February 2014 – String Poet

Submission Guidelines

All forms accepted, 40 lines max per poem. No previously published poems, or poems that have won previous prizes. Winner receives $1000, publication in String Poet, and composition of original music by professional composer inspired by the winning poem, to be performed at the Awards Ceremony in September 2014. Winner and Runners-up published in Winter 2014 issue of String Poet and invited to read at the Awards Ceremony. All contest submissions are considered for publication in journal. There is no theme for submission. String Poet does not solicit poems solely on the subject of music. Reading the journal archives is a great way to become familiar with the type of work that String Poet publishes.

Entry Fee: $15.00 — up to 5 poems, up to 40 lines per poem
Submissions deadline: May 20, 2014
Submissions can be made on-line, or by post.

Final Judge: David Yezzi’s books of poetry are The Hidden Model (TriQuarterly Books, 2003) and Azores (Swallow Press, 2008), a Slate magazine best book of the year; and Birds of the Air (2013), a Publishers Weekly pick. He is the editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, foreword by J. D. McClatchy. His libretto for a chamber opera by David Conte, Firebird Motel, received its premiere in San Francisco in 2003 and was released on CD from Arsis in 2007. His libretto of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon for composer Cyril Deaconoff received a workshop production at West Bay Opera in California in 2010. And his verse dramas On the Rocks and Dirty Dan & Other Travesties have been produced by Verse Theater Manhattan. As an actor and co-founder of Thick Description, a San Francisco theater company, Mr. Yezzi has performed in works by Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, Goethe, Williams, and others, in the United States and Europe.
A Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1998 to 2000, his poems and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry,The Yale Review, Poetry and elsewhere. A former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, he is executive editor of The New Criterion.

Composer: Judith Shatin is a composer and sound artist whose musical practice engages our social, cultural, and physical environments. She draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from machines in a deep coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, a lawnmower racing up a lawn. Timbral exploration and dynamic narrative design are fundamental to her compositional design, while collaboration with musicians, artists and communities are central to her musical life. Shatin’s music has been commissioned by organizations such as the Barlow and Fromm Foundations, the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program, as well as ensembles including Ash Lawn Opera, Da Capo Chamber Players, the Dutch Hexagon Ensemble, newEar,the National and Richmond Symphonies, and many more. Twice a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, she has held residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the VCCA, La Cité des Arts (France), Mishkan HaAmanim (Israel), among others. Her Rotunda, a film collaboration with Robert Arnold, won the Macon Film Festival Best Experimental Film Award (2011), while her music for the film Cinnamon, by Kevin J. Everson, has been heard at festivals ranging from Sundance to Munich and Rotterdam. In demand as a master teacher, Shatin has served as BMI composer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, as master composer at California Summer Music, and as senior composer at the Wellesley Composers Forum. She is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at the University of Virginia, where she founded the Virginia Center for Computer Music. Her work is featured in the recent book Women of Influence in Contemporary Music, Nine American Composers (Scarecrow Press). A staunch advocate for her fellow composers, she has served as President of American Women Composers and on the boards of the League/ISCM, American Composers Alliance, and International Alliance for Women in Music. She currently sits on the National Council of the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Last Year’s Winner

"Doubt Springs"

Last year’s String Poet Prize was awarded to Jean L. Kreiling for her poem, “Doubt Springs,” which was set to music by composer Eleanor Cory, and performed by Lynn Bechtold and Kirsten Jermé.

Online Submissions

Submissions should be made, along with the entry fee, by 11:59 PM PST on May 20, 2014.
Payment: Please do not use the “Donate” button to send payment for a contest entry. Instead, use the shopping cart on this page to send payment by credit card or PayPal. If your PayPal email address does not match the email used to send your poems, please make note of that in your contest submission email.
Submissions: After completing payment, send a single e-mail with your poem(s) to contest@stringpoet.com. Be sure to include submissions in-line within the email body. If you wish to also include an attachment, the following formats are acceptable: PDF (.pdf), Rich Text (.rtf), Word (.doc), or plain text (.txt). Do not attach .docx files. Include your name and contact information in the body of the email, or as a separate cover page within the attachment — do not put identifying information on the same page as a poetry submission.

Postal Submissions

Send your poem(s) and payment, postmarked on or before May 20^th, 2014 to:
String Poet Prize c/o Long Island Violin Shop
8 Elm Street
Huntington, NY 11743
Checks payable to “String Poet” drawn from a U.S. Bank. Author’s name and contact information typed on the BACK of each submitted page — do not put identifying information on the front page of a poetry submission. Include a SASE or your email address if you would like to be notified of contest results, or subscribe to String Poet. Hardcopy entries cannot be returned, and will be recycled.

String Poet Presents
An Evening in Ireland:

The String Poet Studio Series 2014 Season has begun! Our opening event featured renowned Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail, who made his first 2014 New York appearance at the Studio Series, and Scottish and Irish fiddler Calum Pasqua. Long Island poet Gladys Henderson opened.

Micheal O’Siadhail was born in 1947. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Oslo. A full-time writer, he has published ten collections of poetry. He was awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1982 and in 1998 the Marten Toonder prize for Literature. His poem suites, The Naked Flame, Summerfest and Earlsfort Suite were commissioned and set to music for performance and broadcasting.
He has given poetry readings and broadcast extensively in Ireland, Britain, Europe and North America. In 1985 he was invited to give the Vernam Hull lecture at Harvard and the Trumbull Lecture at Yale University. He represented Ireland at the Poetry Society’s European Poetry Festival in London in 1981 and at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. He was writer-in-residence at the Yeats Summer School in 1991.
He has been a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Among his many academic works are Learning Irish (Yale University Press 1988) and Modern Irish (Cambridge University Press 1989). He was a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1988-93) and of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989 -97), a founder member of Aosdána (Academy of distinguished Irish artists) and a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He was the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange).

Calum Pasqua, a fiddler hailing originally from Brooklyn, NY has been playing the fiddle since the age of 6. Starting on Suzuki method and immediately moving to playing folk music for his Scottish born mother’s dance group, Calum honed his skills playing in the old tradition, for dancers. Calum grew up playing Celtic music, mostly Scottish highland pipe tunes on fiddle and pipes. With this tradition came opportunities to play in pubs in what is commonly called ‘seisun’ or session music. Calum has been very active in the New York City Irish session scene for the past 7 years. He can be heard in the busy Irish pubs of the Lower East Side performing with musicians such as fiddlers Tony DeMarco and Bernedette Fee, Riverdance famed piper Chis Layer, accordionist John Redmond, guitarists Eamon O’Leary, Dave Fahy and Alan Murray. Calum also was a performer at the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention which is an exhibition of the diverse fiddle styles of the world, mostly the North Atlantic region, from Denmark to Shetland to Prince Edward Island and everything in between. Calum has won many first-prize national and international fiddle competitions and released his first solo CD called “In Conversation” with famed pianist Susie Petrov. He has spent the last few summers absorbing the old tunes of the Donegal region while spending time with the great fiddling family, the charming and talented Campbell brothers, now in their latter 70s. Calum is also an educator and Orchestral Director at Hewlett Woodmere Schools where he conducts Chamber, String Ensemble and leads a class in music theory.

Gladys Henderson’s first chapbook of poetry, Eclipse of Heaven, was published by Finishing Line Press, June 2008. An award-winning poet, she was awarded first place in eight competitions on Long Island from 2004 to 2010. In 2006 she was announced a finalist for the Paumanok Poetry Award. In 2010 she was named the Walt Whitman Birthplace Poet of the Year, and she won 2^nd Place in the 2013 String Poet Prize.