Our National Poetry Month project of sending out sonnets and other daily poems prompted me to dig around in the traditional poetic forms, and I’ve been playing with a new one that is short and quite lovely, but very difficult: the triolet. Like the pantoum, a triolet takes part of its structure from the repetition of entire lines — in fact, three of its lines are repeated, so that the poet only actually has to compose five lines to write a triolet. This extreme repetition, and the fact that only two rhymes can be used in the eight-line poem, restricts the language so tightly that both poet and reader must focus on the very subtle ways in which the sound and meaning of the same words evolves line by line during the progress of the poem.

Examples of triolets in our library:
“Triolet” by Robert Bridges (1876)
“How Great My Grief” by Thomas Hardy (1901)
“The Coquette, and After” (a pair of triolets) by Thomas Hardy (1901)
Four Triolets by Sara Teasdale (1911)

William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were separated in childhood after their parents died, but developed a very close relationship as adults and spent the rest of their lives together, even after William was married to Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy and William walked the Lake District hills together, her detailed observations of the natural world served as inspiration for his poems (he wrote “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears...”), and she contributed her ideas to the poetic discussions between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Dorothy kept journals—intended not for publication, but solely for William’s eyes—and their publication a century later opened a window on the writing life of a Romantic poet. After reading those journals, British biographer Frances Wilson has written The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (published by Faber in the UK, not yet published in the US), which looks to be a fascinating story of the intertwined lives of a poet and his sister and helpmate.

In The Telegraph, Frances Wilson explained how she came to write the biography, after discovering in the journals a Dorothy very different from the accepted stereotypical “maiden aunt”:
“A demure virgin? Not the Dorothy I know”

And there have been a good number of illuminating reviews of the book in the UK newspapers:

from The Telegraph:
“Wordsworth’s intriguing sister Dorothy,” by Caroline Moore
“This account is actually constructed, with scrupulous care, from Dorothy’s own words (‘I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed, neither hearing nor seeing anything...’). Frances Wilson is meticulously aware of the ‘tantalising economy’ of Dorothy's writings, and how they resist our intrusive sympathies.”

from The Guardian:
“More than her brother’s keeper...,” by Virginia Rounding
“Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth reveals a passionate, talented woman whose love for her brother defined her and finally destroyed her.”

also from The Guardian:
“The agony, the ecstasy and the hot soup,” by Andrew Motion
“a subtle and iconoclastic life of Wordsworth’s brilliant and devoted sister.... By aligning her life with his, and assuming from early womanhood that they would always be together in some kind of menage or other, she discovered freedom and self-validation but also embraced self-denial.”

from The Sunday Times:
“The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth,” by Miranda Seymour
“Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journals in 1800 ‘because I shall give William pleasure by it.’ William’s pleasure included filching from Dorothy’s pages to create his poetry. The connections are transparent.... Such was their closeness that Wilson suggests Dorothy and William may have been the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.”

More on William Wordsworth:
Profile of William Wordsworth, seminal British Romantic poet
Library of poems by Wordsworth
Memory and Nature: A Guide to William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
Wordsworth’s Daffodils Spring Up on YouTube

In her first month as IBPC judge, Patricia Smith has revealed her method, clearly drawing from her experience as a performance poet: “I read every poem I encounter out loud, listening for the magic it works on the open air.” She selected these four poems as winners (none of them from our Poetry Forum), and if you follow her lead and read them out loud, you will hear the reasons for her choices:

• In first place, “A Second Look at Creation,” by Sergio Lima Facchini, which impressed Smith with its “lyrical momentum... remarkably fresh view of an old story... sweet science....” and “bright, rollicking language.”
• In second place, “Spring Dance,” by last month’s winner Brenda Levy Tate (selected by a different IBPC judge). Smith cited Tate’s poem this month particularly for “the poet’s daring, the deft creation of pinpoint phrasing that conjured exactly the image needed.”
• Two poems tied for third place, both focusing on youth, a boy and a girl: “Boy, Winter 2008” by Mike LaForge, which captivated her with characters whose lives “go on well beyond the poem,” and “18—Again” by Cherryl E. Garner, for its “conciseness that embraces huge vision.”

Related resources:
About the IBPC
Current IBPC judge Patricia Smith
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of winning poems
Archive of poems entered from our Poetry Forum

Because there was only one nomination posted in the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder, Poetry Guide Margy Snyder has once again stepped in and chosen a couple of her favorite poems from those recently posted in our Forum to round out our set of three entries in this month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition. The poems chosen to represent the About Poetry Forum are:

• “An Old Married Couple Dancing” by Debbie Ouellet, a graceful and vivid depiction of how long-time love reveals its subtle beauty in action.
• “What April in New York Is,” by Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett), another example of his expert use of enjambment and rhythmic ebb and flow across long lines to create a lilting paean to his beloved city.
• “Broken Dreams,” a swinging tumble of resonant dream images by Forum newcomer Brian K. Lynch (BebopPoet).

