Women's History Month

"Lines of Flight" by Catherine Chandler (Able Muse Press, 2011)

I'm thrilled to announce that my poetry will be featured at a Women's History Month event at Southwest Minnesota State University.

The event will take place on March 21, 2013.

Each year, American poet, translator and Professor of English at SMSU, Dr. Susan McLean, whose book The Best Disguise won the prestigious Richard Wilbur Award in 2009, chooses two contemporary female poets (recent poets include Rhina P. Espaillat, A.E. Stallings, Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane, Gail White, Deborah Warren, Catherine Tufariello and Rose Kelleher) and pairs their poetry with the work of stellar poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, Dorothy Parker and Wendy Cope, for an afternoon reading by a group of faculty and students.

More about Women's History Month HERE.

Will update as more information becomes available.

Thank you, Susan!

Delmira Agustini - "Los cálices vacíos" (1913)

Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini published her third and final book of poetry, Los cálices vacíos, one hundred years ago, in 1913. She had planned on two more books, but her ex-husband murdered her then committed suicide in 1914.

Last week I found one of the most complete works on Agustini's tragic life, Delmira Agustini, by Ofelia Machado de Benvenuto (1944), in one of the many musty bookstores in the feria Tristán Narvaja in Montevideo. Can't wait to read it.

This blog is named after her poem "La barca milagrosa", and I plan to translate some of her later work into English, that is, after I finish several more by the brilliant Uruguayan poet María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira.

Back in Punta, I was surprised to find two cross streets named Delmira Agustini and Cálices Vacíos.

Photo by Hugo Oliveira

Storm Fear

December 27, 2012 snowstorm, Montreal - Photo by Hugo Oliveira

Robert Frost's first book of poetry, A Boy's Will , was first published one hundred years ago, in England, in 1913. I love so many of the poems in the book, including one of my favorite Frost poems, Reluctance.

However, with the recent storms on my mind, here's Storm Fear, which only ostensibly has anything whatsoever to do with snow.


STORM FEAR

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
'Come out! Come out!'--
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,--
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether 'tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.


-- Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)


 A free e-book of A Boy's Will is available at the Project Gutenberg site HERE.

Enjoy!

Paul Lake wins the Richard Wilbur Award

Paul Lake, poetry editor of First Things,* has been awarded the 2012 Richard Wilbur Award for his manuscript, The Republic of Virtue, the final judge being Dana Gioia. The book will be published by University of Evansville Press this year.

Several of Paul's poems are available online at The Poem Tree. Two of his interesting essays are also online: The Enchanted Loom and The Shape of Poetry.
 

Glowworms in the Forest. Photo by Quit007, Source: Wikipedia

Congratulations, Paul!


"First, symmetrical forms such as sonnets, villanelles, and ballad stanzas are not static “received forms”; they evolve, like plants, through a process of iteration and feedback. The regular meter of formal poems is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock’s; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of “phase-locking”–a natural process that occurs, in the words of Briggs and Peat again, “when many individual oscillators shift from a state of collective chaos to beating together or resonating in harmony.” . . . the way the randomly flickering lights of fireflies become synchronous throughout a whole tree . . .    -- Paul Lake, The Shape of Poetry (Contemporary Poetry Review, 14 July 2010)





* Since 2006 First Things has published four of my poems ("The Red Beads", "Eleven", "Mother's Day" and "Kyrielle") and one translation ("Niagara").

Upcoming Anthologies and Journals

I'll have two poems in The Centrifugal Eye's upcoming fifth anniversary anthology, two sonnets in The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes, scheduled for release in the fall of 2013. Also, recent acceptances include two poems for Angle, one for The Lyric, two for Mezzo Cammin, and one for First Things.