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“When you’re judging a contest I’m looking for something to just knock me over, and that’s what happened when I read Natasha’s manuscript,” says Rita Dove about first encountering Natasha Trethewey’s poetry while judging a book contest. In this 2011 conversation at Emory University, the two former U.S. poets laureate discuss writing, mentorship, and literary ancestries.
The deadline is approaching for the nineteenth annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, given for a book-length manuscript by a poet living in Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C., or West Virginia. Perfect for beer lovers, the award includes $500, publication by Broadkill River Press, 10 author copies, and two cases of Dogfish Head craft beer. The winner is expected to attend a reading and awards ceremony at the Dogfish Inn in Lewes, Delaware, on December 11. Lodging for a two-night stay at the inn is provided, but travel expenses are not included.
Submit a manuscript of 48 to 78 pages to dogfishheadpoetryprize@earthlink.net by August 15. Only writers over the age of 21 are eligible. Hayden Saunier will judge. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
The most recent recipient of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize was Susan Rothbard, whose winning manuscript, Birds of New Jersey, was praised by Edgar Kunz, the final judge, as a “sometimes shocking, often bemused, and always insightful collection.”
“Now they have come home to roost—all the same kind at the same speed,” reads Kay Ryan from her poem “Home to Roost” in this installment of The Poet’s View, a film series produced by the Academy of American Poets, in which she is interviewed in her home and discusses being featured in the comic strip The Boondocks.
In this 1988 episode of Voices & Visions, a series produced by the New York Center for Visual History for PBS, the life and work of American poet Hart Crane is explored through interviews, archival footage, and readings.
“I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing,” writes Muriel Rukeyser in her poem “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” in which two disembodied voices confess, speak, and exchange information about their lives. In the poem, the voices are both individual and collective, and the use of caesuras serve as a visual cue for silence in a conversation. Write a poem in which two people speak without relying on the use of traditional dialogue tags. How can you focus on the sounds of the language and the potential for slippage between voices to add texture to the poem? For more inspiration, watch Carl Phillips read Rukeyser’s poem in the Poets & Writers Theater.
“The hardest part of writing Virga was finding the courage to be vulnerable on the page.” —Shin Yu Pai, author of Virga
