the journal where poetry and music meet
This issue is dedicated to the memory of composer Steven R. Gerber
– September 28, 1948 – May 28, 2015 –
Lauren Camp
Carol Frith
Laverne Frith
George Held
Ryan Hibbett
Richard Meyer
George H. Northrup
Sharon Olson
Wally Swist
Rob Wright
Margaret Rockwell Finch and Marta Rijn Finch
with poem by Margaret Rockwell Finch
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 Spring 2016. Winner and Runners-up published in Winter 2015 issue of String Poet and invited to read at the Awards Ceremony. All contest submissions are considered for publication in journal. String Poet does not solicit poems solely on the subject of music. There is no theme for submissions. Reading the journal archives is a great way to become familiar with the type of work that String Poet publishes.
Entry Fee: $15.00 — include up to 5 poems, up to 40 lines per poem
Submissions deadline: June 29, 2015
Final Judge: Bruce Guernsey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University where he taught creative writing and American Literature for twenty-five years. He has also taught at William and Mary, Johns Hopkins, the University of New Hampshire, and Virginia Wesleyan College where he was the poet in residence for four years. A graduate with honors from Colgate University, he holds M.A.’s from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins and a PhD from New Hampshire, writing his dissertation on tools as metaphor in Robert Frost’s poetry.
Bruce’s poems have appeared in well-known publications such as Poetry, The Atlantic, American Scholar, and many of the quarterlies. His work has also appeared in more diverse places like Cat Fancy, The Journal of Medical Opinion, and Yankee. His books of poetry include Lost Wealth (Basilisk Press, 1974), January Thaw (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), The Lost Brigade (Water Press and Media, 2004), and New England Primer (Cherry Grove Collections, 2008). His selected poems collection, From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010, was published by Ecco Qua Press in 2012. He is also the author of seven chapbooks.
His honors include fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a “Featured Poet” on the Illinois Poet Laureate Web Site, and former US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, has selected five of his poems for the international column, “American Life in Poetry.” His residency awards include the NEA Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in 2011, as well as past residencies at Ragdale, the Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and Norton Island off the coast of Maine. The recipient of Fulbright Senior Lectureships in American poetry to Portugal and Greece, he has also twice sailed around the world as a faculty member with Semester at Sea.
In 2006, Bruce was invited to edit The Spoon River Poetry Review through the winter/spring issue of 2010. The magazine received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for both 2008 and 2009. He is the founding editor and former letterpress printer of Penyeach Press which recently published Mapping the Line: Poets on Teaching (2013), a collection of classroom tested essays on poetry writing by some of the country’s best poet/teachers.
Bruce’s own prose has also found publication in a variety of magazines, including War, Literature, and the Arts, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fly Rod & Reel, and Dappled Things. His essay, “The Raven’s Gift”, won the creative nonfiction award from the literary magazine Flyway. His memoir The Sunburned Daughter has been serialized throughout 2014 by the on-line journal, The Wild River Review.
For his teaching, Dr. G. was awarded seven faculty excellence awards while at EIU, and in 1992 was awarded the State of Illinois Board of Governors’ Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor offered in that state system. He was also twice nominated for the Carnegie Institute United States Professor of the Year.
He and his wife, the artist and jeweler Victoria Woollen-Danner, divide their time between Charleston, Illinois, and their home in Bethel, Maine. Together, they have five children and four granddaughters, plus a variety of dogs and cats (the latter all with Boston Red Sox’ names).
Composer: Joelle Wallach writes music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo voices and choruses. Her String Quartet 1995 was the American Composers Alliance nominee for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The New York Philharmonic Ensembles premiered her octet, From the Forest of Chimneys, written to celebrate their 10th anniversary; and the New York Choral Society commissioned her secular oratorio, Toward a Time of Renewal, for 200 voices and orchestra to commemorate their 35th Anniversary Season in Carnegie Hall. Wallach’s ballet, Glancing Below,a 1999 Juilliard Dance Theater showcase production originally commissioned by the Carlisle Project, was premiered in Philadelphia during the summer of1994, entered the repertory of the Hartford Ballet in February 1995, and received its New York City premiere that June. As early as 1980 her choral work, On the Beach at Night Alone, won first prize in the Inter-American Music Awards. Wallach grew up in Morocco, but makes her home in New York City, where she was born. Her early training in piano, voice, theory, bassoon and violin included study at the Juilliard Preparatory Division, and she earned bachelors and masters degrees at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University respectively. In 1984 the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with John Corigliano, granted her its first doctorate in composition. A pre-concert lecturer for the New York Philharmonic for several subscription series, Ms Wallach speaks on a broad range of musical subjects, bringing fresh insights to familiar works and opening doors to modern ones and to those less frequently heard
Last year’s String Poet Prize was awarded to Richard Meyer for his poem, “The Autumn Way,” which was set to music by composer Judith Shatin, and performed by cellist Suzanne Mueller.
Submissions should be made, along with the entry fee, by 11:59 PM PDT on June 29, 2015.
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.
Send your poem(s) and payment, postmarked on or before June 29th, 2015 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.
