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It’s estimated that a new poetry journal is released every day, and in 2010 alone, more than 100,000 new poems will be published. But, it’s not reader demand that’s fueling this escalating trend. Instead, the vast majority of new poems and poets will never find much of an audience for their work. To talk about the new math of poetry is David Alpaugh, a poet and a writer.
Elaine Grant/New Hampshire Public Radio

The Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry is awarded annually to a Canadian poet, based on a book published in the previous calendar year. The work should follow in the tradition of Acorn, Livesay, Purdy, Plantos and others by being accessible to all people in its use of language and image. The award is open to any living poet who is a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant. The work may be entered by the poet or the publisher. The award itself honours the poet.

The award consists of a cheque for $500.00 CDN and a medallion.

The deadline for entries published in 2009 is June 30, 2010, received.

Here are a few links for a slow Friday at work: The New Yorker has a few fun flash puzzles of their covers to shuffle. The Poetry Ark is a multi-part contest that involves round by round voting with prizes and an anthology at the end. McSweeneys presents the 24th Existential Olympics, because life is… you know.

They are the forms that break new ground, use unexpected combinations to express either new ideas or long standing ones that benefit from little shocks or big pushes. They can ask big questions. They can offer researched answers. But after looking at them side by side for about a decade I’ve come to a conclusion that their root difference is: new music actively gathers to it an audience whereas poetry seems content being left alone.

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Indeed, translation has traditionally been married to the notion of what is lost, and this makes sense, if one looks at a poem like a Renaissance painting: the original being of highest quality and any replica a necessarily poor copy. But what if, like everything else in the world, it’s not so black and white?
Ellen Welcker/The Quarterly Conversation

The poem state is manic: written as if it talks fast, talks much, talks an ear off; it grasps what it can, perhaps stays too long, but it is glitteringly present, evanescent, has the amiability of a high. But the real danger of the poem is the change it makes in its poet: convinced that the poem is transcribed from the muse, pure dictation, the poet is gulled into thinking that the writing will be lasting, will be a contribution, and the poet, heady, not yet coming down, has the manic state of his art:
-from Maisonneuve

“About a year ago, a friend and I noticed a theme running through many New Yorker poems: With astounding frequency, they were about writing poetry. We would read them aloud up until some explicit mention of writing, words, grammar, typewriters, or anything else in the poet’s arsenal.”
Chris Wilson / Slate.com