Tag Archives: Article

Announcing the 2015 Bermuda Triangle Prize Winners and Finalists

12 Sunday Jul 2015

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The Poet’s Billow is proud to showcase the poems of seven great poets who are our winners and finalists for the 2015 Bermuda Triangle Prize. This year’s poems where published under the theme of space.

Don’t forget you can follow The Poet’s Billow on Facebook and Twitter.

Winners:
Lisa St. John
Evelyn Conley
D. Ellis Phelps

Finalists:
Flower Conroy
Nikki Paley Cox
Libby Kurz
Marti Snell

Semi-Finalists:
Loretta Oleck
Douglas Cole
Ellie White
Karla Linn Merrifield
Bryn Homuth
Ed Coletti
Chris Dingman
Sara Wielenberg

Poetry: Who Needs It?

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

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“A century ago, poetry did not appear in little magazines devoted to it, but on the pages of newspapers and mass-circulation magazines. The big magazines and even the newspapers began declining about the time they stopped printing poetry.” — William Logan

This is a great article. Read it here: Poetry: Who Needs It?

A Great Article For Writers At Any Stage In Their Development

24 Thursday Apr 2014

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What I Wish I Knew After My MFA Ended

 

A guest post from Sara Finnerty:

420-Jacquelyn-Mitchard-splits-limbo-looking-back.imgcache.rev1308082218874In the years after I got my MFA I was a miserable mess. I felt like a failure as a writer and a human being. I still feel that way sometimes, but now I try and fail and try again and I know that does not mean I am a failure, it only means I am a person like everyone else. If I could, here are some things I would tell my self six years ago when I was finishing graduate school.

Link to the Article Here.

Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

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This is a great article in the New York Times from 2012. It’s a close look at language and how it works in our culture and in poetry.

Here is an enticing excerpt or you can go straight to this great article.

Here’s one striking puzzle: We speak and write with remarkably different aims.  We sometimes try to get clear on the facts, so we can reach agreement on how things are.  But we sometimes try to express ourselves so we can capture the uniqueness of our viewpoint and experiences.  It is the same for listeners: language lets us learn the answers to practical questions, but it also opens us up to novel insights and perspectives.  Simply put, language straddles the chasm between science and art.

America, Meet Your Poets!

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

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What we have here, it seems, is a failure to communicate. America has a thousands-strong class of recent university graduates whose degrees are in writing, who are presently without any gainful employment directly associated with their field, and who are intimately familiar not only with contemporary poetry but also with the communities and institutions working poets spend much of their time in, and yet few in the media seem willing to tap them as a resource.

Read the article at The Huffington Post

Winner of the 2013 Pangaea Prize

20 Saturday Jul 2013

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The Poets Billow is happy to announce the winner of the 2013 Pangaea Prize. Here is an except from Caitlin Scarano’s Entry. Visit our Literary Art Gallery to read seven of her finally crafted poems. 

Losing It

God came to me like a drunken man
running from a car accident. God came

at me with a mouth full of snow, blood
& broken teeth. I used to be alone.

I used to wake up without an arm across my neck.
No boys or gods licking the sole of my shoe

or testing the rope ladder hooked in my lower lip.
Sinning is storytelling –

you always look them in the eye. Your body
always betrays you. God came to me

like the accident itself. No, he came at me like the tree
that parted the car, or the girl that parted

the windshield. The only car accident I was ever in
was the night I lost my virginity in the backseat.

God wasn’t there.
Just a frightened, frightened boy.

Read more by Caitlin Scarano

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Michelle Bonczek’s New Poem in Orion Magazine

10 Wednesday Jul 2013

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Check out the current beautiful issue of Orion Magazine to read a new poem by Michelle Bonczek, as well as an essay by Barry Lopez, and an article by environmental activist Bill McKibben.

“Advection, Nova Scotia”

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The Humanities are Not in Decline According to the Numbers

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

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Recently, Nate Silver, the statistician who has become famous for the accuracy of his analyses of polling data, has weighed in on the inexorable decline of the humanities, and has found, using “numbers” and “arithmetic,” that “the relative decline of majors like English is modest when accounting for the increased propensity of Americans to go to college.”

“In fact, the number of new degrees in English is fairly similar to what it has been for most of the last 20 years as a share of the college-age population,” Silver said.

Read the article, see the numbers at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Seven European Literary Journals You Should Know

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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Everybody knows The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, AGNI and The Kenyon Review but which European (including British) magazines should a poet-in-the-know be sending work to? Which magazines should a reader-in-the-know be reading? Let B O D Y guide you hither and thither with our recommendations of literary publications from the U.K and Europe who are doing (and publishing) good work.

Read the full article at: Body: Poetry. Prose. Word.

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Why I Hire English Majors by Steve Strauss

29 Saturday Jun 2013

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I love English majors. I love how smart they are. I love their intellectual curiosity. And I love their bold choice for a major. Most of all, I love to hire them.

A recent article by the great David Brooks in the New York Times about the changing nature of the Humanities in higher education just reinforced why, when given my druthers, English majors are my employee of choice.

And the reason is not that I am a writer; I more consider myself an entrepreneur than anything else. I run a small business and the people I hire do a variety of tasks — SEO, project management, social media, and so forth.

For my money (literally and figuratively), for my needs, and I suggest the needs of most small businesses, English majors are easily the top choice when it comes to getting the type of teammate who can make us all better, as they say in basketball.

Read the rest of the article by Steve Strauss at the Huffington Post