Spring issue of The Puritan

Coming to the BPU desk today via email, good news from The Puritan -- a fine, substantial publication, operating under the banner "Frontiers of New English" -- that their spring issue is now online. NB: Puritan contributor rob mclellan has written previously for The Charles River Journal, a publication of the BPU's Pen & Anvil Press. 

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The wait is over! The Puritan is back with our patiently awaited (and hotly anticipated) Issue 17: Spring 2012! And, most importantly, it's in an all-new, html format, making it easier to read, copy, save, and share!

Check out original fiction by Marc Apollonio, Andrew Boden, Melissa Kuipers, and Molly Lynch! Peruse new poetry by Sean Braune, David Brock, Amanda Earl, Alyda Faber, Sean Howard, Anna Maxymiw, Lynn McClory and Matthew Tierney! Read an inspired essay by rob mclennan! And open up two new interviews: Myra Bloom's conversation with Michael Lista and Jim Smith's discussion with Lillian Necakov!

While you're on our website taking in this great new work, be sure to note our ongoing contest: The Inaugural Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Literary Excellence. The deadline for this prestigious award is September 30, 2012, so that gives you plenty of time to polish up that poem or short story and send it our way.

Our fiction winner will receive $650, our poetry winner will receive $350, and both winners will receive a prize package of books from some excellent (and small!) Canadian publishers (including Chaudiere Books, Coach House Books, Cormorant Books, ECW Press, Free Hand Books, Goose Lane Editions, Insomniac Press, Mansfield Press, Pedlar Press, and Tightrope Books -- approximately $500 worth of books!). Winners will also be included in a Best-Of print anthology and in an upcoming issue online.

Visit the submissions page for details on how to enter: http://www.puritan-magazine.com/submissions.php.

Also, we're still taking regular submissions of fiction, essays, poetry, reviews, and interviews for Issue 19: Fall 2012. Get those in before September 15, 2012 to be considered. And remember: we pay all our writers! $50 for a work of fiction or non-fiction and $25 per poem!

To help us reach as many readers as possible (and to help get our writers read), please share our new issue on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media. We can't continue without you!

Until next time ... Happy reading!

The Puritan Editors

Amazing new poem by Ben Mazer in Eyewear

From "Monsieur Barbary Brecht" by Ben Mazer (author of, most recently, POEMS), as appears at the Eyewear blog edited by Todd Swift:

In the hall the rich children glare and they stare

at the poor little visitor who enters there,

his musical prodigy greater than theirs

sends them scuttling in snide little groups up the stairs.

But the hostess is compassionate and hands him a score,

but he just doesn’t feel up to play any more,

and wonders what lies behind the magnificent door

where the children all vanished, and his vision is flecked

by the shadowy mustache of Monsieur Barbary Brecht!

Readers wanted for poetry stroll in Roslindale

Rozzie Reads, a project of the Friends of the Roslindale Library, is looking for poetry lovers who’d like to read their own poems or a poem of their choosing at the August 2nd "Poetry in Motion" event, part of Roslindale Summer Stroll. Local poetry fans, dressed in togas, will travel around the village and recite poetry as area residents enjoy an evening out of doors.

When? Thursday, August 2nd from 7 – 8 pm

Who? Three groups of five performers will be staged near restaurants and shops 

What do I do? Take turns reading or reciting a favorite poem or poems! You can read from a book, a paper or your phone or you can recite your poem from memory.

What if I don’t have a poem? Log onto www.rozziereads.org to find a selection of great and fun poems

How can I practice? Visit http://rozziereadspoetry.wikispaces.com/Tips+for+Memorizing+Poems for some handy tips for memorization

What do I wear? Wear something white and accent your outfit with gold colored accessories – you will look great!

I still have questions, who do I contact? Email Jennifer Dines at  jdines@lgfnet.org.

Awesome! How do I sign up? Visit this link, where you’ll fill out a form with your contact information.

Need more information? Log onto www.rozziereads.org.

Maria Gapotchenko in 3QD

How wonderful to see that the blog 3 Quarks Daily ("3QD is smart and high-class."—Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate) has selected a poem from one of our Boston Poetry/Pen & Anvil publications for this week's Sunday Poem pick. The piece, "Third Person" by Maria Gapotchenko, was originally published in Clarion #15.

