Recently Published Work: Steven Teref

Steven Teref is the translator of Ana Ristovic's Little Zebras: Selected Poems (Zephyr Press, 2016) and Novica Tadic's Assembly (Host Publications).  His prose is featured in the collaborative fiction anthology, Rescription (Anabium).  He is the Editorial Advisor for Ricochet Review and an instructor at Columbia College Chicago.

An excerpt of Teref's book-length, conceptual writing project, published on The Volta, can be found here.    An excerpt of his and Maja Teref's next book of translations, a selected poems of the Serbian poet, Ana Ristovic, due out on Zephyr Press in 2016, is here.

Read about Ricochet Review, a collaborative effort between Steven and Maja and Rhino to bring poems of high school students into the world, here.

Recently Published Work: Martin Willetts, Jr.

Martin Willitts, Jr. is a prolific poet.  Here is a list of his recent chapbooks, including web books:

Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees (Edgar and Lenore Publishing House, 2013).  Click here to learn about.  Click here to purchase.

Searching for What Is Not There national full-length contest winner, Hiraeth Press, 2013).  Click here to learn about.  Click here to purchase.

Constellations of Memory and Forgiveness (web book, Seven Circles Press, 2014).  Click here to read the web book and press release.

William Blake, Not Blessed Angel But Restless Man (national chapbook contest winner, Red Ochre Press, 2014).  Click here for sample poems and to purchase.

His website is edgarallanpoet.com.

Recently Published Work: Jeff Streeby

Jeff Streeby earned an MFA in Poetry from Gerald Stern’s program at New England College in New Hampshire. His poetry has appeared in Ginosko, Southwest American Literature, Los Angeles Review, Rattle, and many others. His poem “Biography” won the 2013 Provincetown OuterMost Community Radio Poetry Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Assumption University (ABAC, Bang Na) in Bangkok, Thailand.

Streeby's most recent and forthcoming work can be found in the following links, in the following journals and presses:


1. "Target Ship," Camroc Press Review,  February, 2013.

2. “Coppinger Hall” was included in the 2013 Contemporary Haibun Anthology, and can be found here: "Coppinger Hall"


3. Haibun Today published “Peregrino” in Volume 7, #3 in September, 2013. HT accepted “The End of Spring” for future publication and “Target Ship” (reprinted from Camroc Press Review) for publication in Volume 7, #4. HT also accepted "Hornick, Iowa" for publication in June 2014.  Click here for "Peregrino".

4. Hitherto: The MUIC Literary Journal has accepted “Elegy” and “Other Days” for publication in Issue 5 in April, 2014. Hitherto is the online literary journal of Mahidol University International College in Bangkok, Thailand. In 2013, “Elegy” was a finalist for the $1000 Provincetown OuterMost Community Radio Poetry Award  judged by Marge Piercy.

5. Provincetown OuterMost Community Radio Poetry Award: “Biography” was named winner of the 2013 contest by its judge, American poet and writer Marge Piercy.

6. Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies at Clemson University in August of 2013 accepted “Wat Mahatat” for publication in the anthology Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed.

7. "The Irma Hotel"is in the current issue of Hobble Creek Review:

8. Right Hand Pointing published “We are in the business of wanting things” in Issue #45, November-December, 2011; “Evidence” under the title “River: Evidence” in Issue #47 released in January, 2012; “Quadriga: 1. Darley’s Horse” under the title “Darley’s Horse” and “Cong Abbey” in issue #54 released in August, 2012; and "Picture This:" in #72 released in February 2014."We are in the business of wanting things...""Wall, South Dakota""River: Evidence""Darley's Horse" and "Cong Abbey""Picture This"

Congratulations, Jeff!  Well done!  We look forward to highlighting future publications in Post Poetry 
MFA!

Jeff Streeby earned an MFA in Poetry from Gerald Stern’s program at New England College in New Hampshire. His poetry has appeared in Ginosko, Southwest American Literature, Los Angeles Review, Rattle, and many others. His poem “Biography” won the 2013 Provincetown OuterMost Community Radio Poetry Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Assumption University (ABAC, Bang Na) in Bangkok, Thailand.

Recently Published Work: Terry Lucas

Post by Terry Lucas.

It's been a while since I've posted on this blog.  As you can see below, I've been more busy creating work, than writing about other people's work.  But the time has come to use this blog as a way of promoting the work of my fellow poets.  Since many people I meet want to know where to find my recent work, here is a sampling of my own work published in the last year, and where to find it. 

