Ruth Lilly Fellowship, part 3

So August 1 came and went. Mid-day yesterday I found the expected e-mail in my inbox: "Thank you for your application to the 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship competition. We are grateful to you for letting us see your work." The letter went on to explain that I was one of the nearly 860 applicants receiving the same letter - thank you and good luck next time. 


Congratulations to the 40 finalists and best of luck not biting your hands off between now and September 1. I'm sure I'll be competing against 35 of them next year (along with the other 860 or so). My work will stack up better next year. One nice thing about being a young poet is that I have plenty of time, even when competing for awards limited to young poets.


The work I've been turning out this summer has been harder to come by, but I've felt more confident about it. I feel that my struggle with stodgy formalities and out-dated expressions has finally resolved. Without, I might brag, falling into pretentiously "everyday" speech. Most of it is still out for consideration in other contests. There's still time for the Milwaukee Irish Fest, WRWA Jade Ring, Slash Pine Press Chapbook and the WFOP Triad contests.

Life Gets By

Without hardly wanting it, it's almost August 1 already. That date means a few things for me really:

1. My wife and I are really having another baby, really soon. 
2. Rent. Dang. 
3. I need to get churning on sending out my submission for the WFOP Triad poetry contests!
4. Ruth Lilly Fellowship announcements go out to the finalists via e-mail. It's not that I'm really harboring any expectation that I'll even get so much as a note saying "Thanks for playing, try again next year" from them, much less that I'll be a finalist; but, all the same it's a possibility. Even being labelled a finalist would be monumental for me. So far the best publicity I really get is that when you google "Ruth Lilly Fellowship" this blog is the third hit.
5. Notifications for almost all of the other contests I entered through the spring and summer start to go out. 

It's been a dry-spell, as far as poetry goes. I've written a few, but my desk reclaimed them before I could get around to revising and typing. I feel a few more lurking, waiting for paper; it's not as easy to find time to pen them this summer.

E.P.

My son selects books for me to read as a way of telling me that the bookshelf is too messy. I have a few stacks that have piled up horizontally in front of the books that are properly at home on the shelves and he will try to reorganize them so that it doesn't look so spring-smidge. The other day he pulled down an introduction to Ezra Pound written by a Franciscan sister and literature professor - I didn't even know I had such as book. It begins with a biographical sketch following the advice of St. Augustine, "Love so that you may understand." Needless to say, a number of events in E.P.'s life were glossed over - little mention was made of his support for Mussolini while his imprisonment at St. Elizabeth's was discussed. However, its efforts to flesh out an intellectual biography for the man that illuminates his attitudes and tropes were relatively unhindered by such omissions. Reading about the lives of poets makes me all the more eager to write and publish, even when the poems are far between.

Two entries went out last week for the Milwaukee Irish Fest poetry contests. Filling manila envelopes with freshly printed manuscripts fills me with an absurd pleasure. Perhaps I should have been a bureaucrat somewhere? Four more poems will be making their way into the post to join the pool of poems considered for the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association's Jade Ring Contest.