MARSH HAWK POETRY PRIZES

December 1 is coming up! Which means the submission period for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prizes -- judged this year by Marge Piercy -- will soon open. Info at: https://marshhawkpress.org/marsh-hawk-press-poetry-prize-awards/

MARY MACKEY ON CHAPTER ONE

Mary Mackey delivers the third installment in Marsh Hawk Press' Chapter One series which focuses on how writers got their early start. (At prior link, you can see the first two installments by Denise Duhamel and Philip Lopate.) You can see Mary Mackey's essay HERE but here's an excerpt:

I do not have an MFA. I became a poet by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, and being caught in volcanic eruptions, swarmed by army ants, stalked by vampire bats, threatened by poisonous snakes, and making catastrophic decisions with regard to men. And then there was reading.

PHILLIP LOPATE ON CHAPTER ONE

Marsh Hawk Press' new "Chapter One" feature -- about how poets got their start -- has released its November feature on Phillip Lopate. It's interesting -- here's an excerpt:

"A higher, “purer” standard of what it took to be a poet seemed to reign in that corner of academia, based partly on the possession of an MFA credential, and partly on the networking of the professional poetry world. I got a real taste of the way that poetry guild mentality operated: the mentoring and bestowal of the blessing on a chosen few acolytes, whose books would then be recommended for publication, and the whole priestly sense of the Poet as someone of rare vatic powers. The non-exclusionary ethos of the Sixties and early Seventies had ended, in the face of the writing program-generated mystique of technique. The impression was conveyed that there could only be two dozen poets at most in one era who had received the vision. I knew I’d never gotten a message from on high: I did not fit that bill. My sense of myself as a poet began to shrivel up. 

"But that simple explanation is false. It would be wrong to blame my colleagues for killing the urge, since anyone who can be discouraged so easily from writing poetry is not cut out to be a poet."

You can see the whole article HERE.

BURT KIMMELMAN MEDITATES OVER PRAGUE AND MEMORY

From a recent half-year stay in Prague, Burt Kimmelman shares his 3-part meditation on "Prague and Memory" over at BODY, a lovely English-language journal headquartered in Prague.

MARY MACKEY RECEIVES SPIRITUALITY BOOK AWARD!

Marsh Hawk is delighted to announce that Mary Mackey's The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018 has won a  2018 California Institute for Integral Studies Women's Spirituality Book Award. Congratulations, Mary!

A SLOVENIAN TRANSLATION FOR ED FOSTER!

We are pleased to share that Sowing the Wind by Ed Foster (Marsh Hawk, 2016) has been published in a Slovenian translation as Sejanje Vetra by Zalozba SKUC (Ljubljana) in their series Zbirka Lambda. You can check out the original English through our distributor SPD.

MARSH HAWK REVIEW--FALL 2018 ISSUE IS RELEASED!

We are pleased to release the Fall 2018 issue of The Marsh Hawk Review. Thank you to the poets for sharing their works. Here are the participants to this issue of the Review:

Mark Young
Irene Willis
Peter Vanderberg
Lynne Thompson
Susan Terris
Eileen R. Tabios
John Simonds
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Barry Schwabsky
Susan M. Schultz
Janice Lobo Sapigao
E. San Juan, Jr.
Barbara Jane Reyes
Randy Prunty
Paul Pines
Naomi Buck Palagi
Gwynn O’Gara
David O’Connell
Geoffrey O’Brien
Rich Murphy
Michelle Murphy
Daniel Morris
Sandy McIntosh
Tricia McCallum
Agnes Marton
Mary Mackey
Hank Lazer
Amy Grace Lam
Basil King
Burt Kimmelman
Sherry Kearns
George Kalamaras
Jacqueline Jules
Paul Ilechko
Michael Hardin
Grace Grafton
Anne Gorrick
Kirk Glaser
Robert Gibb
Danny Gallardo
Thomas Fink
Thomas Fink and Maya D. Mason
Carol Dorf
Shira Dentz
Aileen I. Cassinetto
Tom Beckett
Ryan Bayless
Ivy Alvarez