The Lark Ascending was a New York City literary performance group who sought to revive classic works of high culture by performing them live in a chamber setting. Their last performance was more than a year ago, but they’ve just announced that the audio recordings and program notes of all their readings have been made available online for free downloading by anyone who wants to listen: Literary Downloads at The Twickenham Press. It’s a treasure trove of old classics—lots of Milton, including a dramatic reading of selections from Paradise Lost entitled “The Great Debate in Hell,” works from Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, and a whole program devoted to women poets of the English Renaissance, “Shakespeare’s Sisters.” Bravo!

For more online listening, visit our audio library:
Links audio poetry archives and podcasts

For poets who are spending the long winter evenings reading, revising and combining their poems into collections, here’s an updated list of upcoming contest entry deadlines:

• Perugia Press Prize for a first or second book by a woman (postmark deadline November 15)
• Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (postmark deadline November 15)
• Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (postmark deadline November 15
• Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards (postmark deadline November 16)
• Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition (postmark/online entry deadline November 29)
• The Motherwell Prize for a first or second book by a woman from Fence Books (postmark deadline November 30)
• A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions, Ltd. (postmark deadline November 30)
• Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition (postmark deadline November 30)
• The Motherwell Prize from Fence Books (postmark deadline November 30)
• The Plough Prize Poetry Competition (postmark/email deadline November 30)
• Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers from Kenyon Review (online submissions only, deadline November 30)
• The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from Waywiser Press (postmark deadline December 1)
• Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books (postmark deadline December 1)
• Missouri Review Audio & Video Competition (postmark deadline December 1)
• Meridian Editor’s Prize in Poetry from the University of Virginia (online submission only, deadline December 15)
• Gival Press Poetry Award (postmark deadline December 15)
• The Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press (postmark or online submission deadline December 31)
• Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Contest (postmark or online submission deadline December 31)
• The Colorado Prize for Poetry from Colorado State University’s Center for Literary Publishing (postmark deadline January 14)
• Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas at the University of Notre Dame (postmark deadline January 15)
• John Ciardi Prize for Poetry from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri Kansas City (postmark deadline January 15)
• Grayson Books Chapbook Contest (postmark deadline January 16)
• Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prizes, First Book competition and Open Competition (postmark deadline February 15)
• Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books (postmark deadline February 15)
• New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition from Finishing Line Press (postmark deadline February 15)
• National Poetry Series (postmark deadline February 16)
• Robert E. Lee Wilson & Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award from Margie Review (postmark deadline February 27)
• Fence Modern Poets Series (postmark deadline February 28)
• The American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press (postmark deadline February 29)

Required reading before you submit to any contests:
"What's Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?," by David Alpaugh
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

Our friend Michael Rothenberg is involved in an interesting journey this fall: Rockpile, a collaboration with David Meltzer “in the tradition of the troubadour and with the spirit of improvisation and collaboration,”—the two poets have been travelling across the U.S. performing poetry composed on the road “in a spontaneous fusion with local musicians.” They started the tour last month in Los Angeles & Albuquerque, and this week they’ve made it all the way across to Washington, D.C. and New York City—if you can’t make it to any of the cities where they are performing, you can follow the tour on the Rockpile blog, which has the poets’ road musings, performance videos, and more. The whole thing is meant to conclude with “a final grand performance” in San Francisco. Keep on truckin’, poets!

More postings on poetry/music collaborations:
Poetry and Music, Sister Arts Allied (2007)
Listen to the woodlark’s song: “Lullula” (2006)
Jazz & poetry on the road together in Copenhagen, Amsterdam & London (2005)
Are songs poetry? (2004)
Poetry + music, an inspired collaboration (2004)
Caught in the Act, The making of a live poetry + music CD, by Whitman McGowan (2004)
Ngoma: Entering the Dreamtime with Music and Poetry (2002)

IBPC judge Majid Naficy recently announced his choices in the October competition—once again, none from our Poetry Forum, but as always, interesting reading:

• In first place, he selected “Rain” by Anna Yin, a poem that infuses elemental natural forces with life, chosen by Naficy because “That’s how beauty prevails itself.”
• In second place, he chose “a smooth satirical poem about a ‘forbidden’ love, “Forbidden Lullaby” by Walter Schwim.
• In third place, Majicy put “Without Salt” by Mandy Pannett, a poem that “rests on memory.”
• He also awarded an honorable mention without commentary to one poem: “Bills and Yet More Bills,” a light piece of word-play by Christopher T. George.

