We welcome S. Mei
Sheng Frazier to judge our 14th annual Tom
Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She is assisted by Jim
DuBois. The best poem in any style or genre will win the Tom
Howard Prize and $1,500. The best poem that rhymes or has a traditional
style will win the Margaret Reid Prize and $1,500. 10 Honorable
Mentions (any style) will receive $100 each. The winning entries will
be published on our website. The entry fee is $10 per poem. Submissions
may be published or unpublished. Each poem may have up to 250 lines. Submit
your entries by September 30.
About Our
Contest Judge
S. Mei Sheng Frazier's debut fiction collection, Collateral
Damage: A Triptych, won the 2013 RopeWalk Press
Editor's Fiction Chapbook Prize, and has earned praise from Nikki
Giovanni, Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket), Sarah Shun-lien Bynum,
Antonya Nelson, Molly Giles and others. You can find her work online at
Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Eleven Eleven, and Kore
Press. Frazier's second fiction chapbook, Salve,
was published in March 2016 by Nomadic Press, and new work is
forthcoming in Glimmer Train and ZYZZYVA. Read
this selection of poems and listen to her read with other
Nomadic Press authors on KPFA
94.1 FM.
Her writing has been singled
out by Robert Olen Butler, Nikki Giovanni, Jim Shepard, Frederick
Barthelme, and others, and placed in literary competitions offered by
Zoetrope, Glimmer Train, the Mississippi Review, HBO, and more. Her
poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one
of her award-winning short fiction pieces was named a Notable Story of
2009 by the storySouth Million Writers Award authors. Read her brief Glimmer
Train essay on literary craft.
Ms. Frazier is Chair and
Assistant Professor, English and the Humanities, at Cogswell
Polytechnical College, and Founding Editor of Cog: a multimedia
publication. She has also taught at the Sarah Lawrence College Summer
High School Writers Program, Holy Names University, Gavilan College,
Oakland School for the Arts, and Valhalla Women's Correctional Facility,
and worked at KQED, the Bay Area's public media source.
What, for
you, makes a poem in traditional verse feel fresh and contemporary?
Poetry is as ancient and
persistent as war, so I'll quote military strategist Sun Tzu:
There are not more than five
musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more
melodies than can ever be heard.
There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they
produce more hues than can ever been seen.
There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them
yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.
(Sun Tzu, The
Art of War)
Being intimately familiar with
the vast poetic terrain, a skilled traditional poet can adeptly
navigate meter and structure—guiding readers unwaveringly toward the
destination—in a singularly modern way. Thoughtful inclusion of today's
events, perspectives, vernacular or themes can render even the
strictest villanelle contemporary. And a slight, strategic bending of
the rules can make a sonnet feel utterly fresh. Shakespeare took
occasional liberties. Poet, so can you.
Consider Samsara
Turntable, a crown of sonnets by Lois
Elaine Heckman of Milan, Italy—winner of the Traditional Verse category
of 2013's Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. The sonnets span the
arc of a mother-daughter relationship, traveling nimbly back and forth
in time between two appearances of the one stunning, transforming line
that opens and closes the work: "Her hand is cold and trembles
into mine." With thoughtful manipulations of common language we
hear every day, Heckman zooms in close on doctors in bleached white
smocks; a grapefruit tree displaying its golden baubles—zooms out again
to ponder the symbiosis of parenthood; the horrors and discoveries of
dementia. These are not your great-grandfather's sonnets.
What poetic
qualities do you look for in free verse, to differentiate it from
prose?
Robert Mezey, poet and
professor emeritus, once said to me: "Prose is an opening form.
Poetry is a closing one." So in free verse, I look for linguistic
closure: a finality of language—a satisfying precision, throughout the
work and especially in the poem's last line—even if its narrative is
left unresolved. Beyond that, I really expect poetry to follow the
advice of another great teacher—my second grade teacher, Mrs. Brown.
"Show, don't tell," she'd remind us when we wrote our
wobbly-lettered stories. "Make it so I can understand and
experience whatever you're writing about." Thank you, Mrs. Brown,
for imparting the purpose of nearly every poetic device: metaphor,
imagery, alliteration.
How can poets
figure out whether our contest is a good fit for their work?
Here, I'll let the interviewer
answer the question for the interviewee: check out Jendi
Reiter's spot-on advice on selecting the right poetry
competition. Once you have, you'll see why Winning Writers offers more
than one contest category.
Because each category is
adjudicated professionally and ethically, and Winning Writers has a
long history of choosing winners who go on to produce more high-caliber
work (and paying these winners well) each category receives hundreds,
in some cases thousands, of entries from the US and beyond. So my
advice for ensuring that your work is competitive in the Tom
Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest is this: read your poem aloud,
listening as though it were being read by a stranger.