In Third Person

a haze a heron in a tide-pool
and for a long time out of time
two children push a giant yellow globe

coyotes come and every June the same
the unrequited loneliness the same
out-of-tune expressions herons dance
the same blue wings
                           it all made sense
the way he asked me for the Book of Job
to make some pattern make some rhyme
out of his life before he die
the way he scrutinized his patterned robe

when he did die it's simply that he sensed
there was no more to do no other dance
to be composed no present tense

Salem State poetry seminar from June 5-8

The Salem Poetry Seminar, sponsored by the Salem State Center for Creative and Performing Arts, is a free, week-long seminar, offering students at the Commonwealth's public institutions of higher education the opportunity to study poetry intensively with accomplished teachers and writers. The seminar, to be held June 5-8, will bring 12 young poets together to study, with a "master class" held by acclaimed poet Afaa Michael Weaver. Seminar poetry readings are free and open to the public. This year's reading schedule is as follows:

• Tuesday, June 5, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Theatre Company, 90 Lafayette Street
  Featured Readers: Kevin Carey, Charlotte Gordon
  Student Poets: Steven Durta, Rebecca Mueller, Jacob Reecher, Kayla Russell
• Wednesday, June 6, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street
  Featured Readers: J.D. Scrimgeour, Claire Keyes
  Student Poets: Felicia Connolly, Lillian Donnelly, Emily Hatch, William Regan
• Thursday, June 7, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street
  Salem Poetry Seminar Alumni Reading and Open Mic
• Friday, June 8, 7:30 p.m.
  Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street
  Featured Reader: Afaa Michael Weaver
  Student Poets: Sara Afshar, Ashley De Souza, JD Debski, Lyndon Seitz 

For more information, please contact:
J.D. Scrimgeour, Program Director, jscrimgeour@salemstate.edu, (978) 587-7082
January O'Neil, Project Manager, joneil@salemstate.edu, (978) 239-2598
Karen Gahagan, Salem State Center for the Arts, kgahagan@salemstate.edu, (978) 542-7890

BU MFA poets at the Boston Playwrights' Theater

At 7 PM on May 15, 2012, come to the Boston Playwright's Theater at 949 Commonwealth Avenue, for the final session in the BU MFA poetry reading series, featuring Susan Barba, Mike Brokos, Bryan Coller, Megan Fernandes, L. E. Goldstein, Abriana Jette, Natasha Hakimi, and Kelly Morse. Wine and cheese reception to follow.

 

ABOUT THE READERS

• Susan Barba is the managing editor at David R. Godine, Publisher/Black Sparrow Books. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, and her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Words Without Borders, and The Yalobusha Review. She has a poem forthcoming in the Hudson Review, and she lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children.
• Mike Brokos hails from the mid-Atlantic, growing up outside of Baltimore, earning an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Maryland, and living in the Washington, DC area for several years before coming to Boston to work on his MFA in Poetry.
• Bryan Coller grew up in Southern California where he attended UC Irvine. He studies and teaches creative writing at Boston University.
• Laura Goldstein is from Niceville, Florida. She finished a creative writing M.A. in August from the University of Southern Mississippi, and is now pursuing her M.F.A in poetry from Boston University.
• Natasha Hakimi holds both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles.She has received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2010, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction in 2010 and the Falling Leaves Award in 2010. Natasha writes for Los Angeles Magazine and Truthdig and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry at Boston University.
• Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English Literature at UC Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011) and has two forthcoming chapbooks, Organ Speech (Corrupt Press, November 2011) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press, January 2012). She has also been published in Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale.
• Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abriana Jette holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Hofstra University. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Boston University where she is a Betsey Leonard Fellow. She is a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, an AWP Intro Journal Project nominee, and teaches at the Boston Academy of Arts.
• Kelly Morse grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but has since drifted as far as Spain, South Africa and even the East Coast. Most recently, her work has appeared in PoetsArtists and Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi. Kelly is currently working on a series that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between Eastern and Western cultures after a two-year stay in Vietnam.

For more information please visit: http://www.facebook.com/events/323200821086669. This event cross-posted at the Boston Poetry calendar.

Herta Mueller to speak at BU

2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature
Herta Müller

Saturday, May 12, at 4:00 p.m.
Barrister’s Hall, Boston University Law School (behind March Chapel)
765 Commonwealth Avenue

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Herta Müller is the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in 1953 in a German-speaking town in Banat, Romania, where her parents were members of the German-speaking minority. Her father served in the Waffen-SS in World War II, and her mother was deported to a work camp in the Soviet Union in 1945. At university, Ms. Müller opposed the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and joined Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of dissident writers who sought freedom of speech. She emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of persecution and censorship in Romania. Her early works depict village life and the repression its residents face. Her later novels, including "The Land of Green Plums" and "The Appointment", approach allegory in their graphic portrayals of the brutality suffered by modest people living under totalitarianism.

Moderated by Askold Melnyczuk and William Pierce. Melnyczuk is founding editor of AGNI and the author of three novels, most recently "The House of Widows". He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction and the McGinnis Award in Fiction. Pierce’s fiction has appeared in Granta, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He is senior editor of AGNI, where he contributes a series of essays called “Crucibles.”

Sponsored by BU’s Center for the Study of Europe, AGNI and the Goethe Institut Boston.