Michael Cantor
Karen D’Amato
Laura Foley
Catherine Abbey Hodges
Janet R. Kirchheimer
Len Krisak
Mary Makofske
Richard Meyer
George H. Northrup
Ellin Sarot
Renée M. Schell
Muriel Harris Weinstein
A wonderful evening of poetry and music, featuring a poetry reading by Finalist Judge David Yezzi, followed by readings of the poems that placed or received honorable mentions.
The event culminated in a reading of Richard Meyer’s First-Prize winning poem, “The Autumn Way,” followed by the debut of Composer Judith Shatin’s original piece of music, inspired by the winning poem.
Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Able Muse, 14 Magazine, The Raintown Review, Measure, Alabama Literary Review, Light, and The Evansville Review. His poem “Fieldstone” was selected as the winner of the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize, and his poem “La Gioconda” was chosen as a top sonnet in the 2013 Great River Shakespeare Festival.
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.
Cellist Suzanne Mueller is a native and resident of Long Island (NY). She is a graduate of both the Pre-College and College of The Juilliard School. Her teachers have included Marion Feldman, Alexander Kouguell, Lorne Munroe, Leslie Parnas, Channing Robbins, and Harvey Shapiro, and she has coached with artists including Joseph Fuchs, Margot Garrett, William Lincer, and, for non-classical cello and perspective, Eugene Friesen.
She made her New York recital debut under the auspices of Artists International as a member of the piano/cello Elysian Duo, and went on to perform as half of its successor, Elysian II, for ten years, before forming CROSS ISLAND with pianist Elinor Abrams Zayas in 2007.
Suzanne has been Beech Tree Concerts Artist-in-Residence at Old Westbury Gardens (Long, Island, NY) since 2003. There, she presents a series of outdoor summer concerts in a broad range of genres with various partners. She is a also a frequent performer on the Composer’s Voice concert series, presenting new music by living composers. Suzanne is a member of the New Directions Cello Association, of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and of the Mu Phi Epsilon music fraternity.
In 2013, she released her first solo CD, Solitaire, featuring a number of premieres, several written especially for her. Composers represented are J.S. Bach, Barbara Bach Sternberg, Greg Bartholomew, Bela Bartok, Douglas DaSilva, Lawrence Kramer, Nicholas Chen McConnell, Jimmy Pigott, J.P. Redmond, Bettie Ross, Rick Sowash, David Wolfson, and Carol Worthey.
String Poet is pleased to announce the results of the 2014 String Poet Prize, as chosen by Final Judge David Yezzi. We thank all those who entered, and offer our congratulations to the winner and runners-up!
“The Autumn Way” – Richard Meyer
“Anniversaries” – Ellin Sarot
“Beyond Vienna” – Renée M. Schell
Look for these poems, along with other String Poet Prize finalists and fine poets in a forthcoming issue of String Poet. Don’t forget to Subscribe to the String Poet Newsletter and Like us on Facebook to get updates about the coming Award Ceremony in September 2014. We hope to see you there!
String Poet Founder and Editor Annabelle Moseley has been named 2014 Long Island Poet of the Year by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Board of Trustees.
Join us at the Walt Whitman Birthplace on October 19 from 1-3 PM for the Award Ceremony and wine and cheese reception!
Annabelle Moseley, 2014 WWBA Long Island Poet of the Year, is the award-winning author of several collections of poetry including The Clock of the Long Now (David Robert Books, 2012) which made The Poetry Foundation’s best-seller list for poetry in 2012; The Divine Tour (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and The Fish Has Swallowed Earth (Aldrich Publishing, 2012). Her newest collection, a double volume, A Ship to Hold The World and The Marionette’s Ascent is forthcoming in December 2014. She is the author of the young adult novel: The Delaney: Journey to Banba, and a collection of children’s poetry: 10 Hero Fables. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, Moseley has published poems in such journals as Able Muse, The Seventh Quarry, The Nervous Breakdown, Measure and The National Review. In April 2011, her poem, “Breakable,” was chosen by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of twelve poems selected from thousands to be featured on Oprah.com. Moseley is the winner of a 2008 Amy Award from Poets & Writers. The first Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer-in-Residence, 2009-2010, Moseley is founder and editor of String Poet, the online literary journal of poetry and music, and host of The New York Times-featured String Poet Studio Series at The Long Island Violin Shop. Moseley is a Lecturer at St. Joseph’s College and teaches poetry workshops at the Walt Whitman Birthplace and other Long Island/New York metro area cultural centers.
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Janet Packer, a wonderful musician and human being. String Poet was fortunate enough to be graced by Janet’s warmth and great talent as both a performer in our Studio Series, and also as the featured musician in String Poet Volume 3, Issue 1.
Jean Free
Marcene Gandolfo
Gladys Henderson
Jeff Holt
Siham Karami
Ed Shacklee
Gail Thomas
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 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.
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.
Send your poem(s) and payment, postmarked on or before May 20th, 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.
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.
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 2nd Place in the 2013 String Poet Prize.
Donna Barkman
Debra Bruce
Marta Rijn Finch
Claudia Gary
Gladys Henderson
Jean L. Kreiling
Carol Levin
Kathryn Howd Machan
Sharon Fish Mooney
Carolyn Moore