Genre: Poetry

In conjunction with the new May/June 2014 Writing Contests issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we are excited to introduce Winners on Winning, a new regular feature in which we will talk to recent winners of writing prizes, grants, and fellowships who will share their experiences on how winning—and losing—has affected their careers.

For the first installment, we spoke to Rebecca Dunham, winner of the 2013 Milkweed Editions Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry for her collection Glass Armonica ($10,000 and publication for a writer from the Upper Midwest). Dunham is the author of two previous poetry collections: The Miniature Room (Truman State University Press, 2006), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Flight Cage (Tupelo Press, 2010). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

What kind of impact has winning this prize had on your career?
One of the most rewarding effects of winning the Lindquist & Vennum Prize is that I’ve had the opportunity to meet and develop relationships with more poets from the Midwest. I’ve also had the amazing experience of collaborating with a Minneapolis choreographer, Maggie Bergeron, on a ballet inspired by Glass Armonica. The Lindquist & Vennum Prize is sponsored by a Minneapolis law firm and comes with a generous cash prize. This has allowed me to travel and promote the book, as well as take the summer off from teaching to focus on my writing.

Has winning this award, or previous awards, changed the way you approach your work?
Honestly, I hope it hasn’t. It can take a while to find the right match between a manuscript and a judge, and I try to focus on the writing itself. Having had books published via winning contests has, however, given me more confidence that what I’m writing will someday find itself into the world.

Have you ever entered a contest that you didn't win?
I have racked up more rejections than I care to count. I try to separate the writing from the rejection, but it can be hard. I submitted Glass Armonica to presses and contests for two years, under different titles, and the manuscript changed a lot over that period of time. The one upside to rejection was that before sending the book out again, I would always comb through it, revising, adding or removing poems, etc. Glass Armonica is a tighter and more polished book than it was the first time I sent it out into the world.

What advice would you offer to writers thinking of submitting to writing contests?
Remember that entering writing contests is the business side of writing, not the creative part of it. I try to handle submissions as dispassionately as possible. I read the guidelines, follow them precisely – sort of like doing one’s taxes. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of where my manuscript is under consideration, and then I try to put the contest out of my mind. For me, that’s the best way to keep anticipation and anxiety from crowding out the pleasure I take in writing.

For more Winners on Winning, read the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and check back here every Wednesday for a new installment.

Dunham: Mark Pioli

Rachel Guido de Vries is a poet and fiction writer. She has written three books of poems: How to Sing to a Dago, (Guernica, 1996); Gambler’s Daughter, (Guernica, 2001), and The Brother Inside Me (Guernica, 2008). Her first children’s book, Teeny Tiny Tino’s Fishing Story, (Bordighera, 2008) was a winner of the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People Award. Bordighera Books will publish a new collection of her poems, A Woman Unknown in Her Bones, and a new children’s picture book, Stati Zita, Josie, in 2014. She is a poet-in-the-schools, and gives workshops independently. She lives in Cazenovia, New York.

One of the things I love about Poets & Writers is the support of readings and workshops outside of the academy. Don’t get me wrong: I went to grad school at Syracuse University in the mid to late '70s and I have received funding from P&W to do readings at colleges and universities for thirty-some years. But it has been the readings and workshops outside of the academy that have most enriched me. This support has allowed me to offer poetry to male and female inmates at a psychiatric center for convicted felons in Marcy, New York, where I was a poet in residence for over ten years; at migrant farm worker camps in western New York, where workers left the fields after sunset, and after a day of digging potatoes. They would shower before coming to workshop, and that often meant we would be writing poems after nine at night, in a small trailer, or in the juke, the common kitchen area at a migrant camp.

I’ve done workshops with senior citizens and with inner city kids and adults in the city of Syracuse. What a gift this has been. I have seen poems blossom in every setting, and I have come to cherish working with marginalized communities—I feel enriched by what I have learned from these students, and I hope that I have at least on occasion brought to celebration voices not frequently heard, by writers too often silenced by poverty, education, or class, race, or gender.

For me, the support of Poets & Writers has been a kind of writer’s lifeline, connecting me to students I would never otherwise encounter. Their desire to write, and their love of words, their ability and interest in the image as a way into meaning, and into sharing the meaning of their lives is profound, and often startling. Asking young poets to write about peace, a seven-year-old wrote: “War is as savage / as a hunter in deer season / Peace is a descendant of Aphrodite / War is a descendant of Ares.”

A convicted felon in the prison workshop wrote a poem beginning: “My heart is like a little bird…” His big, muscled frame the cage of safety, perhaps, for that little bird beating away inside of him. A Christmas poem written by a young inmate was heart breaking—he wrote all about what he did not want for Christmas, including no more living on the street, no more shame to his mother. The repetition of the phrase “I don’t want” followed by such poignant hopes is a poem that has stayed with me for decades. In fact, I often use that idea—what one does NOT want for Christmas—as a poetry exercise for students.

In a way, I think the sheer honesty and truth of these poets have kept me humble and in awe of the power poems have to move us to voice and insight. Their work has sharpened my own work, the clarity of image, the meaning I hope to evoke. The pure imagery created in these workshops, without artifice or self consciousness, is moving. I believe and have always believed that poetry is a gate to true literacy; that the image is often a key to unlock what I call the “Blue Door,” the door within each of us, behind which all we need to say and all we know is waiting to be set free on the wings of poems, borne up on faith and the belief in what one knows.

Photo:  Rachel Guido de Vries.  Photo Credit:  Anonymous

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.