Surfacing with a few poems

Apology-and-poems

I've neglected sending out poems and posting for a long time because of far-flung travels, a long stay in North Carolina after my mother's death, those peculiarly-named small but wicked demons Madame Plantar Faciitis and Sir Histamine Intolerance, and also the general oceanic chaos that is sometimes life. Luckily, I sent a few poems out and also received some welcome requests. So here are what new or recent-ish publications that come to mind. I'm afraid it's a bit random. Rather lazily, I have sometimes simply pointed to a page that gathers all my poems from different issues in one place, so be sure and ramble around and read other poets in the archives. (And in fact, you may find more of my poems from earlier years there if you keep scrolling down at The Brazen Head.)

I do have some (eight, maybe?) new poems coming out in The Colosseum, The Brazen Head, and New Verse Review... All three journals are good homes for poets who write in form, and they have interesting poet-editors. And I think a number of those poems reflect some of my travels of the past year and a half (Canada, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, Singapore, and South Korea--whew!), particularly in Asia.

• "A Painter of the Eleventh Century" in Mezzo Cammin

• "Aelfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work," English Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia) / ESU Formal Verse Contest 2024: Runner-up to the First Prize. President's Choice Award. Published at the English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch) site and in The Brazen Head.
• "Blue and Shadow" in The Brazen Head
• "Child and Ancient Mask" in Mezzo Cammin
• "Jenetta, Blessed" in The Borough (Australia)
• From the archives — "Landscape With Icefall" in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily
• "Making and the Blackbird" in Presence (2025)
• "My Fox Wife" in The Borough (Australia)
• "Saint Thief" in New Verse Review
• "The Cartaghena Fair" in The Brazen Head
• "The Castle that is the World" (crown of sonnets) in Gramarye (University of Chichester, UK)
• "The Deepening Shade in The Borough (Australia)
• "The Maker in the Snows" in the special issue in memory of poet Jane Greer from New Verse Review.  A Tribute to Jane Greer: Poets and Friends Remember Jane Greer (1953-2025)
• "Thomas the Rhymer and the Ancient Paths" in Gramarye (University of Chichester, UK)
• "Woman in the Land of Dream-after-storm" in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

Confetti, champagne, and singing petunias--

Video of the presentation...

Pleased to have won two of the four prizes in this rare international contest for formal poetry--and also tickled that Jesse won the big one. Winning poems can be read here. The full shortlist, which names two of my poems, can be found here. Many thanks to the English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch), ESU President Robert Furlan, judging poet Stephen Edgar, and Lucas Smith of the ESU and Bonfire Books. (And congratulations to Lucas Smith for his Wiseblood residency award!)

Here's the announcement:

ESU Formal Verse Contest 2024 - Winners
The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch) is pleased to announce the winners for the inaugural ESU Formal Verse Contest, for a metrical, rhymed or unrhymed poem of 70 lines or less.

We had a large number of entries from poets in Australia, the USA, Canada and Germany and thank everyone for participating. The final winners were selected by Prime Minister’s Award-winning poet Stephen Edgar. The President’s Choice Award was chosen by ESU Victoria Branch President Robert Furlan. The winners were announced at an Awards Ceremony in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 14 December 2024.

Congratulations to our winners!

Winning Poems:

First Prize ($5,000) “Continuing City” - Jesse Keith Butler (Canada). Coming soon: a video of Jesse reading his winning poem.

What struck and impressed me about this poem was the way the form to some extent enacts the content. The formal regularity of the iambic pentameter and the strict rhyme scheme—both handled with skill—are shaken and pulled apart by enjambment and sentences which lie at odds with that rigid grid, mirroring the disruptions to the city’s stable forms by demolition and construction. Repetition of key words creates a sense of urgency, or even panic, and, literally rising above the damaged cityscape, the poem builds to a dystopian vision of the future. --Stephen Edgar

Runner-up ($1,000) “Learning Greek” - Kevin Hart (Australia)

This trancelike--indeed, entrancing--poem in iambic pentameter, though unrhymed, has quite different strategies from the winning poem. Here, the marriage between meter and grammar establishes a mood of quiet ecstasy or yearning. Indeed, the Greek word in the poem, Έπέκτασις, literally a straining-towards, tempts one to read ekstasis. The poem brought to mind Wallace Stevens's adage that the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. The world within represented by the two languages the poet studies, Greek and French, which inform and transform the world without, or the speaker--in the end virtually recreating it. --Stephen Edgar (transcribed--I hope accurately--from the video)

Runner-up ($1,000) “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work” - Marly Youmans (USA)

I admired the ambitious scope and richly imagined details of this poem. It made me think fleetingly, though the two poems are quite different in mood and content, of Robert Browning’s ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, in its reimagining of a mediaeval world and ethos. The language and imagery are impressively charged and evocative, and the poem embodies the very creative process it describes, whereby the naked page is filled with ‘the rich illuminations of the year’. --Stephen Edgar

President's Choice Award ($1,000) “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work” - Marly Youmans (USA)

An impressive depiction of creativity - from the void of a blank page to the emergence of ideas and images embedded in life's experiences. The sparrow's flight imagery is a clever use of Bede's parable - the flashing wings of insight and inspiration leading to a masterful illuminated expression of meaning. The poem's use of cognitive images which extend beyond the standard earth-bound images of nature are sublime:  "A cosmos gleaming with possibility"; "the Apocalypse of birth" ; "a cloak of endlessness". A refined and thought-provoking poem. --Robert Furlan

In other news, there are some new reviews of Seren of the Wildwood, and I'll soon post excerpts on the Seren-page.

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Seren of the Wildwood from Wiseblood Books

Whee! A book landing on the list...

CURRENT's 100 Books of the 21st Century

Read the intro and run your peepers down to no. 29!

Birthday frolics

Signing books on the Village Library of Cooperstown lawn, 1-3 pm on Sunday, June 2. Including the newest books from Wiseblood Books and Ignatius Press.