Submission Call: Printed Matter Vancouver and C-Tran Seek Poetry for the Buses from Clark County, WA Residents (DEADLINE: September1, 2015)

PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER

PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER
Toni Partington & Christopher Luna, Editors

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO RESIDENTS OF CLARK COUNTY, WA

Printed Matter Vancouver is proud to announce the submission period for POETRY MOVES, poetry by Clark County Residents to be showcased on C-Tran Buses beginning January 2016.

Submission Guidelines:

What You Need To Know:
• Poems will be accepted until September 1, 2015 at 11:59pm, Pacific Standard Time.
• Submissions will be accepted via email only.
• Submit a maximum of two (2) poems. Poems can be no longer than seven (7) lines. The poem can be a complete poem or an excerpt from a longer poem. If the poem is an excerpt, please indicate this and give the poem title. Previously published poems may be accepted subject to the discretion of the editors. Indicate the publication name, date, poem title, and publication rights in the body of the submission email…

View original post 342 more words

Advertisement

Hai Seas

a train of flowers
strung across the waves
a wreath
bringing up the rear
like a flower girl

© 2015 Douglas J. Westberg

In Memoriam Carol Holden 1948-2015

In Memoriam Carol Holden 1948-2015.

SunWinks! March 8, 2015: Rhymes with “Economy”

[This column first appeared in slightly different form on Gather in 2012]

Dear SunWinks! Symbiotes:

Metonymy!  (gesundheit…)

Pardon my Greek… The word “metonymy” itself may look as arcane and hairy as, say, onomatopoeia, but like onomatopoeia, you can find metonymy almost anywhere you look! Metonymy (meh-TAWN-i-mee) is the rhetorical figure in which an object is referred to by substituting something—usually smaller and more concrete—that is related to, symbolic of, or a constituent of that object.

An individual instance of metonymy is called a metonym. The type of metonym which consists of a constituent or component part of the object referred to is called a synecdoche (sin-ECK-duh-key). We use metonyms every day without even thinking about it. Here are a few familiar examples. You can think of dozens more.

Visit my Amazon store!

Check out Copious Notes Books, my Amazon bookselling site!  

Antiques, first editions, author-signed titles, and other remarkable items chosen with the unique taste and acumen of yours truly.

I’m tackling a crazy back-up of acquisitions now, and new one-of-a-kind items will be added daily.

Meanwhile, everything in the store as of March 1 has been marked down 20-30%. Nothing has been held back!

Highlights:

• T.S. Eliot first edition
• Daphne DuMaurier first edition
• Alan Arkin first edition
• Shirley Jackson first edition
• Ani DiFranco first edition
• 1950s Catholic Girls Manual and Sunday Missal
• Cleveland Amory signed
• Robert Bly signed
• Ralph Nader signed
• Voltaire Candide limited and numbered pre-publication printing signed by illustrator Samuel Adler and editor Carl Van Doren
• Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory with illustrations by Woody Guthrie
• How I Won The War movie tie-in edition with John Lennon cover

Can you spot the spelling errors?

Can you find the spelling/punctuation errors in the following photos?

1.

2.

3.

4.

SunWinks! March 1, 2015: Abstract Poetry: The Medium is the Message.

Dear SunWinkers!

This is a lightly reworked reissue of my September, 2012 column for Gather.com on the topic of Abstract and Cubist Poetry. I also urge you to read our recent SunWinks! columns on Edith Sitwell and Intrinsic Rhythm and Cubism as these three columns all encourage you to sharpen your sense of the sound, rhythm, and structure of your writing by putting aside considerations of meaning.

* * *

Well, we’re all done with modern poetry. I’ve exhausted every conceivable topic, every possible technique. There’s nothing left to talk about. Just go back through my previous columns and you’ll know everything there is to know about writing modern poetry.

Did I have you going for a second?

The fact is, there is no end to the invention, the creativity, and the variety of modern poetry and approaches to modern poetry. Think of how many stylistic genres and individual styles there are in modern painting, to name just one medium. Think for just a moment about the unique visions of Monet, Mondrian, Matisse, Miro, Grandma Moses, and M.C. Escher.

As I’ve said, and tried to demonstrate, poetry is much more than sentiment, short lines, and end rhymes. The techniques that can be used to communicate the very special, intimate truth that lives in the poetic imagination are as rich and variegated as the colors in the artist’s palette, or the harmonic colors in the music composer’s palette.

Now I’m inviting you to go wild. Let loose. Be creative. Pull out all the stops. Put all the leftovers into the stew. Throw the paint onto the wall. Play the piano without the music—with your fists, even.

SunWinks! February 22, 2015: Waxing Prosaic

Dear SunWinkers:

In recent weeks, we’ve been backing and filling on topics in the area of the sound and sonority of the language, including a couple ideas, neologism and tumbling verse, which we hope encouraged you to think about sonority and rhythm in new ways. Another way of sharpening your acuity on such considerations is to deprive yourself of the benefit of line breaks. When you do that, you end up with a

Prose Poem

Seemingly a contradiction in terms, the phrase may refer to

1. a passage, usually short, of non-discursive* prose, the poetic quality of which is self-evident, or to
2. a long work, which, although printed as prose, because of the prominence of the rhythms, the rich connotations of the language, the scope and significance of the whole, can properly be called a poem.**

Babette Deutsch, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms [NY, NY: HarperResource 2002 reprint].

*i.e. not didactic, not arguing a point from logic and reason, as an essay

**Examples of type #2 include James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and E.A. Poe’s “Eleanora.” We are going to ignore definition #2 for obvious reasons and focus on definition #1.

SunWinks! February 15, 2015: Take a Tumble

Dearest hardy, intrepid SunWinkers:

I frequently badger you to read your poetry aloud, and today’s column is no exception. Writing poetry without hearing what it sounds like is like studying a piano etude without touching the keyboard. For about a year, I’ve been making the rounds of poetry open mikes here in Vancouver USA and trying to be a good citizen of the poetry community. Reading your poems to an audience is so valuable, I just can’t recommend it highly enough!

Ghost Town Poetry open mike, February 12, 2015

You get to hear it aloud, hear yourself read it, see what the audience responds to and what falls flat and what flies over their heads. It builds confidence in public speaking and in yourself as an artist. I’ve grown immensely from doing this. Here’s a sample, from January’s Ghost Town Poetry open mike: http://youtu.be/4Cdg3JWppk4?t=20m

This week, we bounce from Metaphors 201 back to considerations of rhythm and sound. Today’s topic is Tumbling Verse a.k.a. Skeltonic Verse. It’s lots of fun and it’s a great way to experiment with rhythm, pace, diction, sonority, and phonetics.

Poem: The Joy of Soup