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2008 Best of the Net
(9)I am delighted to announce that the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature has nominated my poem ““Lines Written After Hearing W. S. Merwin Read a Poem about his Father” for Sundress Publications’ 2008 Best of the Net anthology.
I am one of five poets and two fiction writers to receive Dead Mules’ nomination for this year. The full list, with links to the works, are at this link. It’s a great group of writers and I’m honored to be in their number.
I am especially pleased that the nomination is for this poem. “Lines Written After Hearing W. S. Merwin Read a Poem about his Father” is a work I tried many times to write as free verse, but it just always got away from me. It wasn’t until I went to the West Chester Poetry Conference and had a workshop with Molly Peacock that I found a way to discipline the material and the emotion into something approaching what I wanted.
Be sure to check out the 2007 Best of the Net Anthology.. It’s a distinguished group of writers, including Lexington poet Ann Neuser Lederer’s “January Thaw.”
Sundress puts out a great family of web magazines. I know Wicked Alice best. They have published Joanie DiMartino and another of my favorite women poets whose name just won’t slip through the gears this afternoon. If you’re out there, nudge my memory, would you?
And my heartfelt thanks to Helen and the folks at Dead Mule for their faith in my work. Keep your fingers crossed that the editors at Sundress like my work, too.
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P.S. Just to give you some idea how stiff this competition is and how unlikely I am to actually make it, let me point you to this poem of Helen Losse’s that made the finals but not the cut:
Where the Reverie is Apt to Lead
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2008 Best of the Net, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
9 Responses to “2008 Best of the Net”
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I enjoyed the poems very much.
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Brava! I’m so glad this news prompted me to read the poem again–it’s absolutely deserving (and, in my favorite form!).
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sherry August 19th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Max, you are more than tolerant with me. Poets sometimes skew the truth a little, you know, to tell a good story. Anyway, it’s in my genes. Mom was telling me last night that when somebody accused my great-uncle John Irving Keith of stretching the truth a bit in some tale he was telling, he said, “You think I lie. You don’t know my brother Tim.”
(Tim Keith was my grandfather. He used to describe himself as
Tim Keith
Bald-headed and no teeth.Which I guess is where I got my penchant for rhymes.)
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We are hoping at least one Mule writer makes it into the anthology.
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Georgia Green Stamper August 19th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Wonderful news! Congratulations – and good luck on the next round of selection.
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sherry August 20th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Andrea, our favorite conservative critic, Paul Fussell, says of terza rima,
One tercet stanza which has never really established itself in English is the terza rima, the stanza of Dante’s Divine Comedy. …The failure of terza rima to establish a tradition in English, as well as the general rarity of successful English three-line stanzas, suggests that stanzas of even- rather than odd-numbered lines are those that appeal most naturally to the Anglo-Saxon sensibility. We may inquire how well any three-line stanza, regardless of the talent of its practitioner, can ever succeed in English.
The quotation is from Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, of course. I guess, in Mr. Fussell’s view, the “Anglo-Saxon” mind likes things nice and symmetrical and closed off. He also likes a stanza to be a unit of meaning like a paragraph so that the white space between has meaning. He sees no reason to have a stanza break unless there is also a change of some sort.
A stanza form that just sort of tumbles down the page, with lots of interconnectivity up and down the page, no doubt made him most uncomfortable.
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Good luck and congrats!
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TIM KEITH Tales Of;
I believe Tim had a lot of fun, and tolerated other prankster friends.
I recall Jesse Lusby telling a little tale. Tim was hooking the horses up to a piece of equipment, Jess in front of the horse would waive his hands which caused the horse to “dance around”; Tim would call the horse (uh) hames. This activity would go on a little while until Tim would run Jess off. Probally so he could get some work done. -
sherry August 29th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Jessie — very belated thanks for your good wishes. Considering the quality of the other nominees, I am happy just to make the Mule’s cut. If I make the anthology, somebody will have to tie me to the ground.
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Sherry has also received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
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