Philbrick Poetry Project Chapbook Competition

The Providence Athenaeum has announced guidelines for the 14th annual Philbrick Poetry Project Chapbook Series. This year's poet-judge is Lisa Starr, Rhode Island Poet Laureate

The winning poet will receive $500, publication of her or his chapbook, publication of an e-book on the Athenaeum website, and the opportunity to read with the poet-judge.

• Deadline: Submissions must be postmarked between July 15, 2011 and October 15, 2011.
• A check for the entry fee of $10.00 must be enclosed with the submission (includes free chapbook of a previous honoree).
• Manuscripts should be 15 to 25 pages. Please send two copies.
• Eligibility is limited to residents of the New England states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) who have not had a poetry chapbook or a full-length book published. The Philbrick Poetry Project honors a spirit of fairness and integrity among poets. If you have been a student of the judge within the last five years or if you have a close personal or professional relationship with the judge, please wait until next year to submit your work.
• The author’s name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript.
• Please enclose with your submission two cover sheets with the following information. Cover sheet #1: Title of manuscript, author name and address, telephone number and e-mail address. Cover sheet # 2: Title of manuscript.
• Please include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for announcement. Manuscripts will not be returned.
• The honoree will be announced in February 2012.
• The reading by the poet judge and honoree will take place at the Athenaeum in April 2012.

Manuscripts may be sent to: The Providence Athenaeum, attn. Philbrick Poetry Project , 251 Benefit Street

Providence, RI 02903.

Kinglsey Amis: "Something Was Moaning in the Corner"

O muskrat, ramble through the living grass
And coil the leaves on the abandoned bone;
Bring to the midden your eliding grease
And load the summer zephyrs with your bane.

O viper, mad with coiling on a pin,

Deadly Narcissus gazing on your scales,

Vomit your naked young sentenced to pain

And learn to love the bad sun where it scalds.

O spider, crawl into my tiny heart

And find your doom. The blood is vacant there.
With needle legs prick my dull skin apart
And build your web of sweet inhuman hair.

*

One of several experiential elements which have not yet been translated from physical libraries to e-reader storefronts and other digital spaces (I'm looking at you, Cushing Academy) is the likelihood of serendipitous discoveries brought about by catalog propinquity. Case in point: I was looking for a Kingsley Amis novel not too long ago, and happened to find on the library shelf in the same section, the thin volume which I have since discovered is relatively rare: Bright November, Amis' first collection, published by The Fortune Press in 1947, and from which the poem above is taken. A neat thing, -- imperfect to be sure, but full of Positions and Perspectives which would get a newly-minted MFA in trouble now-a-days is he or she tried to thicken a first manuscript with them.

Literary Seminar: American Expat Literature

This is now the third summer in which the Boston Poetry Union has organized a Seminar in Literary Appreciation. This year, Christopher Ohge will guiding participants through a tour of "AMERICAN EXPATRIATE WRITING IN THE 19th & 20th CENTURY".

These reading seminars are intended to acquaint participants with major personalities and events in the broad body of American literature written by Americans abroad. No prior experience is assumed or needed, and no preparation is required to attend.

These are relaxed and informative affairs, where the aim is for all involved to grow in their appreciation of literature. The moderator will provide reading packets for each session, in hard copy at the seminar and in PDF in advance. At each session, the moderator will deliver a brief expository lecture introducing the themes and relevance of that evening's texts, before leading group discussion focused on close reading.

Thursdays 6-8 PM
Boston University's Mugar Library
771 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 414
"BU Central" stop on the Green Line "B" trolley

Seminar 1: July 28th
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The Sphinx"; "Persian Poetry"; and selections from Journals while abroad in Italy
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: "P's Correspondence"

Seminar 2: August 4th
Herman Melville: selections from Typee; "Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids"; and Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant

Seminar 3: August 11th
Henry James: selections from Italian Hours
Edith Wharton: selections from In Morocco

Seminar 4: August 18th
Gertude Stein: "Ada" and "Guillaume Apollinaire"
T. S. Eliot: "Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse" and Four Quartets

Seminar 5: August 25th
Paul Bowles: selected letters from France, 1929-1932; "A Distant Episode"; "Allal"; and "Baptism of Solitude"

Participants may attend any or all sessions; the seminar is not cumulative.

If you'd like to register, please email your name to bostonpoetryunion@gmail.com as well as your contact information and the dates you plan to attend. A maximum of 12 students can be seated at each session. The cost to attend each session is $5, or $25 for the whole seminar series. Payment may be made at the first seminar with cash, by check to "Boston Poetry Union," or via PayPal to bostonpoetryunion@gmail.com.

Eliot on Jones

Meeting of the directors in the Faber and Faber board room in 1944, 'round a table filled with readers' reports and bottles of beer'.  Sir Geoffrey Faber, the chairman and founder of the firm is in the center. T. S. Eliot is on the extreme left.

In his early years at Faber Eliot’s reports on poetry collections are written to tell his colleagues about the types of verse which he considered that the firm should steer clear of.  He was normally very diplomatic, but the feeble verse that a well-known aesthete had submitted received a terse one-line report: ‘I cannot endure this stuff’. One of Eliot’s most perceptive reports is on the manuscript of In Parenthesis, the great work about the First World War by the poet and artist David Jones, dated September 1936.  He does not overstate the importance of the work but draws out the Arthurian and Kiplingesque qualities that he knows will appeal to particular colleagues on the Book Committee. Typically self-deprecatory, he admits his views may not be widely shared: ‘I have not the slightest notion whether what I see in the book is really there, or if it is there, whether it will reach more than a few people’.

-- from "T. S. Eliot and the Faber Book Committee", a post by Faber archivist Robert Brown, over at The Thought Fox. [Also cross-posted to The Wonder Reflex; hat-tip to Don Share for sharing this.]

A salon for Little Star # 2

A literary salon, held in a handsome Harlem brownstone ... Jamaica Kincaid reading, transfixing every person in the room, her white socks turned down so their embroidered edges splayed over her brown leather shoes, her angular prose resplendent... sound like a nice time? These are reports from the recent Little Star event, held to celebrate that rare thing in our era of ephemera, the second issue of a literary magazine.  

Little Star #2 may be purchased online; you'll also find much interesting literary goings-on at the journal's Facebook Page and blog. But if you're looking for olives and real live human beans, you'll have to keep your eyes open for the next Little Star salon.

Words and art this month at Lorem Ipsum

 

TONIGHT at Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge, the opening reception of YOUNG GHOSTS, the gallery installation for the month of May from local graffiti artist, Black Math, featured in a Weekly Dig interview this week. [Event page]

FRIDAY, MAY 20: the Sig Amet reading series session featuring Janaka Stucky, Dot Devota, Matthew Henriksen (author of Ordinary Sun) and Brandon Shimoda (author of The Girl Without Arms, whom Tomaž Šalamun describes as "an Ur-being, a totally new creature [... whose] language changes natural laws."), as well as poems read from Destroyer of Man, a posthumous collection of poems by Boston-area punk rock renaissance man, Dominic Owen Mallary. Start time, 7:30 PM. [Event page]

from "The Knife" by Keith Douglas

This I think happened to us together
though now no shadow of it flickers in your hands
your eyes look down on ordinary streets
If I talk to you I might be a bird
with a message, a dead man, a photograph.

*

This is the last stanza of five; a full text version appears here but it is not clear whether this is an authorized source.