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information, poem links and book-buying links for current IBPC judge Patricia Smith

Video is certainly the fastest growing Web medium, and it’s an interesting vehicle for two kinds of poetry: recorded reading or performance, which gives you the multidimensional aural and visual experience of the poem as conveyed most often by the poet who wrote it, and word-art, in which it’s the actual letterforms whose motion is captured in the video recording. Here are two new links worth checking out, one of each.

• Poetry.LA, Wayne Lindberg and Hilda Weiss’ video showcase of readings and interviews, including more than 100 Southern California poets, and more each month.
• At Conduit magazine, Oni Buchanan’s “The Mandrake Vehicles,” three examples of a new form of animated poem which evolves in stages from a block of text which reveals “secret, embedded poems” as some of the letters float away.

More poetry videos:
A newly discovered cache of poetry video shorts
Poetry Everywhere Videos All Over the Place
Fun with Poetry Cartoons
Wordsworth’s Daffodils Spring Up on YouTube
“Fragile” — Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 is a poetry film single
Our library of links to video poetry

April is over, the National Poetry Month celebrations are done, and our thoughts naturally turn to the approaching summer season. There are not many publication contests that run during the summer, but spring is not yet finished, and if you’ve been working on a poetry manuscript, you still have time to submit it to one of these poetry competitions with upcoming entry deadlines:

• Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award (postmark deadline May 15)
• New Letters Prize for Poetry (postmark deadline May 18)
• Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press (postmark deadline May 31)
• Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest (email entry deadline May 19, postmark deadline May 31)
• Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from Calyx (postmark deadline May 31)
• The Bordighera Poetry Prize for Italian American poets (postmark deadline May 31)
• Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Contest (postmark deadline June 1)
• Taste ’Test contest from Poetry Daily and the Virginia Arts of the Book Center (postmark deadline June 1)
• Boston Review Poetry Contest (postmark deadline June 1)
• Best New Poets Open Competition from the University of Virginia (online entries accepted April 15 - June 5)
• Verse Drama Prize from the Poetry Foundation (postmark deadline June 15)
• Ekphrasis Prize for poems based on other works of art (postmark deadline June 30)
• Barrow Street Press Book Contest (postmark deadline June 30)
• Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award (postmark deadline August 15)
• Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Poetry Award (postmark deadline August 15)

Required reading before you submit to any contests:
How to put together a poetry manuscript for publication
“A Word To the Wise: On entering your poems in competition,” by Kurt Heintz
“You Do It Because You Love It,” by S.A. Griffin

Related resources:
More contest links

International PEN, the world association of writers, has devoted itself to building “bridges of understanding” between cultures and protecting freedom of expression since its formation in 1921. In this Olympic year, its Sydney and Swiss German affiliates have come up with a brilliant way to use words in the campaign for free expression: The International PEN Poem Relay. They have chosen a poem by Shi Tao, the journalist imprisoned in China for 10 years for emailing a government document asking journalists not to report on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, as a poetic torch, to travel the world along the path of the Olympic torch by going from PEN center to PEN center, being translated along the way. The poem is “June,” here in its English translation by Chip Rolley of the Sydney Pen Centre:

June

My whole life

Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in romance’s pool of blood

June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead

      Shi Tao (trans. Chip Rolley)

from The Guardian Books Blog (UK):
“Protest poem takes on Olympic flame,” by Simon Ings
“A virtual torch of freedom and free expression, crossing continents on fibre-optic threads and microwaves: the irony cannot be lost on Shi Tao. Indeed, it was surely uppermost in the organisers' minds as they cooked up this elegant, cerebral protest. The Chinese knew to arrest Shi Tao because he was using a Yahoo! email account. He may as well have posted his account details direct to the government. Yahoo! did.”

from PEN American Center:
“Billy Collins Reads Shi Tao’s ‘June’ as Part of Free Expression Poem Relay”
“As the Olympic torch reached the U.S., PEN American Center today released a recording of former U.S. Poet Laureate and PEN American Center Vice President Billy Collins reading imprisoned Chinese writer Shi Tao’s poem ‘June’.... The recording serves as PEN American Center’s "leg" in the International PEN Poem Relay—an effort by PEN centers all over the world to publicize the lack of free expression in China by shadowing the progress of the Beijing Olympic Torch and broadcasting translations of ‘June’ in over 60 languages.” (You can listen to the Billy Collins recording at the bottom of this page.

