Elaine Terranova Wins Off the Grid Press Prize

Goddard graduate Elaine Terranova’s poetry collection Dollhouse has won the Off the Grid Press 2012 Manuscript Contest.

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This new poetry collection by Whitman Award winner Terranova is her sixth, and it is breathtaking.  In pellucid language the poet walks through a kind of “vale of soul making” by re-visioning hours she spent as a child playing dolls with a friend.  Terranova weaves her poetics of space by setting the fragile orders of the dollhouse against the realities of family fiction and the terror of a whole world outside where no shelter can be found – all this in exquisite, minimalist music.

From Dollhouse
By Elaine Terranova

The dollhouse is a box
like most things,
a tooth, a heart, a tomb.
Cloud glory crowns it
or it is maybe struck
by eyeball-shaped hail.
At dusk, the earth’s shadow
falls over it.  The dollhouse
is an ecosystem with
a fixed population.
Their wool-strand hair.
Their wooden feet. …[Keep Reading]…

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Dilruba Ahmed on NPR

NPR’s Weekend Edition recently spoke with Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) about what makes poetry so important.

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Ahmed says it’s a little difficult to tease out exactly why she started writing poetry. “I can only guess that it was sort of two major factors,” she says. “One was that I grew up in a literature-loving household. … My parents are from Bangladesh, which is a country where poetry is very much a part of the cultural fabric. I think probably the other reason is that, growing up, my family moved a lot. And so that experience of being an outsider over and over again, sort of, small towns in western Pennsylvania and rural Ohio, and just trying to figure things out, sort of where I fit in, and I’m sure other people were trying to figure out where I fit in too, and we were all sort of trying to figure each other out. Being an outsider had a large influence on my poetry — maybe not my earliest efforts, but when I really started trying to write in earnest.”

“There’s potential for poetry to have more of a presence in public life,” she continues. “At formal events like readings, or things like the poems that have been posted on buses — you know, I love that idea of that sort of carrying a poem in your pocket. That might be a way to start incorporating poetry into one’s everyday life.”

Listen at NPR

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Kanawha Dog

“Kanawha Dog,” a poem by Faith Holsaert (fiction, ’82) appears online at Union Station.

Kanawha dog
is in the river
lion head turned
to Malden.
The feathers of his
legs pluming
into twentieth century
poison water, heart
pumping with
machine din.

At Kanawha Salines
his forebear saw the woman
on the bank. Dog,
he waited for her to
play their game of sticks,
lay his big head
on his paws
barking throw it
throw it and then
leaping light as a finch
feather
while the auger
bit deep into the earth
wringing free the iron
red salt treasured
for curing meat. …[Keep Reading]…

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Survivors

“Survivors: Shanghai and Beijing, China” a piece by Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears online at The Common, as part of their “Dispatches” feature.

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We took the fast train to Beijing across hours of deadened countryside where all the trees grow in rows, various heights, but all new and emaciated under the dusting of early leaves. I asked an acquaintance what happened to all the old trees. Was this a result of the Cultural Revolution? He said, maybe they ate them. They ate grass sometimes. Maybe they cut them down for firewood. Now and then you see some that don’t look planted; volunteers, they had been fattened up by age and randomly placed. There are always survivors.

The train whistled us over nearly a thousand miles in less than six hours, a smooth, silent ribbon pulled gracefully through the hard fingers of this landscape. It was comfortable, well ventilated, warm, and the seats gracefully proportioned. Between Shanghai and Beijing, we stopped at four stations. This was the cleanly constructed new China. Big expanses of glistening escalators and parking complexes void of even a single passenger or vehicles. …[Keep Reading]…

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Poems by Mark Prudowski

Two new poems by Mark Prudowski (poetry, ’09) appear online at the poetry blog On Barcelona.

The radio says sequestration before sunrise

so that the soft vowels and hard que alliteration
put in my mind equestrian, though
another part knows it for an accretion of cuts.
People are losing their jobs. In an interesting twist
a public defender lays himself off rather than
a less senior beneath him. That from his mouth
I hear the poor can’t get a fair shake is not thus ironic.
If not forever, hasn’t this been true for an awfully long time?
Three cheers for those who still give a damn,
by which I mean actually do something about it.
                   Like the  torturer’s horse,  I just want
relief for the itch on my ass.
I obey the bit and bridle.
The alternative is just too damn hard.

Read more at On Barcelona

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Post-MFA Conference Deadline

Tomorrow, April 30, is the deadline to  register for this summer’s 2013 Goddard/Wally Alumni (Post MFA) Conference!

As a reminder, The conference itself is July 28 – Aug. 3 (or shorter stay option of July 31 – Aug. 3) at St. Mary’s in Moraga, CA (SF Bay Area).

From Peg Alford and Cass Pursell, your friendly conference co-coordinators:

We’re getting very excited as the registrations come in, from alums all over geographically — and temporally, as in grads of early days to brand spanking new.  Alums who have never attended before, ever, will be there.

The proposals for the classes and panels are varied and delectable, such as (very roughly paraphrased) theater games & improv & writing; writing “away from the self”; getting your mojo back; & more. There will be a fun Shakespeare reading, and of course, YOUR readings of your work.

To your choice of workshops, in addition to poetry & fiction, you may choose creative nonfiction this year.

Really, there’s simply too much to cover in this communiqué! You’ll have to come and see for yourself and from all the tasty offerings select your own smorgasbord.