And for the November competition, we’re proud to announce three very fine poems entered representing our Poetry Forum:

• “On Preparing to Play Bach Again” by Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett), a poem that captures the musician’s experience of great music with both subtlety and energy.
• “Johnny Two Bows” by Abigail Weatherspoon (mapovia), an elegiac tale of a man destroyed by the experience of war that sounds like a country western song but has nothing in it of cliche.
• S. Radhamani’s “A Long Wait,” a poem that leaps from the momentary sensations and observations at a bus stop to a symbolic analysis of its society.

Kudos and luck in the judging to all three poets! Please remember to keep your nominations coming in. Any time you see a poem on the Forum that you think would be a worthy envoy to the IBPC, go right to the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder and post it. Address your post to the poet whose work you are nominating—this ensures that the poet will be notified of your nomination, and can post the required permission and information before it’s time for Poetry Guide Margy Snyder to choose the next month’s three entries.

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 and reading links for October - December IBPC judge Majid Naficy

I’ve spent the last month in St. Andrews, Scotland—a much more northerly latitude than my home in San Francisco—and the turning of the season has been that much sharper. The days are hours shorter now than a month ago, and especially since Britain set the clocks back with the end of summer time last weekend (the US doesn’t go off daylight savings time until next weekend), I’m experiencing the carpe diem impulse every afternoon. Grab hold of every single daylight hour, because it will all too soon pass into darkness! So I’ve gathered a collection of classic poems on the theme of time’s passage and the impulse to seize the day, intensify your living as the days shorten into winter:

• Carpe Diem Poems

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found near death in a public house in Baltimore and several days later succumbed to “congestion of the brain.” There is no definitive record of his movements in the several days before he died, and there are many theories as to the cause of his death. Some say it was alcohol poisoning, some say it was some other illness or heart disease that killed him. Because it was election day in Baltimore and he was not wearing his own clothes when he died, others suspect that he was a victim of “cooping,” having been taken prisoner by a political gang, beaten and forced to vote repeatedly. He was attended by Dr. John Joseph Moran at Washington College Hospital, where he was kept a virtual prisoner and allowed no visitors, for several days slipping between consciousness and delirium. Moran reported that his final words were “Lord, help my poor soul!,” just before he expired on October 7.

Poe’s funeral was the next day, a hasty 3-minute ceremony in the damp chill, so sparsely attended that the minister declined to give a sermon. He was buried without a headstone, because the monument his cousin had ordered was accidentally destroyed by a derailed train. He was exhumed and reburied, with a new tomb monument, in 1875, at a ceremony to which several leading poets were invited, but only Walt Whitman attended.

Now, 160 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe has been given a proper send-off in Baltimore—a “viewing” of his recreated dead body in the casket, a funeral procession accompanied by bagpipes, and a memorial service with eulogies delivered by actors in the roles of his contemporaries and colleagues, attended by more than 700 admirers and mourners. The “master of the macabre” has at last been laid properly to rest.

from The Baltimore Sun:
“A Proper Reburial,” by Robert Little (with video of the viewing and funeral)
“Edgar A. Poe, local author and poet of much renown, was laid to rest at Westminster Hall yesterday inside a simple redwood coffin, after a grand theatrical and oratorical send-off to usher him, as he once wrote, ‘into the region of shadows.’ Of course the true Poe remained buried beneath the monument on the northwest corner of the church grounds in Southwest Baltimore, near where his body was placed hastily in a family plot soon after his death on October 7, 1849. But yesterday the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe’s death was revived, so that the great poet could receive the eulogy that eluded him in the days following his demise.”

