life after NaNoWriMo…

It’s November 30, and if you’ve been keeping up with NaNoWriMo or the November PAD Chapbook Challenge, you might find that you need a little extra incentive to get out of bed tomorrow morning. Maybe this will help…

Here are three opportunities to submit a chapbook of your poems for possible publication, awards, fame and all the wealth that comes with being a poet:

The Poetry Society of America invites U.S. residents who have not previously published a full-length poetry collection to submit 20-30 pages of poetry to their chapbook fellowship competition. Deadline December 22, 2011. Guidelines here.

Pavement Saw Press, out of Ohio, is open for chapbook submissions of up to 32 pages of poetry. Deadline December 31, 2011. Guidelines here.

Bellingham-based Flying Trout Press invites authors without a published book or chapbook to send submissions of 20-24 pages of poetry. Deadline January 15, 2012. Guidelines here.

Chapbook competitions generally require payment of a small fee; awards (typically publication and funds) may vary significantly. More information about each of the contests and their sponsoring organization can be found at the links provided. Always read and follow guidelines very carefully.
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chapbooks photo

putting poetry on the map…

A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology makes use of Google Earth technology to combine poetry, images and mapping. Edited by Katharine Whitcomb, Robert Hickey and Marco Thompson, all of Central Washington University, the project anchors Washington State place-specific poems to their geographic location. When a viewer clicks on a blue icon on the Google Earth map, a new window opens with the full text of a poem, a photograph of the location and a brief bio of the poet.

Google Earth software is required for viewing, but you can learn more about the project at The Center for Geospatial Poetry.

P.S. This just in: a presentation and reading from A Sense of Place will be included in the Cascadia Poetry Festival on Sunday, March 25, 2012. Mark your calendar!

November 28…

It’s Day 28 for NaNoWriMo and the November Poem-A-Day (PAD) Chapbook Challenge. So how’s your progress? Are yours some of the 2,623,719,934 words logged on the NaNoWriMo website? Do you have some drafts to ponder and rework over the coming months? (This might be a good time to review the Sue Boynton Poetry Contest guidelines for line and character count!) Including today, you have three days to catch up.

Never got started? November 28 is as good a day as any! Why not give yourself a little write-a-day challenge for the rest of 2011? A poem, a paragraph, a vignette, a memory… just a handful of words each day. No editing, no rewriting, no yammering in your head about what you should be doing instead. Just get going. Write. Right now. Go.

on poetry…

“A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.” Naomi Shihab Nye

Roman numeral D

Welcome to the 500th post on the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest blog! When we launched this blog on a whim on July 2, 2010, we never imagined it would take on a life of its own and still be going 499 posts later.

The WordPress platform provides all kinds of stats about the blog, including listing the search terms that brought people here. In honor of this milestone, we thought we’d share a few of the top searches.

Not surprisingly, variations on Sue Boynton Poetry Contest was at the head of the pack. For general information on the contest, see the About page. For information on the upcoming contest, see the 2012 Contest page.

Next by numbers of searches was Sue C. Boynton’s poem, We Walk Together, which is a love poem and has taken on a life of its own as a reading in wedding ceremonies!

Third in line is Sue Boynton, which may include people looking for the contest as well as people looking for information about our namesake, Sue C. Boynton.

Next we have the words bare feet, which take visitors to (then) 3rd grader Tessa Haggerty’s 2009 Walk Award-winning poem, Bare Feet.

Fifth is a large number of searches for information on how to count lines and characters in a poem, a subject that’s emphasized in the contest guidelines and covered in some detail here.

Next in number are people searching for the words Indian plum, which lead them to the 2009 Walk Award poem Indian Plum by Esme Dutcher.

Finally, among the significant-search numbers, are people looking for the terms placard design. Of course the beautiful poetry placards for the contest are displayed throughout this site and have been designed each year by Egress Studio.

However you happen to arrive here, thanks for visiting, for reading, for Liking these posts, for Commenting and, of course, for Subscribing!
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photo topiary 500

shopping…

Making a list? Checking it twice? Why not support your local author (and bookstore!) by giving books for the holidays this year? The following list includes (mostly) Whatcom County writers, (mostly) poets whose books are currently available or order-able through the links provided. There are also many books and chapbooks available through the poets themselves, or on the shelves of local bookstores but not listed in an online catalog. (Apologies for glaring omissions.) We welcome your suggestions for additions!

A Long-Forgotten Truth by Rachel Ballard
Beasts and Violins by Caleb Barber
Clover, A Literary Rag
Dogs and Other Poems by Paul Piper
Finding Water, Holding Stone by James Bertolino
Follow Me Down by Denise duMaurier
Graffito by John Burgess
In the Company of Crows by Carole MacRury
Listening Against the Stone by Brenda Miller
Lives of the Saints by Suzanne Paola
Money for Sunsets by Elizabeth Colen
Necessity of Flight by Jane Alynn
Neither Rising nor Falling by Jeremy Voigt
No Sweeter Fat and After by Nancy Pagh
POETRY WALK: the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest, First Five Years, Anita Boyle and Nancy Canyon, eds.
Red Studio by Mary Cornish
Reimagine: Poems, 1993-2009 by Richard Lee Harris
Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz
Rumors of Shore by Paul Fisher
The Art of Departure by Susan J. Erickson
The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems by Bruce Beasley
The View from Lummi Island by Luther Allen
What the Alder Told Me by Anita K. Boyle

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have a very poetic and delicious Thanksgiving!

at a loss for words?

If you’re facing a blank page and discover that your mind is empty of words, here’s a sort of surprising place to begin. Full Poster seems to be an advertising site, but buried within its profiles, reviews, posters, blogs and polls are several applications available without registration, including the Creative Writing and Creative Poetry: Cut-Up Interactive Tools.

While not a thing of beauty, this page allows you to select words — 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 150, 200 — from a variety of texts in English, Italian, Spanish, German, French and even Latin and Greek. Check one or more sources, indicate your preferred number of words, click GET WORDS! and voilà! You now have a copy and paste-able list of words, which you can shuffle, align, realign and de-align, as well as a blank composition window. To save, copy your work and paste it into your preferred writing program.

Enjoy!

5/100ths

For your shopping convenience, The New York Times offers a Holiday Gift Guide of 100 Notable Books of 2011, including these five poetry titles:

Space, In Chains by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon)
Canti by Giacomo Leopardi (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Taller When Prone: Poems by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf)
Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon)

Poetry books, with or without a nod from the Times, make superb gifts. Buy one for yourself!

found poetry…6

Warning: the following information could substantially derail your ability to get anything done today.

Thanks to the fun-loving folks at Wave Books, you can try your hand at found poetry, right now, from where you’re sitting, without any of the trouble of looking for a book, newspaper or other original text.

Click on Wave Books ERASURES, select a text (or click on Make an Erasure), then click away until you’ve found the poem you want. Hint: to see what you’ve done, click SAVE, not RESET TEXT.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

More found poetry posts.