But now that I've done it, if you are in my poetry network (loosely defined), message me, or email me (lucas.t274@gmail.com), or just comment on this blog, and I will take a look at your recent (or not so recent) publications, and post them on this blog.  Perhaps an interview.  Who knows what it could evolve into.

Thank you to all of the publications below for all that you do for poetry and for the poets you have selected.   

1.  Chapbook  

If They Have Ears to Hear, winner of the Copperdome Award, published by Southeast Missouri State University (2013):http://www6.semo.edu/universitypress/Copperdome/Ears%20to%20Hear.htm

Excerpts from If They Have Ears To Hear, published in Extract(s):  http://dailydoseoflit.com/2013/05/31/excerpt-terry-lucas/  

Review of If They Have Ears To Hear in B O D Y:  http://bodyliterature.com/2013/07/26/friday-pick-if-they-have-ears-to-hear/

Altar Call, one of four winning chapbooks, in the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, published in the anthology, Diesel:  http://www.amazon.com/Diesel-Anthology-Gabriel-Literary-Festival/dp/0615755496

2.  Individual Poems

"Contra Costa," winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Featured Poet Award (forthcoming in the 2014 Summer/Fall Issue)

"Without," published by MiPOesias, and nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Award.

"The Thing Itself" and "Return Of The Purple Martins" are part of "fiXation 2014," a Curated Gallery and Publication Event by Zhou B Art Center and PoetsArtists Magazine, Chicago IL.  
http://www.poetsandartists.com/fixation-2014/

"Spoils" published in Great River Review.  

"They'll Never Walk Alone" published in Extract(s) (Daily dose of lit):  http://dailydoseoflit.com/2013/03/05/poem-terry-lucas/

"Vox Dei" published in The Good Men Project (and "Collect" forthcoming):  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/chb-vox-dei/

"Up In Lights" published in the current issue of Star82 Review:  http://www.star82review.com/2.1/lucas-neon.html

3.  Edited collections and poems

MiPO:  The Blues Issue, edited by Terry Lucas
http://issuu.com/didimenendez/docs/bluesissue

Trio House Press:  Lead editor on Clay, by David Groff, finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry:  http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/09/16/clay-by-david-groff/

Putting Together Your First Poetry Book Manuscript

Last week I had the privilege of joining Iris Dunkle, Professor of English at Napa Valley College, in leading a salon for thirty-some poets at the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Below is the first of three handouts I gave them on "Putting Together Your First Poetry Book Manuscript."

Do’s and Don’ts

1. Do combine chapbooks into a larger work. “Chapbooks are your friends.” —Dan Albergotti.

2. Don’t flesh out your manuscript at the last minute because you (or someone) thinks it needs more poems in a section or on a certain topic.

3. Do revise your poems right up until the last minute, getting feedback from writers you trust.

4. Don’t change your poems or make them sound like someone else because you think it will please the judge(s).

5. Do write a cover letter if the guidelines call for one, and pay attention to what the editors say should be in it.

6. Don’t explain your poems in the cover letter. If any poems benefit from a brief (sentence-long) explanation, write an appealing epigraph. If they require a longer explanation, they shouldn’t be in your manuscript.

7. Do have a poet or select group of poets read your manuscript and give you their comments (even if you have to pay them to do it). Pay attention to them, but

8. Don’t pay more attention to their comments than they deserve.

9. Do read your manuscript to clean it of all redundancies.

10. Don’t be afraid of repeating themes.

11. Do cull your manuscript of great poems if they do not belong.

12. “Don’t be in collusion with your own poems” —Dorianne Laux (from Jack Gilbert in a dream.)

13. “And don’t write sissy poems.” —Dorianne Laux (from the same dream.)

14. Do put your best poems up front—you can always change the order when the book is accepted.

15. Don’t waste your time sending your manuscript to contests with judges whose work you do not like (they probably won’t like yours either).

I will publish on this blog the remaining handouts, as well, under their topics.

TL

The Next Big Thing: Interview with Chella Courington

The following is a "Next Big Thing" interview with Chella Courington about her book, Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana.

What is the working title of the book?

Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Diana McPhear first appears in a poem entitled “Redder than Diane’s Lipstick” published in Gargoyle. I like her name and became attached, looking for a place where she could thrive. I teach at a community college where many of my friends are adjuncts, always struggling to make ends meet while writing novels and painting watercolors on the side. I want to show their lives through Diana, who has an MFA in Poetry and teaches at Earl Warren Community College.

What genre does your book fall under?

Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction while Musa, Diana’s online publisher, lists it as microfiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of characters in a movie rendition?

