dumbfoundry

The Australian Poetry Centre is seeking poets, in each Australian State or Territory, interested to sit as 'poet-in-residence' in a café in their capital city for a period of six months getting free tea or coffee while you write.

Carrie Etter: Ugly? Have you seen Yet?

Seriously, I think that a pamphlet can prove useful in a number of respects. Emerging poets can learn about editing and sequencing before they approach a publisher with a book-length manuscript, and using the pamphlet as a stepping stone also means such poets will take more time to develop their first books. For poets in between books, it may allow them to publish an independent sequence or work-in-progress, generating interest in the new work and potentially the next book.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
"Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss." --Charles Dickens

Ah, that famous quote by Charles Dickens! So wrong, and yet so right. The Red Issue will be Fairy Tale Review’s sixth annual issue and, as the color suggests, will be as as devoted to Little Red Riding Hood as was dear Mr. Dickens. This is will be the journal’s first truly themed issue and we welcome your newest and brightest writing to it. As usual we do not offer further guidelines for your submissions or word count limits. The best way to get a sense of what is possible is to look at a back issue. We are open to all forms, all styles, all manner of thinking.

David Kirby: "You, the poet, are crazy about it, but it couldn’t care less about you. Pursue the poem aggressively and it’ll run away or, like a figure out of Greek myth, fall dead at your feet when you touch it. Reverse psychology will only get you so far: If you ignore a poem, it might whisper a line in your ear the way the answer to a crossword clue pops into your head when you’re not looking at the puzzle, but it won’t whisper two lines, much less a whole stanza."

Most poetry readers tend to be time travellers: browsing among anthologies and old favourites, and only occasionally setting foot in the futuristic present. This is understandable. Poetry is the richest history we have of our inner life.

This seminar provides a thorough overview of applying for arts funding. It covers topics such as effective processes for writing applications, tips to increase your chances of success and developing budgets. You are given a comprehensive set of materials, including examples of successful grant applications.

Transit Lounge 2009 takes the form of three online conversations between remotely distanced participants (located in Sydney, Melbourne, Paris and Berlin) - with exchanges developing into three collaborative projects. A discussion of the Moving While Standing Still online artist collaboration will occur as part of the transmediale.09 festival, plus exhibitions, performances and online exhibition.

Dana Guthrie Martin: "I am interested in your mention of being frightened by collaboration. I know you’re (at least mostly) joking about being afraid to collaborate, but you do touch on something that seems to hold true for the majority of poets: We are afraid to work together."

Go on the streets here and ask people if they know who Benjamin Zephaniah is and what he does, and most of them will tell you. Ask them what Andrew Motion does and silence.

That’s what happened at Graywolf Press when Barack Obama picked poet Elizabeth Alexander, a Graywolf author since 2001, to recite a poem at his inauguration — putting her in such hallowed company as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. The St. Paul-based publisher is publishing 100,000 copies of Alexander’s inaugural poem, by far the biggest print run in its 35-year history.

"Yesterday I got my final manuscript off to Salt, which was a pleasure and a relief after protracted agonies about inclusions, omissions and alterations."

Alan Baker: "It's common for writers to lead double-lives, maintaining a career and domestic life that is entirely separate to their poetic activities."

Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency, has posted a special letter to President Elect Barack Obama containing poems by the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and Bardd Plant Cymru (Welsh-language Children’s Laureate), Ifor ap Glyn.

Martha Engber: "Most of us writers come from humble backgrounds, which consist, more or less, of some training and a whole lot of heart. But in order for us to excel, we have to use the latter to increase — exponentially — the former. One way to train harder and smarter is to aggressively pursue fellowships.

"What often stops us, however, is that humble background, which I call the Lowly Worm Complex. If you, too, suffer from I'm probably not good enough, get over it and start applying for the numerous creative writing fellowships."

When Elizabeth Alexander reads her poem at next week's inauguration, the surreal and simple truth is that we are welcoming a President with a deep appreciation for the written word in its critical and creative forms. I am recalling his two published poems, in the now-defunct Feast in 1987, and his time leading the Harvard Law Review, much less his memoirs. I am also thinking of this morning's story on NPR online about Obama's effect on the publishing world and the story's photograph with Obama and his eldest daughter, who was holding a copy of her current reading, a book by Cynthia Kadohata. I am pleased for Graywolf Press (the home of Linda Gregg and Jane Jeong Trenka, among my favorite writers)---Graywolf will be publishing the chapbook of Alexander's poem. It will be available on February 10, 2009. A Spanish edition will follow.

Is this poem a ... vaguely mystical object embodying metaphysical delights in a narrative of contemporary environmental concerns; or the product of an academic poet plying his trade from a workshop in the Creative Writing industry? (posted by 'Eremon')

"The man was eating a ham sandwich when I offered him a poem.

"No thanks," he said, "I'm allergic."

The poet Mick Imlah, whose volume of poetry, The Lost Leader, won the 2008 Forward prize for best collection and is shortlisted for tonight's TS Eliot prize, has died, aged 52.

Now available from Highmoonnoon is the largest available collection in English of the works of Kitasono Katue, one of the most radical innovators of Japanese Modernist poetry. Translations by John Solt, author of Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning (Harvard University Press, 1999), an academic study of Kitasono and Japanese Modernism.

You are invited to submit to a fun poetry contest. No submission fees. E-mail submissions.

Roger Tagholm: "In a piece in the New York Times snappily entitled ‘Puttin’ Off the Ritz – The New Austerity in Publishing’, the literary agent Binky Urban was quoted as saying: “Books can only support a certain retail price. It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.’

No, that’s not true, either for the publisher or the public. How many poets receive the same advance as Patterson?"

My nan told me this afternoon that she was struggling to understand lots of the poems in Bad Appendix, but that she'd had no trouble with the ones she'd heard me read at the launch.

I said I thought maybe they weren't for understanding, but that sometimes by just reading them aloud a bit or reading them over you could feel them.

"I did that!" she said, "And it worked! I could feel them and understand them perfectly!"