from The Age (Melbourne, Australia):
“Poem follows Olympic torch in freedom call,” by Arnold Zable
“Writers worldwide have translated and recorded the poem ‘June’ by imprisoned journalist and poet Shi Tao into, at last count, more than 90 languages. The poem is a moving meditation on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, written on June 9, 2004, to coincide with the event’s 15th anniversary.... It has moved via website, from PEN centre to centre, along a route similar to the Olympic torch itinerary, adding new translations as it goes. So far the poem has been to 70 locations throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, and it will continue its journey up to the opening of the Olympics in August. The Australian leg will include translations into Aboriginal and other languages that reflect our extraordinary linguistic diversity.”

We’ve been treasure-hunting online again, and have just come across Poetry Matters Now, where the Lempert Family Foundation is getting into poetry-film in a big way. They are “roaming the big tent of American poetry,” working with “master poets; poets, teachers and critics writing, reading and teaching in our schools and universities; established and emerging ‘slam’ and spoken word artists; hip-hop poets; cowboy poets; and an array of people young and old for whom poetry is a passion,” to create a feature-length documentary that will “present poetry in its abundant diversity, personified.” Along the way Poetry Matters Now is producing a series of shorts — readings, conversations and poet profiles — and putting them up on their Web site. Right now you can watch a 20-minute profile of Gerald Stern, Patricia Smith reading “The Gun” by Stephen Dobyns, Alicia Ostriker talking about the reactions you get when you tell someone you’re a poet, Donald Hall reading his own poetic response to that question, Anne Waldman performing “Manatee/Humanity,” and more...

More poetry videos:
Poetry Everywhere Videos All Over the Place
Fun with Poetry Cartoons
Wordsworth’s Daffodils Spring Up on YouTube
“Fragile” - Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 is a poetry film single
Our library of links to video poetry

In the last 10 years, the idea of appointing Poets Laureate has filtered down through the states to the local level all over the U.S. Sometimes it feels as if there’s a “Poet Laureate” political party campaigning to institute official poets in local governments everywhere, now that the office is well established in the federal government and almost all of the states. Witness the article that greeted me in this morning’s newspaper:

from The San Francisco Chronicle:
“Poets laureate bloom like spring in Bay Area,” by Charles Burress
“...the job of community poet laureate may be the Bay Area’s fastest-growing profession. A decade ago, there was just one — the newly named first poet laureate of San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.... Marin pushed the local total to 13 on Friday, consolidating the Bay Area’s pre-eminence in the field. The nine-county area surrounding San Francisco Bay holds 20 percent of the state’s population and 57 percent of the state’s 23 local poets laureate. Albany and Dublin will raise the Bay Area total to 15. Elsewhere in the state, Siskiyou County plans to add one within a year.... Most states have state poets laureate, and California claims to have been the first, with Ina Coolbrith appointed by Gov. Hiram Walker in 1915.”

I wonder if this is a good thing. I’ve never had much respect for poetry written to order — and yet how can it be a bad idea for so many poets to receive support from their local communities? This is not the same as asking whether poets belong in political office — but I’d welcome your comments.
~Poetry Guide Margy Snyder

Related resources:
Poets Laureate, a brief history
Poets Laureate of the U.S.A., a Net-annotated list

Our profiles of recent U.S. Poet Laureates
Charles Simic (2007- )
Donald Hall (2006-2007)
Ted Kooser (2004-2006)
Louise Glück (2003-2004)
Stanley Kunitz (2000-2001)
Robert Pinsky (1997-2000)

The American Academy of Poets has picked up on New York City’s 6-year-old tradition for National Poetry Month this year and is urging everyone to participate in the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day today — April 17. “The idea is simple: select a poem you love... then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends.” They’ve even put together a collection of pocket-sized poems for you to download, print and take with you. So don’t leave home without your poem today!

And AAP has taken the next step to make sure you have portable poems at your fingertips — in your cell phone — any time you want them. Their new mobile poetry archive has all the poems, poet bios and essays from the big AAP Web site: “Formatted for effortless access on most mobile devices, the poems can be browsed by occasion, theme, author, title, or form, and searched easily by keyword.” Wow! AAP claims to be “the first arts organization to offer mobile content” — and whether or not poetry is first in this, it’s clear that poems want to be portable and they belong on our cell phones. We applaud the Academy’s initiative, and we’re off to gather poems on the Blackberry right now!