulas for creating poems — great for kids, but worthwhile for grownups, too.

You know those magnetic word sets you can buy to build poems on your refrigerator? Why not make your own? Forget the magnets. Just write some words on paper, cut out the words and shuffle them around to make poems. Add words as needed. Can’t think of any words? Open a book, magazine or newspaper and pick some at random. No rules. Go.

poetry prompts…8

If you’re ready to stir up your poetry-writing mind, here is a new collection of linked sites where you’re sure to find some inspiration:

In our first poetry prompt post, we included a page from Kelli Russell Agodon’s Book of Kells with a set of prompts she posted in 2008. Here’s a link to a terrific set of 30 prompts from 2010.

Creative Writing Now offers a list of more than 60 prompts, plus links to other pages on the site with additional fuel.

Susan Taylor Brown has created her own decks of poetry prompt cards. Why not make your own? Use one, combine several, shuffle, repeat.