WCCC Visiting Authors Series - Gerald Stern

The reading by Gerald Stern at Warren County Community College
has been postponed until Wednesday, March 30th, due to inclement weather.

The Warren County Community College (New Jersey) Visiting Authors Series continues on Wednesday, January 26th, with a reading by Gerald Stern.

Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925. His books of poetry include Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 (W. W. Norton, 2010), Save the Last Dance: Poems (2008); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Red Coal (1981), which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; and Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets.

He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2000 to 2002, and received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2005. Since 2006, Stern has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Stern has taught at Temple University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania and for a number of years prior to achieving fame, he taught at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey. Stern is currently serving as distinguished poet-in-residence at Drew University's low-residency MFA Program in Poetry.

This reading, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Room E208, is free and open to the public.

The WCCC Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. All facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. After the reading, there will be brief Q&A with the audience and a book signing. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

For directions to the college or to find out about WCCC’s Creative Writing degree program, please call (908) 835-9222 or visit www.warren.edu

2011 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

2011 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

Submit a manuscript of 48-84 pages of original poetry in any style in English. The manuscript must not have been published previously in book form, although individual poems appearing in print or on the web are permitted. Entries may consist of individual poems, a book-length poem, or any combination of long or short poems. Collaborations are welcome.

Submission deadline: April 30, 2011

Alicia Ostriker will judge the 8th Annual Contest. Ostriker has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, has published 12 volumes of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy, for which she received the Jewish National Book Award for 2009. Her most recent book of criticism is Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. She has received awards and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Society of America, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center, among others. Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ, is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University, and teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University.

W. S. Merwin on Poetry

Listen to The Leonard Lopate Show with W. S. Merwin on Poetry (WNYC)

Poet W. S. Merwin talks about his collection of poems, The Shadow of Sirius, which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. The poems focus on subjects from childhood and memory to age and, of course, dogs.

Mercy

This powerful little prose poem would have been a good example to include in our post for the prompt from November...

Shooting the Horse

I unlatch the stall door, step inside, and stroke the silky neck
of the old mare like a lover about to leave. I take an ear in
hand, fold it over, and run my fingers across her muzzle. I
coax her head up so I can blow into those nostrils. All part of
the routine we taught each other long ago. I turn a half turn,
pull a pistol from my coat, raise it to that long brow with the
white blaze and place it between her sleepy eyes. I clear my
throat. A sound much louder than it should be. I squeeze the
trigger and the horse's feet fly out from under her as gravity
gives way to a force even more austere, which we have named
mercy.

by David Shumate,

from High Water Mark



Also:

The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems