Hitting the Honorable Mention Jackpot

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Awards, Publication News

The Apostrophe Blog

Musings on Writing and Life.

In the Spring 2023 Oregon Poetry Association poetry contests, I got three honorable mentions for some of my newer poems. Now to find publication homes for them! Here’s the skinny:

Honorable Mention for “Of the Wild Bees Living in a Tree in the Alley” in the Wildlife Themed Category; 2nd Honorable Mention for “A Baffling Earth” in the Traditional—Epistolary category; and 3rd Honorable Mention for “Ernestine” in the Members Only Category. The first two are part of my current project to weave lines from Emily Dickinson’s body of work into my poems, a kind of homage and conversation.

I wrote the third poem, “Ernestine,” after a visit to the Oregon State Hospital Cremains Memorial in Salem, Oregon. There the cremains of Ernestine Kottke Plath, the poet Sylvia Plath’s grandmother, were in a canister marked #177 (out of a total of 3423) from her death in 1919 until being claimed by a relative after 101 years in 2020.

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