Imagine yourself seated in a
sunlit café, on a rumbling train or in a doctor's waiting room and
overhearing the poem read. Could you stop listening?
If you could, go back to the
drawing board. Your work still needs revision. If you couldn't, your
poem is ready for this contest.
Do you have
any pet peeves as a contest judge? E.g. over-used themes, clichés,
awkward line breaks...
I don't have pet peeves, and
here's why: I've been called on to help screen/judge work for a number
of literary contests, ranging from literary journals' competitions to
the Kore Press Short Fiction Award to Youth Speaks poetry slams to the
City of Oakland's Youth Poet Laureate competition. And at one time or
another, every pet peeve I held as a judge was forcefully dispelled.
Never rely on general words
that one might hear in a platitude (like "beautiful",
"evil", or "tragic") I thought, till a poem said something
extremely specific with general, flowery, oft-used words—turning those
words on their heads to make me gasp audibly. Never write about
writing, I thought, and particularly not in rhyme, till a rhymed poem
about writing raised goosebumps down my spine.
So go on: write another poem
about birds, or your last breakup. Create a natural-disaster-based
metaphor. Use the image of a red rose in your work—albeit one that's so
ubiquitous Rite Aid builds Valentine's Day campaigns around it. When
you do it, though, do it well. Give me goosebumps. Give me gasps.
What are the
greatest rewards of being a contest judge?
Like everyone these days, I've
got a lot on my to do list: help shape and run my department at the
college where I chair and teach; edit a multimedia publication; finish
a novel; finish a screenplay; collaborate on a stage play; edit my
second prose chapbook for release this spring. And beyond all that lie
the demands of life and parenthood: drive my daughter here, drive my
daughter there, keep her alive and feed her and such.
It's the nature of the world we
live in.
What better, then, than
mandated reading time; being forced—by my role as judge and
responsibility to study each contest entry closely—to read and reread
poems? This justified literary luxury is the greatest reward of being a
contest judge, as I'm not only giving, but also receiving something
unique from each submission I read. Inevitably there's an unfamiliar
word, a mesmerizing line, a distinct or devastating image that grabs
and rattles me; sparks emotion, research, dialogue or a poem in answer;
pulls me back into the reading or pushes me out the door with some
dawning realization. And I'll admit something, too: as the editor of a literary
journal and the organizer of multiple literary events,
sometimes I steal authors from contests. I look them up online and, if
their information is public, contact them to solicit new work or a
public reading.
Do you
encourage writers to re-submit the same poems in future years (or
revised versions thereof), or would you prefer new work each time?
Revisions, to me, are
new work: I can't count the times I've sent a poem or story off to a
contest, then edited the heck out of it and submitted it anew.
Sometimes the revision is transformed beyond recognition. Other times,
I've changed just a sentence or two yet in doing so altered the tenor
of the entire piece. And it's paid off. I've had editors and judges
pass on one version and reward another. So yes: I do encourage revised
work.
Regarding resubmission of an
earlier entry: I don't strongly encourage it, as I want to provide
incentives for poets to keep writing; keep revising. But I don't
discourage it either, as there are those times when a poem nearly makes
the cut, but, due to some variable such as the quality of the other
entries, doesn't quite. In those instances, it may have a good chance
in another year's contest.
How do you
know when a poem is "done"? What are the signs of over-revision?
There are myriad ways in which
to strengthen a piece of writing; myriad alternate versions. So perhaps
the closest a poem can come to "done" is to relay the
intended experience to the target readership; deliver the right message
to the correct recipients. I stop tinkering with my own work only once
I've received satisfying feedback from four or five bluntly honest
people who represent the audience I want to reach with a particular
piece.
One of those people is myself.
So I'll examine the poem in several fonts (the visual is potent, as any
graphic poet knows: sometimes the unfamiliarity of larger, smaller, or
sans serif lines will jar me into seeing something new). I'll ask
someone to read it to me, then read it aloud myself (first sitting,
then standing; first alone, then for others). If I've overworked it,
it'll no longer ring true in my own ears. Then I'll set it aside. This
is hard, but I do it. I leave it alone for a few days. When I come back
to it, I know whether it's done.
Poems are tricky, aren't they?
So in making this decision and all others—for my own work, and for that
of the poets whose entries I judge—I've always got to look closely, and
more than once. As I began with Sun Tzu, I'll end with Sun Tzu:
"To lift an autumn hair is
no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp
sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear."
(Sun Tzu, The Art of War)
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