Poets Online's Pushcart Nominations for 2024

The Pushcart Prize is a prestigious literary award that celebrates outstanding writing published in small presses and literary magazines in print and online. It is not exclusive to poetry but also honors works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each year, editors of small presses and literary magazines nominate works they published, showcasing voices that may not receive attention from larger publishers.

For poetry specifically, the award recognizes exceptional poems that reflect originality, craft, and artistic depth. Each publication can nominate up to six poems for consideration. Poems and poets who are nominated are a select group, and winning or being included in the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology often brings significant recognition and helps elevate a poet's career. 

The Pushcart Prize was founded in 1976 by Bill Henderson and being nominated, as well as being published in the annual, is considered one of the most coveted honors in the realm of small press literature.

Our nominations were selected by the editor and four readers from all poems published in 2024.

Poets Online proudly announces our 2024 nominated poems for the Pushcart Prize. 

"Sleep" by Seema Singh (February issue)

"You're Still the One" by Jo Taylor (September issue)

"Heart of the Grove" by Taylor Graham

"The Paper Fortune Teller" by Rob Friedman

"The Last Time I Ate Meat" by Rose Anna Higashi

"The World According to Wile E. Coyote" by Paul Hostovsky (October issue)

Poems and prose selected by the Pushcart Press editors will be published in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XLIX in Spring 2025.

The idea for the Pushcart Prize anthology was conceived in the early 1970s by founding editor Bill Henderson, a senior editor at Doubleday. “I was tired of the publishing industry turning writers into dollar signs,” Henderson says, citing the tendency for big houses to favor marketability over substance. After leaving Doubleday, he self-published The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition and How-To, a guide that advised writers on how to start their own presses.

To further champion the work of small presses and literary journals, Henderson began to conceive of a “Best of the Small Presses” prize and anthology to highlight poetry and prose being put out by indie publishers each year. 

Henderson used money from his book sales to get the anthology off the ground, and in 1976, he self-published the first annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Now Once: An Ekphrastic Poem

This past summer, I was selected to participate in a writing workshop that used dance and movement as the prompt for writing poems.

Writing poetry about the arts - paintings, sculpture, photography, music, dance, etc. - is called ekphrasic poetry. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. Famous examples include "The Shield of Achilles" by Homer, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, "The Starry Night" by Anne Sexton and one I have written about, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams.

This workshop was sponsored by Arts By The People, a New Jersey nonprofit organization with a mission to establish, operate, promote, and conduct educational programs, opportunities, classes, and sessions in the creative arts for the public. With the support of The Santiago Abut Foundation, this project and all parts of The Writing LAB are free and open to the public.

The participants' writing collected in like waves through flesh represents the work of the 3rd annual Writing LAB Summer Residency. This year's ekphrasis workshop included a unique collaboration between Arts by the People and students from the dance graduate program at The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Photographic stills from, and QR code links to, the dancers’ films are printed in the anthology alongside each writer's final creation.

During the full-day workshop, the participants went through a series of writing exercises as well as movement exercises. The writing portion was led by poet Michelle Ortega. The movement portion of the program was led by dancer Oksana Horban. Paul Rabinowitz is the Founder and Executive Director of ARTS By The People.

Watching the dancer's video that I selected to write about, I initially had a difficult time finding a center. After several attempts, I realized what I was focusing on was the setting - a stone ground and wall that looked like a desert. Because the dancers were from Jerusalem, I decided to research what kind of stone it would be. It turns out that "Jerusalem stone" is what it is called and it was used for many buildings in the city being that it could be quarried from the surrounding land.

Realizing that the stone was once a sea floor, I became fascinated by the idea that this modern man was moving upon this ancient sea floor that had become a desert, but that life was still embedded in that stone.

The best thing about writing workshops and writing prompts is often that they get you to go in directions that you would not have tried on your own. My poem is quite different from most of my poetry which tends to be narrative and more personal. "Now Once" is more focused on language and place.

NOW ONCE
Once a sea, then a lake, now
evaporated to limestone, dolomite, broken into blocks
to make a road, or a wall
one allowing movement, one to prevent it
once coral, mollusks, a swan, a ship,

a lone shadowless figure moving on what
was once deep water, animated and overflowing,
now sedimentary, fossilized, unable to move
waiting to be resurrected by winglike movements
that lift million-year-old memories from the stone.

Can you see it? Look closely with
ancient eyes, this wall of Jerusalem stone,
life preserved below, life renewed upon it,
the figure unfolds, like an oyster or
a swan – but no, a man, hearing

a carnival of animals from deep within.
Can you hear it? The voices begin,
andantino grazioso, slow and graceful, the vibrations
sound like waves through flesh and time
what is now and what was once.

