American Life in Poetry :: Cathryn Essinger

American Life in Poetry: Column 639
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

One of my favorite poems is Louise Bogan's "The Crossed Apple" which mentions two species, Meadow Milk and Sweet Burning, and since reading it many years ago I have made notes of the names of apples, a poet's delight. In this touching poem by Cathryn Essinger, who lives in Ohio, I've come upon yet another for my collection. Her most recent book is What I Know About Innocence from Main Street Rag press.

Summer Apples

I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,

but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers

slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than

the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,

holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .

they're so fragile, you can almost see
to the core. She no longer remembers how

to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.

And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—
to that little cathedral to memory—where

the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (http://ift.tt/xd0win), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Cathryn Essinger, “Summer Apples,” from Alaska Quarterly Review, (Vol 33, No. 1 & 2, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Cathryn Essinger and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2017 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

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Glimmer Train March/April Very Short Fiction Award Winners

Glimmer Train has chosen the winning stories for their March/April Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will open on July 1. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

1st place goes to George Makana Clark [pictured] of Milwaukee, WI, who wins $2000 for “Pluto.” His story will be published in Issue 102 of Glimmer Train Stories.

2nd place goes to Madiha Sattar of Karachi, Pakistan, for “Mulberry Street.” Her story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train, increasing her prize from $500 to $700.

3rd place goes to Oguz Dinc of Istanbul, Turkey, for “The Hurricane.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train, increasing his prize from $300 to $700.

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Deadline soon approaching! Short Story Award for New Writers: June 30
This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Most submissions to this category run 1500-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize wins $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second/third: $500/$300 and consideration for publication. Click here for complete guidelines.

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New poem: ‘Benevolent Assimilation’ in re:asian magazine

Thank you, re:asian magazine, for including me in the “firsts” issue! The poem touches upon things I’ve been thinking about since grade school when I first read the phrase “benevolent assimilation” as a U.S. description of its colonial policy with the Philippines. The magazine has also published a photo I took of the home my […]

Changes at Shanti Arts

Today, Shanti Arts announced changes coming to Still Point Arts Quarterly.

• Art submissions in response to calls will be free. Everything else about the exhibitions stays the same: 30 artists will be featured online and in Still Point Arts Quarterly with five winners awarded. “The Art of Structure” is the current, open call.

• The journal is transitioning from a print quarterly, to an interactive digital magazine. Paid subscriptions to the print journal will be honored until they expire.

• Because of these changes, subscriptions and single copies of the digital magazine will be free for readers. Subscription sign-ups for the digital magazine are now being taken at the magazine’s website.

Check out what else founder and editor Christine Cote has to say about the changes at the Shanti Arts blog.

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WLT New Native Writing

The May - August 2017 issue of World Literature Today features New Native Writing: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock, guest edited by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. The section includes "twenty-eight writers with tribal affiliations from throughout the continental US as well as Guåhån (Guam) and American Samoa." In her introduction, Mish writes about the 1992 WLT  feature "From this World: Contemporary American Indian Literature" in an issue "released just before Returning the Gift, a historic Native writers’ conference held on the University of Oklahoma’s campus, the home of World Literature Today." 

Mish used that 1992 date as the start point for the works she collected for this feature, "to avoid creating categories and to reaffirm the impact of Returning the Gift, I solicited submissions from United States Native writers whose first book was published after the 1992 festival. Despite the simple, temporal structure of this approach, I believe the aesthetics and thematics Native scholars and writers have identified are clearly present in the work." A full list of contributors can be found here.

Twenty-five years later, Returning the Gift Literary Festival returns to Oklahoma University campus (October 8-11, 2017). For more information about the festival, visit here.

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Main Street Rag Needs Poetry

In his Spring 2017 Welcome Readers! section, Main Street Rag Publisher M. Scott Douglass offers readers a historical assessment of the publication's genre content. Having originally started as a poetry journal, Douglass says it was from the advice of Dana Gioia and others that he started publishing fiction and then later book reviews. Now, he says, with the Spring 2017 issue, "for the first time ever - the balance has been tipped in the favor of prose." He considers possible reasons for this, but the bottom line: "Main Street Rag needs poetry submissions. We need a lot of them. And we need them as soon as possible or the Summer issue may end up being a totally prose edition."

Whatever you can do to help, readers. The publication DOES accept simultaneous submissions, Douglass assures - though the website may not yet reflect this change in policy. Writers can expect a reasonable report time, and, according to Douglass, a review by "a tougher poetry editor than we've ever had before. . . but that only makes the magazine better." MSR  takes submissions via Submittable; there is a reading fee which is waived for subscribers.

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Briar Cliff Review 2017 Contest Winners

Pick up a copy of the 2017 issue of The Briar Cliff Review to check out the winners of their annual contest (which—mark your calendars—opens for submissions every August): 

Fiction
Daniel Paul, “The Last Sun of Kansas”

Nonfiction
Lisa Lanser Rose, “Christmas in the Bitch’s Dollhouse”

Poetry
Jude Nutter, “Ianua: 19 September, 2016”

[Cover art: Michael Crowley, “The Stacks in Long Hall, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland”]

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