You can be as involved as you like. Give a class, organize a discussion, participate in a panel. Attend those of your choice. Attend none. Hang out in your room, in the library, in the courtyard (St. Mary’s is gorgeous) and write, sleep, daydream. Hike! Swim!

Dance? Why, yes, if you care to. We’ll have one for sure.

The one thing you need to do, however, is get your registration in — now! Go to the website link and fill in the forms and pay on line, or download the forms, print out and fill and send the paper forms to us at the address listed.

http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/conference-information/

You’ve heard it said before and if you haven’t you need to: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know a soul who’s coming to the conference. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t interacted with another alum in years, decades. You belong. Your presence is wanted. You’ll find initial awkwardness will dispel quickly. You’ll see.

Questions? We’ve got answers! Just ask.

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“Letting Words Bear Down and Burn”

“Letting Words Bear Down and Burn,” an interview with Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appears online at RHINO.

Ahmed_photo_BW_sm(credit Mike Drzal)

…Bengalis hold the Bangla language very dear to them. It’s a very soft, beautiful, expressive, and poetic language—and a matter of regional and cultural pride and political import. Bangla (Bengali) was my first language, English my second. I grew up in a bilingual household in which, over time, my parents spoke Bangla to my sisters and me, and we responded in English. (To this day, this is typically how we communicate.) While my siblings and I have retained our comprehension of Bangla, our spoken Bangla lags behind.

I think that growing up that bi-cultural and bi-lingual environment deeply shaped my cultural identity—my lived experiences spanned more than the small towns where I grew up, and I was keenly aware of my parents’ “ghost homeland” that seemed to exist just out of reach. My bilingual upbringing also heightened my awareness of language, I think—I discovered early that a very funny story relayed by my mother in Bangla sometimes failed to have the same richness and deliciousness in English, for example; or that certain English words had no counterpart in Bangla. I learned, too, that languages could provide access and power as much as they could create barriers to communication and belonging.

[Read More]

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Post-MFA Conference Registration Deadline

From Peg Alford and Cass Pursell, your friendly conference co-coordinators:

Hello, everyone,

Here’s your friendly little reminder that the deadline to register for this summer’s 2013 Goddard/Wally Alumni (Post MFA) Conference is quickly approaching. April 30 is the date.

The conference itself is July 28 – Aug. 3 (or shorter stay option of July 31 – Aug. 3) at St. Mary’s in Moraga, CA (SF Bay Area), a beautiful place particularly in the summer (that offers plenty to do, and we’ve got pages of them listed for you).

We’re getting very excited as the registrations come in, from alums all over geographically — and temporally, as in grads of early days to brand spanking new.  Alums who have never attended before, ever, will be there.

The proposals for the classes and panels are varied and delectable, such as (very roughly paraphrased) theater games & improv & writing; writing “away from the self”; getting your mojo back; & more. There will be a fun Shakespeare reading, and of course, YOUR readings of your work.

To your choice of workshops, in addition to poetry & fiction, you may choose creative nonfiction this year.

Really, there’s simply too much to cover in this communiqué! You’ll have to come and see for yourself and from all the tasty offerings select your own smorgasbord.

You can be as involved as you like. Give a class, organize a discussion, participate in a panel. Attend those of your choice. Attend none. Hang out in your room, in the library, in the courtyard (St. Mary’s is gorgeous) and write, sleep, daydream. Hike! Swim!

Dance? Why, yes, if you care to. We’ll have one for sure.

The one thing you need to do, however, is get your registration in — now! Go to the website link and fill in the forms and pay on line, or download the forms, print out and fill and send the paper forms to us at the address listed.

http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/conference-information/

You’ve heard it said before and if you haven’t you need to: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know a soul who’s coming to the conference. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t interacted with another alum in years, decades. You belong. Your presence is wanted. You’ll find initial awkwardness will dispel quickly. You’ll see.

Questions? We’ve got answers! Just ask.

 

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Four Way Review

Ryan Burden (fiction, ’13) has been named Fiction and Managing Editor of Four Way Review, an electronic literary journal from Four Way Books.  He will be working with the journal’s new Poetry Editor, Victoria Lynne McCoy.

Four Way Review is a biannual journal publishing poetry and fiction by new and established writers.  Past contributors include faculty members Megan Staffel and C. Dale Young, and alumnae Sally Ball (poetry, ’94), Mary Lou Buschi (poetry, ’04) and Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96).

FWR-issue2

For more information, visit Fourwayreview.com

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Poems by Matthew Olzmann

Three new poems by Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appear online at Toad.

All of it is Fading From View

Train wrecks, meteors, catastrophe after catastrophe:
when you were a boy you could survive anything. Leaps
from the tree house into small piles of leaves.
The walls you pedaled your bicycle into. Just scrapes.
Just tiny cuts. Just bruises that are already fading.
Hush child—see, you are fine.
But these days, a crawling ache explores
your body, maps uncharted territories,
plants little flags of sadness on all your shores.
Still, life is good. So good. Your brothers, your sisters,
your parents—all of them—are here, but
you’re aware of a certain motion, a pendulum
whose silhouette sweeps the land.
Just for a second, don’t worry. See? Now it’s passed.
Quiet, young man; everything is fine.
Still, you feel everything
changing. The cornstalks along the highway
are never as tall as you remember...[Keep Reading]…

Matthew is the author of Mezzanines, available today from Alice James Books.

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