Since Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana is told largely from Diana’s perspective with much of the focus on internal thought, I would choose Kate Winslet as Diana. Winslet does a fine job with introspective characters like Ruth in Holy Smoke and Julia in Hideous Kinky. She’s also the right age for Diana. There are several Xs: two boyfriends, a girlfriend, and a husband. The husband is a controlling CPA whom Kevin Bacon can portray. One boyfriend is a lumbering outdoorsman. Maybe Seth Rogen. The other boyfriend is unbelievably traditional and wants a good cook to wait on him. Jon Hamm is perfect. The manipulative girlfriend is Jodie Foster.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Diana's a quirky, adjunct writing professor who spends a lot of time in her head, thinking about the past and depending on her cat Rhoda for affection.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

When I received my MFA in 2009, I didn’t want to become a statistic. So I’d show up almost everyday to write and found it much easier to follow a character than write a new poem each day. Of course, if I’d been working on a novel-length poem like Robert Browning’s Ring and the Book or an epic poem like Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, it would have been easier to enter the work on a daily basis. By the end of my MFA, I had moved largely to prose poetry, a step away from flash fiction, and felt comfortable in that space. It seemed right for Diana’s story as her mind was her playground. To return to the question, I spent nine months to a year writing and revising Diana while teaching 140 community college students.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The vast number of talented and undervalued adjuncts with whom I teach at Santa Barbara City College.

What else about this book might pique the reader’s interest?

Here’s a telling review by Barbara Schweitzer on Amazon: “Chella Courington's new book is a coming-of-age story of an English major pursuing academic teaching. Her character moves through the adjunct-slave-labor camps to a professorship with eyes opening wide for us. Diana's complexity, dark humor, and slanted view of the world make for a fabulous relationship with the reader. This Diana is true, and the prose poetry that drew her so clearly is sheer pleasure to the ear. I wish she had stayed around longer in the pages, and I hope Chella Courington gives us more of her, or another Diana, soon.”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It's published by Musa Publishing online, and available through Amazon.

Opening Piece

Diana loved anything orange—cats, lipstick, hunting vests, nail polish, hard hats, life jackets, water guns. When she slipped through her mother’s legs, almost butting the doctor’s stomach, her skin turned a yellowish red. “I did crave pumpkin,” her mother said. “Before my water broke, I ate a whole pie, crust and all.” It took eleven days of being rubbed in olive oil and resin, her mother’s fingers lightly massaging Diana’s new skin that capitulated to air in March before trout season, before her father deserted them for Pennsylvania streams. Her eighth Halloween she painted her nose and toes tangerine and swathed herself in a sheet, RIT-dyed sunshine orange, that her mother soaked in white vinegar until the bleeding stopped. Even then in third grade, she knew what they didn’t. How we climb into our wombs at night, sheets over our heads, and wait for the water to float us back.


Next week's interviews will be with:

1. Robin Winter
2. Theo Winter
3.Rob Stephens
4. Marcia Meier
5. Claudia McGarry

The Next Big Thing: Interview With Jenn Monroe

What is the working title of the book?

Something More Like Love—the e-book edition!

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote almost all of the poems in this chapbook during the month of April doing the “30 poems in 30 days” challenge. Most of them were composed in my office at Chester College of New England. At the end of the month it seemed to me that they were alike enough in tone, subject, and form that they would make a solid chapbook.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This is an interesting question for a collection of poetry. My poems don’t really have characters, but voices. I think Cate Blanchett would be great for all the “female/feminine” voices. And Gary Oldman for the few male/masculine voices.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

In the same way there are no characters, there’s not a singular narrative that unites these poems, so it is difficult to think about it in those terms. Poet Barbara Louise Ungar offered this in her blurb, and I think it gets to the heart of what you’ll find: Jenn Monroe's poetry finds its wellspring in divine reality in which everything moves through and out of love. "Imagine," she playfully exhorts in the poem "Love for Oil," "a love spill" that results in "slicks of love." "Imagine the mess we'd be in then." We are in a mess--but you will feel better about it after reading this lovely chapbook: happier, calmer, and more joyful.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

For the core of it, about a month, give or take. But many of these poems are combinations of events and situations that happened years ago between people who are only memories to me now, but that I wrote about then.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My husband, my friends and my students at Chester College of New England. Everyone and everything that I sincerely loved at the time.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Some of the poems are funny. Some of them are surreal. All of them are honest. I think there’s something in there for everyone.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It was published by Finishing Line Press in February 2012 they will offer the e-book as well.