P&W-supported spoken-word artist Mike Sonksen, author of I am Alive in Los Angeles, blogs about the L.A. poetry scene.

I was at Beyond Baroque in October to witness a book release party for Wanda Coleman. Promoted as her last public reading for an indefinite amount of time, it was worth the congested drive to Venice on a Friday night to see her live. The World Falls Away is her second book published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

She is more blunt than ever, writing, "There is no poison I have not swallowed." Coleman reflects on her childhood in L.A., two marriages, and the loss of her son. Douglas Kearney says, "Wanda Coleman's hard-edged new collection interrogates death's nearsightedness. Mother outlives son. Feet wear out before the heart. And the truth teller dies before truth frees her. These poems don't go gently."

Her sharp poetics always hit with musicality, which is a great fit for the Pitt Poetry Series. The series dates back to 1967 and is dedicated to publishing progressive poetry. Wanda's forty-plus years of work places here among the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A.

Wanda Coleman is one of the major writers covered in Bill Mohr's new book Hold Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948–1992, University of Iowa Press. Mohr's book is one of the first real treatments of the history of L.A. poetry. There have been many books on slices of L.A. poetry like Charles Bukowski, the Watts Writers Workshop, and the Venice Beats, but there's never been one book as expansive as this one.

Over a fifteen year period Mohr published a literary journal and several books through his imprint Momentum Press. Mohr's anecdotes about Wanda Coleman, Leland Hickman, Ron Koertge, Gerald Locklin, and Suzanne Lummis bring the Carter and Reagan era alive. His book captures the ethos of the small press movement. Mohr describes the lively circuit of independent bookstores and small press publishers, cataloging the Southern California scene from the Venice Beats to the beginnings of the spoken-word movement.

Photo: Mike Sonksen. Credit: Chris Felver.

Major support for Readings/Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Write a poem in the style and voice of a personals or classifieds ad. Read C.D. Wright’s “Personals” for inspiration.

The Montreal Poetry Prize, an international award established this year by a new nonprofit in Canada, was given last night to a poet from Australia. Mark Tredinnick of Sydney received the prize, an unprecedented fifty-thousand-dollars for a single poem, for "Walking Underwater."

"This is a bold, big-thinking poem," said judge and former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion, "in which ancient themes—especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape—are recast and rekindled."

Tredinnick's poem was among fifty shortlisted for the prize (including one other piece written by him), all of which will appear in an anthology published by Montreal-based Véhicule Press. The longlisted poems were published in an e-book, which the prize organization is offering for free on its website.

Another of the shortlisted poets received an unanticipated award, the publication of her work as a broadside designed by U.S. artist Eric Fischl. A limited edition of "The Grasshoppers' Silence" by Canadian poet Linda Rogers will be released in 2012, and proceeds from sales of the signed broadside will go to fund future awards and efforts of the Montreal International Poetry Prize nonprofit.

In the video below, Rogers reads the title poem, itself artfully rendered as a broadside, from her book Muscle Memory (Ekstasis Editions, 2009).

The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, supporter of emerging young poets through its Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, has announced that it will once again administer the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, an occasional prize for unpublished poets of at least forty years of age.

The competition, which awards ten thousand dollars and book publication, is open to American poets who have not published a full-length collection of verse.

Graywolf Press will publish the winning manuscript, which must be forty-eight to eighty pages long and never before submitted for this particular prize. The Minneapolis-based indie also published the two previous winners' collections, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 by the late Landis Everson and The King's Question by Brian Culhane.

The Poetry Foundation will begin accepting entries on January 16, and the competition will close on February 17. The winning poet will be notified before the close of National Poetry Month on April 30.

For complete guidelines, visit the contest web page.

Write a story that opens with your main character doing something that is completely antithetical to his or her personality. Let the story be about how this character came to do what he or she did.

Once again in 2012 Amazon will partner with Penguin Group to hold a contest for early-career novelists.

The two media giants announced last week that the fifth annual Breakthrough Novel Award competition, which offers an advance of fifteen thousand dollars and a publication contract with Penguin, will open on January 23 and close to entries on February 5—or once five thousand entries have been submitted in the general fiction category (a young adult competition is being offered as well).

The assessment process for the contest is five-tiered. First, Amazon editors will select one thousand manuscripts from the total pool, and, with the assistance of seasoned Amazon reviewers, will whittle that group down to two hundred fifty. Those that make the cut will be reviewed and rated by Publishers Weekly reviewers, and the most favored fifty will be handed off to editors at Penguin, who will select three finalists.

The shortlisted writers will have their manuscripts reviewed by a panel that includes editor Anne Sowards, literary agent Donald Maass, and thriller author Linda Fairstein, and Amazon users will then be able to vote for a winner based on the reviews and manuscript excerpts. Amazon will reveal the winner on June 16.

For contest guidelines and the fine print, visit the Amazon website.

Look back through the poems you've written this year and make a list of images or words you've repeated. This list will guide you toward identifying your poetic obsessions. Choose one of your poetic obsessions and write a poem that fully explores it.

Suzanne Lummis, poet and director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, blogs about the P&W-supported Lummis Day Festival in Los Angeles.

Now and then at a reading, you nab the whole audience. When the show is over they rush up to you, wild with joy. But other times, it's that reading where just eleven people show up, only one book is bought, and you drive home grumpy. Then much later, someone comes up to you at an event, kind of shy, and tells you how years back she'd been in a sparse audience at some now defunct café, and how that reading persuaded her to give up her career in advertising, which she despised, and become a writer instead. Now she's happy. And, you think, "Ah, so that's whom that evening was for."

On especially felicitous occasions, you get both, the audience and the person who walks away changed. Take last year's Lummis Day for example. The kick-off poetry reading for the annual gala, also know as the Festival of Northeast Los Angeles, has never failed to please a crowd. And, it does draw a crowd—as many as can fit comfortably into the spacious garden in front of El Alisal, the name Charles Lummis gave to the idiosyncratic house he built with river rock around the turn of the nineteenth century. Eliot Sekular, a champion of Northeast Los Angeles, founded Lummis Day, naming it after my grandfather, who Southwest history buffs remember for his advocacy on behalf of Native American and Spanish California culture. So every first Sunday of June, folks drive across the city, or walk over from around the corner, always in high spirits. It is after all, not only a lively reading with a social gathering afterwards, but the beginning of a daylong party, with bands, folkloric dances, and other entertainments.

Last year, in my opening comments, I mentioned that I felt lucky that my parents had been poetry readers, and therefore I'd never in my life lived in a house that did not have poetry on the bookshelves. Steve Kowit then delighted fiesta-goers with his humor and embracing energy, followed by Mariano Zara, who read a moving personal piece, and poetry-loving actor Dale Raoul (Maxine Fortenberry in True Blood), who presented selections from Poems of the American West. While the assembled gathered in the reception area for a "noise" (Lummis disdained the term "salon" and was bored by "party"), a fellow approached me with a title he'd just purchased from the book table, Poems of the American West.  He was beaming. "Could I please write 'For Alfredo?'"  I asked him to tell me a little about himself so I could personalize the dedication. "Oh, it's for him," he said, and pointed to a stroller holding a boy of about two. Then his wife appeared by his side. And I was, well... I don't want to get sentimental. The English have a word for it—I was chuffed. This little boy would grow up in a house with poetry... it's not everything, but it seems to have the makings of a promising start. 

Photo: Suzanne Lummis. Credit: Penelope Torribio.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from Friends of Poets & Writers.