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.

Todd Boss

A while ago, a friend of mine told me that he had encountered a Wisconsin poet named Todd Boss at some workshop he had attended. Unfortunately, it took me some time before I finally got around to performing the most cursory Google search and locating some of his work. Sure, it seems that he has a penchant for beginning the poem with the title, but unless you can't stand being reminded of cummings or Moore when reading some concrete poetry it shouldn't bother you. When he really gets going, Boss manages to hit a musicality in his verse that is reminiscent of rapping - or, if that's too pop-culture, you could say it's almost Skeltonic. Take, for example, this passage from "Apple Slices," which I'll quote mercilessly and without permission (after all, the author has it on his publicity website):
                  "and our
brief and silent pick-

up tailgate lunch-

box lunch breaks

of link sausage,

longhorn cheddar,

larder pickles, cold

leftover roast-beef-

and-butter sandwiches

wrapped in paper,"
The even plodding of syllables produces a tongue twister-esque contraction of meter that pops over the line break between "box lunch breaks / of link sausage." From there on, the meter begins a period of expansion carried by the sheer inertia of the first four lines of the stanza. It's fitting that the entire stanza ends with an ellipsis, because a more forceful piece of punctuation might break trying to bring the meter to a full stop.


Eventually, when speaking about another living poet's work there's a point beyond which one can only really say, "it's just good." I think that applies to Todd Boss, whose debut full-length Yellowrocket: Poems has won all sorts of attention. It's just good.

Hey, ho the wind and the rain

It's windy this morning. Yesterday I indulged my love of manila envelopes again by printing and mailing off my entry for the WRWA Jade Ring contest - which actually will now be receiving submissions in all categories until June 30th. The poems that made it were "Economics," "Bottling Day," "Trub," and "To an Italian Housewife." I expect that the announcements to category winners will go out sometime in August to allow travel plans to the conference in Stevens Point to be arranged. August is shaping up to be quite the month.

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.

Contests

Yesterday I finally broke my dry spell, which had gone back all the way to Good Friday. Two burst out, one after the other, and I'm pleased with the way they turned out. I'm still building up my store of unpublished work to enter in various contests. Again I'm salvaging the micro-collection of place name poems that I wrote (that I mentioned back in April). I've selected two pieces to submit to the Milwaukee Irish Fest's two poetry contests - the Goodwin Prize and the Gahagan Prize. They were inspired by the Irish poetical tradition of dinnseanchas, poems that recall the origins of place-names and the history of those places. Those should be in the mail soon.

I also intend on having entries out for the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association's Jade Ring contest and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poet's Triad contest, both have deadlines this summer.

I've been busy

In case you follow my blog and wondered what I've been up to for the past several week, I'll provide a brief run-down. You can also take this as a signal that I'll be picking back up with more regular postings. The other week I received my official notice that I've been accepted to start work on my M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh. I expect to meet with my advisor soon to work out a rough sequence of courses. Then by next fall I'm writing applications again for Ph.D. work.

I'll also be starting as a reader for the Wisconsin Review soon, as well. I'm very excited to get some experience on the editorial side of things. As far as my own poetry, I've hit a slight dry spell - several ideas are bouncing around but nothing has broken through yet. At the beginning of the month (end of last month) I submitted a manuscript to Slash Pine Press' chapbook contest. I am trying to develop a few more contest pieces for submission as well.