To view the video that inspired the poem,
scan the QR code below.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Oscar Wilde: Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde, 1882, by Napoleon Sarony

I came across this quote from Oscar Wilde: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." I believe Wilde meant that all poetry - "good" or "bad" - comes out of something genuine emotionally. (If you have another interpretation, please comment on this post below.)

Though Oscar Wilde is better known for his plays and novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his poetry remains an important part of his body of work, showcasing his talent for lyrical beauty and deep emotional resonance.

He began his literary career as a poet and published several collections, with Poems (1881) being one of his earliest works. Wilde's poetry often focused on themes of beauty, love, and human suffering, reflecting his fascination with the aesthetic movement and the idea of "art for art's sake."

The most anthologized of his poems are these four. "Requiescat" – A tender and sorrowful poem about his sister, who died young. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" – Written after Wilde served time in prison, this longer narrative poem explores themes of justice, suffering, and compassion for the oppressed. "Her Voice" and "Helas!" are examples of Wilde’s reflective, lyrical style.

Despite his fame, Wilde had a difficult life because of his sexuality. Born in Dublin in 1854, he was already a successful playwright when he fell into a love affair with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was married with two children at the time, and the affair ruined his reputation in society. 

Despite being married and having two sons, Wilde’s primary romantic attractions and relationships appear to have been with men. While his love for his wife, Constance, was genuine, it’s generally accepted that Wilde was primarily homosexual, though some might see him as bisexual given his marriage and family. His life and work remain emblematic of the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in an era of strict societal repression.

His intense relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, often called “Bosie,” eventually led to his downfall. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite." Wilde sued for libel but lost, and during the trial, evidence of his relationships with men surfaced, leading to his conviction for "gross indecency" and imprisonment."I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life," Wilde later wrote.

He did not hide his life. One of his most famous quotes is "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." 

He wrote three plays in two years about people leading double lives, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895). What is considered to be his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is about two men who use an imaginary person named Earnest to get themselves out of all kinds of situations, until their invented stories and identities get so complicated that everything is revealed. The play was a big success but, that same year was when Wilde was accused of sodomy by Douglas's father and his suit for libel failed and he was sentenced to two years of hard labor. 

His plays continued to be produced on the stage while he was in prison, but his name was removed from all the programs. He was released from prison in 1897 and died three years later in a cheap Paris hotel.

Requiescat

Tread lightly, she is near

    Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

    The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair

    Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

    Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

    She hardly knew

She was a woman, so

    Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

    Lie on her breast,

I vex my heart alone

    She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear

    Lyre or sonnet,

All my life’s buried here,

    Heap earth upon it.

Complete Works

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Line Breaks

I was reading an anthology of short poems and was paying attention not only to their brevity but to their line breaks.

In Rae Armantrout’s poem “Unbidden," her use of short lines in conjunction with enjambment contribute to a sense of disjointedness.

The ghosts swarm
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone

Line breaks are one of the main things that separate prose and poetry. They give poems their slim who-cares-about-margins appearance.(We will pass on talking about prose poems for the moment.)

Enjambment is where the poet deliberately breaks a sentence across multiple lines before its natural finishing point. End-stops are the opposite of enjambed lines in that an end-stopped line contains complete thoughts, phrases, or sentences.You can usually tell a poetic line is end-stopped if there is punctuation at the end. The punctuation could be internal (e.g. comma, semi-colon, colon, em dashes), or external (e.g. period, exclamation mark, question mark).These lines give the reader logical moments to pause at the line break. It is used in many traditional poems and it supports poetic forms using rhyme and meter.

William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a modernist poem orriginally published without a title. It was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection that incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Notice that to maintain his very short, two-line stanzas Williams breaks two words that could be together - wheelbarrow and rainwater.

Line breaks create white space in the text and are one way that poets can exercise a greater degree of control over the speed and rhythm that you read. It is unlike our everyday language and unlike prose literature.

Personally, I find it annoying when poems have breaks that seem to be used simply to keep line lengths the same - almost like a margin. It is possible a poet will do that in order to create a shape for the poem. There are good reasons to break a line. There is no rule book but consideration should be given to the first and last words: Avoid having weak words at the beginning or end of lines. For example, action verbs and nouns tend to be strong.

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost has strong end words: fire, ice, desire,twice, hate, great, suffice. (Although I find that breaking a line on "ice" - "To say that for destruction ice / Is also great" - seems more in service of the rhyme than the line break. Sorry, Robert).

"Dreams" by Langston Hughes is a good example of end-stopped lines that each contain a complete thoughts, phrases or sentences.

Our two model poems by two very different poets are both 9 lines / 8 line breaks. This month's call for submissions is for a 9-line poem on any topic of your choosing. Stanza breaks are another consideration - one stanza, 4X2, 3X3 or any combination. The key here is for you (and the editors) to pay special attention this month to line breaks. Whether enjambed or end-stopped, each of your 8 breaks should be logical and pushing us to read in a particular way with a particular attention. Sounds easy. It is not.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org