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

Seren: video, newsletter, review, more...

                                            CLICK ME, says Alice's video, though rather shyly.

VISUAL ART

on this page and the pages of Seren of the Wildwood is the splendid handiwork of Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

WISEBLOOD NEWSLETTER 

Eep! I've been posting away on social media and entirely forgetting the blog. But here I am, and HERE's today's newsletter from Wiseblood Books, focusing on Seren of the Wildwood and Dana Gioia's translation of Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules. Interesting letter with links for pre-orders (better hurry if you want a pre-order price--and you can get the pre-order price plus shipping if you live abroad), and even a homemade video from moi! Enjoy...

FIRST REVIEW

And here is the very first review of the book, a happy long double-pager. Click to enlarge. I'm grateful to Tessa Carman for spending her time on it, and to Fr. Mark Michael for assigning a review in The Living Church (ECUSA/Anglican Communion.) Don't I need business cards that read Master Enchanter now?

SEREN LOUNGING ON CHINOISERIE

Here you may see three Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood Books) copies at the home of L.A.-and-Chicago artist Leonard D. Greco, Jr. 

MORE

I'll be doing a reading near D. C. in early March, and then at City Lights (Sylva) and Goldberry (Concord) at mid-month. After that, some in and near Cooperstown. And then we shall see. I have a house reading scheduled, and I'm also open to those if they're not too far from Cullowhee or Cooperstown, or on the road between...

The Rollipoke 23, with more Seren news, is HERE.

Twelfth Night, with poems online

"Murmurs of the Crones in Hackmatack" and "Cronesong" are up at The Orchards Poetry Journal. Catherine Chandler, Philip Quinlan, Corey Mesler, Kevin Durkin, Andrew Frisardi, and more are included.

Golem and swan

Thanks to Prufrock News for once again featuring one of my poems, this time linking to "The Poet and the Golem" from Books and Culture. Artists of all sorts need chatty champions, people who are willing to get the word out and say in public what they admire and like.

For every writer who is the lucky recipient of a black swan, there are many more who go swanless. After Typee and Omoo, Melville went so swanless that he was eventually forgotten. Dickinson was swanless, though I expect swanlessness was good for her art--nobody chiseled off the oddly important dashes or beat her over the head with the idea of how very strange and curious her work appeared, and that much of swanlessness was good for her singular art. (Most people aren't so strong and vitally themselves as she was.) Poe was so terribly swanless. And Kafka was swanless. In fact, most artists in most artistic fields go swanless.

And so I very much appreciate that Micah Mattix, busy professor that he is, takes the time to share news about poets and writers he finds worthy on daily basis. It is a good thing that he does, and he does it faithfully. If you want to subscribe, go here.

The Book of the Red King on the 11th day of Christmas

iPhone photo by Rebecca Beatrice Miller
A royal sunset on Main Street, Cooperstown

I've finally gotten back to working on The Book of the Red King, long written and finally, now, revised for a final time (and another and another and so on. But it's good to think of it as a final polish. Final polishes are always more complicated than they seemed at the start.) Like Thaliad, it tells a tale in an alternative landscape. Unlike Thaliad, the manuscript is composed of many poems, some of which I have just now cast into the fire, as on some terrible day of judgment (though a fire on the hearth is pleasant.)

Always, it is a severe lesson for a writer to look at a large group of poems. After much time away, I can see that some of these are simply not good enough for a book. They don't leave enough gold in the sieve after I pan through their waters. And then the rest have varying degrees of spark and combustion of language. Some I want to read again because they still manage to surprise me, or because I like the sounds of them. It's the middling ones that I dither over--are they needed for the over-arching story, are they good enough, can I polish them more? Can I wrestle with the angel again, and gain what I seek? Am I just playing in the shallows, or have I managed to swim out to deeper waters? Do the poems, placed together, make a kind of potent journey from darkness into light, through transformation, or are they only dead leaves skittering along the pavement?

And it is strange to read poems so different from my own life, yet so close--threads of self-scorn and old darknesses in the Fool. What a hard time he has becoming a man, becoming a proper Fool with mastery of his foolishness, his tales, his loves... He feels so near, so far. Jots of my own days are here but unrecognizable to any but me.

I am considering using "The Starry Fool" (slightly altered) as the first poem in the book, to be a sort of proem-poem, a kind of preface. You can see it in the original version at Mezzo Cammin here. 

There is no other village

One of the vignettes from Thaliad,
by Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
My Thaliad page.
Phoenicia Publishing Thaliad page.

This excerpt from Thaliad has already been shared in several places, so if you're a regular visitor to my little cluster of huts by the internet stream, you may have seen it. What's the news of Thaliad? Lady Word of Mouth appears to be working slowly and yet steadily on such an unusual item as a 21st-century adventure in verse . . .

