The Greenfield Annual Word Festival will run from Tuesday, October 18th to Sunday, October 23rd in Greenfield. I will be reading on Friday at 7 pm the Root Cellar, 10 Fiske Ave. with some wonderful poets including Lori Desrosiers, Anita Gallers, Debbie Tosun Kilday, Colin Haskings, Michael L. Kilday, to name a few. Join us for this word marathon.
poetry
Reading at Amherst Art Walk October 6
Join me and four other fabulous poets at the Amherst Arts Night at the Emily Dickinson Museum on Thursday, October 6 at approximately 7 pm
Featured Readers are:
Howie Faerstein
Tommy Twilite Clark
Gerald Yelle
Marian Kent
There will also be Poetry Open Mic at 6 and Art in the Homestead by Rebecca Fricke. It should be a great night.
https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/node/558
Winning Writers Has Been Kind
I was grateful to learn I earned Honorable Mention in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest:
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2015
Congratulations to the winners of the 2015 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest!
Honorable Mention:
- Donald Adamson, Proper and Enduring, Poetry
- David Hill, After Wounded Knee, Poetry
- Justin Hunt, My Mother, My Father, Poetry
- Laura M. Kaminski, Hush, Poetry
- Ray Keifetz, Night Farming in Bosnia, Poetry
- Maribeth Pittman, Two Women in an Unbalanced Street Scene, Poetry
- Shoshauna Shy, Keepsake, Poetry
- Eileen P. Kennedy, Migration, Traditional Verse
- Allegra Keys, Thin Line Between Love and Hate, Traditional Verse
- Kathleen McClung, Lighter Than Her Lace: A Crown of Borrowed Self-Portraits, Traditional Verse
- Katy McKinney, Worm Bin Sestina, Traditional Verse
- Stuart J. Silverman, Letter to Her Father, Traditional Verse
- Jeff Walt, Serial Killer Sonnet, Traditional Verse
Judge Ellaraine Lockie comments on the winning entries
Traditional poetry forms have had a blockbuster year in the 2015 Contest. The winners’ list includes: two sonnet crowns, two sestinas, a villanelle, a palindrome, a pantoum, an elegy, three ekphrastic poems, and two poems with such distinct and unique construction as to be classified nonce forms. Read our press release announcing the winners.
You can read my winning poem, and the other winners as well at:
Help Massachusetts get a Poet Laureate
Did you know that Massachusetts is one of only five states without an official poet laureate? The home of Bishop, Bradstreet, Dickinson, Cummings, Kunitz, Longfellow, Frost, Olson, Sexton, Plath, Lowell… And no poet laureate? Ouch!
A bill to remedy the situation has already passed the state house. Contact the senate Ways and Means Committee to ask that the bill is brought up for a vote, and that we have a Massachusetts state poet laureate.
The London Book Festival Has Been Kind
The London Book Festival Awarded Banshees an Honorable Mention among Poetry Books for 2016. I am grateful for the acknowledgment of my work.
The Greatness of Such Space
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
–Hart Crane
Call of the Sea
Herons, pelicans, and gulls glide like dreams
through cloud-portals, cloud-porticos, and cloud-porte-cochères
Giotto could have done with his passion for blues and dimensions.
Hard not to love a place always called by possibility.
–Spencer Reese
Mountain and River
In my country there is a mountain.
In my country there is a river.
Come with me.
Night rises up the mountain.
The faint longing down in the river.
Come with me.
–Pablo Neruda
Ciudad Colon
For all those who have asked me about where I go in the winter, I am showing pictures of Colon, Costa Rica. I live about a half mile above Colon and usually go into the Centro for cafe con leche or errands sometime during the day. It is a writer’s paradise for which I am very grateful.
One Good Sentence
“No es cierto que la gente deja de perseguir sueños porque crecen viejos, envejecen porque dejan de perseguir sueños”.
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez
Eileen P. Kennedy Author 