More on Edgar Allan Poe:
Our biographical profile of E.A. Poe, American Romantic
Library: Poems by E.A. Poe
Celebrating Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th Birthday (2008)
A new wrinkle in the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death (2007)
The Mysterious Poe Toaster Revealed? (2007)
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe! The Empty House Tour, by Tom Devaney
A new Poe(try) film: The Death of Poe (2006)

The new edition of The Uncollected Dorothy Parker has a new and unusually autobiographical poem in it, never before published under her name: “Pollyanna Takes the Air,” which deals with her brief affair with playright Charles MacArthur in the 1920s.

from The Telegraph (UK):
“Found: Dorothy Parker poem reveals pain of rejection,” by Tom Leonard
“Dorothy Parker had much to say about the romantic misfortunes of others but the celebrated wit was curiously silent about her own doomed love affair.... Although Parker famously said of MacArthur: ‘How like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard,’ there had been no solid evidence until now that she had ever written about their relationship.”

from The Age (Australia):
“Dorothy Parker poem found”
“A ‘lost’ poem by Dorothy Parker has thrown light on her affair in the early 1920s with emerging playwright Charles MacArthur, which led her to an abortion and a suicide attempt.... editor Stuart Silverstein has included a previously anonymous poem, ‘Pollyanna Takes the Air,’ in a fresh anthology, having found the original copy in a 50,000-item collection of manuscripts amassed by an eccentric millionaire collector.”

Other recently rediscovered poems:
A trio of new poems by Langston Hughes (February 2009)
A new poem by William Shakespeare (April 2007)
A Robert Frost poem handwritten & hidden away: “War Thoughts at Home” (September 2006)
An ancient poem carved in stone (September 2006)
Rediscovered: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetical Essay against war (July 2006)
A new Sappho poem comes to light (June 2005)
“And Yet”... A new Philip Larkin poem comes to light after a half century lost in the library (August 2004)

Once again, none of the winning poems selected by judge George Szirtes in last month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition came from our Poetry Forum—but his choices and his comments are worth your while:

• In first place, Szirtes selected “We Burned Incense,” by Judy Swan, a dramatic monologue that “has a compulsive voice, takes risks with its reiterations in the second verse, tells a story without too much ‘telling.’”
• In second place, he chose Laurie Byro’s “The Secret Life,” an unrhymed sonnet that wears the poet’s slightly cryptic, resonant natural metaphors quite well.
• Szirtes arrived at a three-way tie in his third-place selection: “On Waking I Think of Winter” by Sarah Sloat, an untitled poem by Matt Moseman, and “Illegal #2” by Sergio Ortiz.
• He also offered comments on three poems he singled out for honorable mention: “Acquired Tastes” by Allen M. Weber, “Air Poem” by Divina, and “Bird-dog, Bird-dog” by Margaret Hemme.

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 and reading links for July - September IBPC judge George Szirtes
Background information and reading links for October - December IBPC judge Majid Naficy

We’ve selected three fine poems as our Poetry Forum entries in this month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition, one by a poet whose work has often represented us, and two by newbies to the competition:

• “His Coffin List” by Robin Taylor (bitoftruth), a poem our readers admired for its “unique twists and turns,” its puns and references, the subtle changes in meaning imparted by capitalizing selected words and the interaction between poem and title.
• Valerie Peck’s “Dark Journey,” a lovely rhythmic metaphor extended through the night.
• “Keep Me” by T. Obatala (trkyounger), a prayer/meditation added to his collection of “meaning-packed little gems.”

July - September judge George Szirtes has just submitted his selected winners for the September competition to the IBPC editors, so we will be able to post the announcement sometime this week.

Please remember to keep your nominations coming in. Any time you see a poem on the Forum that you think would be a worthy envoy to the IBPC, go right to the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder and post it. Address your post to the poet whose work you are nominating—this ensures that the poet will be notified of your nomination, and can post the required permission and information before it’s time for Poetry Guide Margy Snyder to choose the next month’s three entries.

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 and reading links for July - September IBPC judge George Szirtes
Background information and reading links for October - December IBPC judge Majid Naficy