Now and then in writing, I was aware of drawing on some prior work. There's one long passage where I felt Anglo-Saxon rhythms and ways of describing, for example. But in this one I felt the presence of Cavafy, and the close of this chapter is indebted to him. Writers are always indebted to those the masters they love who did the work, and occasionally that indebtedness is strong enough to notice and acknowledge.

from XXI, (Samuel and Thalia, after tragic events):

Then Samuel in sorrow vowed to her
Now I will leave and find another place,
A village where my heart is not in earth,
And Thalia replied to him with truth:
There is no other village, is no place
To find where your dead heart is not in earth.
And still he moaned his lot, exclaimed with tears,
I want to go where ground is not a waste,
And where my life is not a ruined town.
And Thalia with mercy answered him:
In time you will begin to heal your heart
And all that seems a waste will bloom once more.
But he went on in anger, blaming God,
The strangers who had maundered into town,
The grave that meant a stone around his neck,
Until she spoke in haste against his words:
For you there is only this blood-drenched ground,
The murdered life that is your freight of guilt,
Also the murdered life that is your own,
The world that you create by how you act
Or see or how you dream the world to be,
Your world that’s ruined everywhere like this,
Which you yourself have caused to be a waste,
Which you yourself have scorched with inner fire.

To the poets--

Thoughts after reading some contemporary poetry... They might be in place of a few reviews, or maybe they're reminders to me about things I knew but felt like jotting down. 

* * *

If you are [insert sex or color], please love the world's people in your poetry. All. No matter what color and sex. To put it another way: give the people in your poems your full and fair attention, even if their behaviors are feckless or monstrous.

Aspire to be like God. Remember this? "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten...." Give your only-begotten verse child to the world so that people may have more life. More life, raised and intense. (That means the poem must have life. And that's a difficult demand.)

Love the reader. He does not need to be clubbed on the head with your ideas of social justice. In fact, lay off the ideas of social justice in your poems. If you love the world well and truly enough in your poems, you don't need to "say" a thing about social justice. Go volunteer at your local food bank or soup kitchen; you'll be a lot more useful to this world. And you might get some of those raised and intense poems out of the experience...

Forgive. Have mercy. If you don't forgive and have mercy, your poetry will be marred by hate and rigidity and the inability to remove your metaphorical sunglasses and see the world's light, falling without passion on all men and women everywhere.

Careful about your progenitors. Never follow writers who are possessed by a spirit of rage and unforgiveness that leads toward the use of poetry as a form of vengeance.

Sit with humility at the feet of the great masters.

Be willing to suffer transformation.

Even if you write short lyric poems, don't leave out story. It worked for Homer, Shakespeare, and Yeats. It can work for you and me.

Poems at "The Flea"

Special Mermaid Tavern issue
in honor of "The Flea"
on its second natal day--
two years of blood and song.

I have three poems in the Mermaid Tavern issue of "The Flea," two of them written expressly for this roistering, carousing celebration! They also fit into my The Book of the Red King sequence: "Song of the Fisher-Folk"; "Fool's Toast to the Red King"; and "The Mermaid Tavern."

The Flea
Special Mermaid Issue

Transgress, transform, transcend--trala!

Recently I almost stopped writing fiction…

I was still fulfilling story-anthology requests, but I was overtaken a spring spate of poetry—a veritable flood in which I wrote one, two, or sometimes three poems a day. Formal poems, that is: the once-beloved kind with meter and rhyme and aspirations toward song. And I found this immensely satisfying. In the light of poetic practice of the last century, it feels positively kick-up-my-heels transgressive (transgressive--a favorite caddisfly-nymph decorative ornamentation of the academic world, which I hereby steal and pervert for my own purposes), particularly as some of these were not lyrics at all but longer narrative poems.

In addition, I entirely ceased thinking about where whatever thing I had made would be published because there was so darn many poems that I couldn’t even bother to think about such petty little distractions. This is a good, a downright delicious feeling, especially since I have realized that a writer who has seven books (counting the forthcoming U. K. book) but has never received the a “push” from her various mainstream publishers is not going to find novels easy to publish in the brave new world of publishing where Bookscan numbers, past marketing history, youth, and other silly things determine one’s lot. If my soulmate Hawthorne (so conscious of guilt that he must have been a Southerner in disguise) had had to put up with this stuff, he’d never have gotten so far as The Marble Faun. Why, who would publish so odd a thing as The Blithedale Romance? And what about that darling old crustacean, Melville? They never would have let him thrust his whaling boat past Moby Dick. Moby would have been the enormous white rock that his gifts foundered on. As it was, the powers tried manfully (demonfully, perhaps) to stop him. Luckily he managed to slip pursuit by constant transformation and by surviving neglect and general human stupidity. There’s nothing like eternal persistence, a trait (or perhaps itself a stupidity) for which the mid-list writer then and now must be grateful.

Having written an astonishing-to-me number of short-to-moderate-length poems this spring, I have ventured into long ones. Currently I’m on page 50 of a narrative poem entitled The Thaliad. As a person who has been prone to having each new book be entirely different from the last (the absolute bane of publishers) and who has frequently shifted from poetry to novel to story, I’m finding combining an expansive narrative with poetic form to be a fresh-feeling and an entirely enjoyable act. It’s a sort of culmination of many trajectories and tendencies having to do with approaches to joy, truth, and beauty.

And that is what I have been doing—along with the usual summer ferrying, the mama-work, the carrying-of-houses-and-laundry-and-so-on—while neglecting this airy little nothing called a blog.

* * *

Illustration: scratchboard drawing by my daughter, 16.