it’s back!

Don’t let your poetry practice get swept away by the distractions of the season. Join Two Sylvias Press for daily prompts to help you write 31 new poems in December. Visit the Two Sylvias Press 2017 Online Advent Calendar of Poetry Prompts page for all the details.

on poetry

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.”
Madeleine L’Engle
(November 29, 1918 – September 06, 2007)

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the dark days of winter

If you tend to sink into the gloom of short winter days, here are a few prospects for the months ahead (all dates 2018; check back with sites if information is not yet posted):

• January 9-22 — Newport, OR — Tin House Winter Workshop: Session 1 (short fiction)
• January 14-20 – Maui, HI — The 2018 Maui Writers’ Retreat
• January 26-29 — Newport, OR — Tin House Winter Workshop: Session 2 (poetry)
• February 2-4 — New York, NY — Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators annual conference
• February 9-12 — Newport, OR — Tin House Winter Workshop: Session 3 (nonfiction)
• February 15–17 — Pasadena, CA — PubWest 2018: Raising Voices
• February 16-17 — Gold Beach, OR — 23rd Annual South Coast Writers Conference
• February 23-25 — Galiano Island, BC — Galiano Literary Festival
• February 23-25 — Astoria, OR — The FisherPoets Gathering
• February 25 — Silverton, OR — Silverton Poetry Festival
• March 2-5 — Newport, OR — Tin House Winter Workshop: Session 4 (novel)
• March 2-3 — Orcas Island, WA — Generosity & Joy! Artsmith workshop with Peggy Shumaker
• March 7-10 — Tampa, FL — AWP Conference & Bookfair

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advice for poets

Earlier in November, Erin Woo at The Stanford Daily interviewed Tracy K. Smith, the current Poet Laureate of the United States. In the short interview, Smith says,

Everybody says, “read, read, read,” and I think it’s really true. That’s essential. But I think it’s also important to read against your taste, to read the things you don’t love, and see if you can learn how they’re built and what they achieve and whether those tools can be useful to you.

Good advice. Read the interview.

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now showing

The subject of typewriters, and especially the poets who favor them in public, has been a recurring theme here at The Poetry Department. Poetry on film is another. While the new documentary California Typewriter does not purport to be about poetry (it does include poets Silvi Alcivar and Darren Wershler), it celebrates a favored writing tool as object, muse, and even obsession. The Los Angeles Times calls the film “rich, thoughtful, meticulously crafted.” California Typewriter is screening in theaters nationwide.

the coolest cats

You are most cordially invited to a reading and release party for Nine Lives Later: a Dead Cat Anthology. Writer/editor Dee Dee Chapman presents this unique collection of poetry and fiction that embraces the unusual motif with sincerity, honest grief, humor, and love. The evening features readings by Jessica Lee, Rena Priest, Duncan Shields, Luther Allen, Malcolm Kenyon, Nancy Canyon, and Dee Dee Chapman.

Let the fur fly. Join the hep cats at Honey Moon in Bellingham, on Thursday, November 30, 2017, at 8:30pm.

ambitious

The University of Arizona Poetry Center has been awarded a grant by the Art for Justice Fund for a three-year project to commission “new work from leading writers in conversation with the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, with the goal of creating new awareness and empathy through presentation and publication” and “confront racial inequities within the criminal justice system to promote social justice and change.” Read more.

Thanksgiving

found poem © j.i. kleinberg
with gratitude

Container

As mentioned previously (here and here), we’re big fans of Container, the category-busting literary/arts project of Jenni B. Baker and Douglas Luman.

For its latest Multitudes project, Container mailed a vintage lunchbox from the 1960s-1980s to seven artists with an intentionally vague directive: transform the object into a work of visual or literary art. The result is the Container Lunchbox Series — seven one-of-a-kind creations, several of which have already been sold.

Container is currently — and only until November 30, 2017 — open for submissions.

Periodically, Container opens to submissions of original poetry, fiction, nonfiction and other text-based work to develop into limited-quantity text objects and artist’s books (think: a poetry manuscript published on a fold out map, a short story printed on a milk carton, a novel rolled into cigars and presented in a cigar box).

Read the guidelines. Go for it.

Washington’s next Poet Laureate!

We are very pleased to share the news that Claudia Castro Luna, a prominent Seattle poet and teacher, has been appointed the fifth Washington State Poet Laureate by Governor Jay Inslee.

Castro Luna fled war-torn El Salvador for the United States at the age of 14 with her family. She went on to earn an MFA in poetry and an MA in urban planning. After working as a K-12 teacher, she became Seattle’s first Civic Poet, a position appointed by the mayor. In that position, Castro Luna won acclaim for her Seattle Poetic Grid, an online interactive map showcasing poems about different locations around the city. The grid even landed her an interview on PBS NewsHour. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook This City and the collection Killing Marías.

Castro Luna’s term will run from February 1, 2018, to January 31, 2020. She will succeed Tod Marshall, the current poet laureate. Prior to Marshall, Elizabeth Austen (2014–2016), Kathleen Flenniken (2012–2014), and Sam Green (2007–2009) held the position.

The Washington State Poet Laureate program is jointly sponsored by Humanities Washington and the Washington State Arts Commission (ArtsWA).

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photo bu Timothy Aguero