The Apostrophe Blog
Once again, a poetry manuscript of mine has made it close to getting the big prize—publication and money!—but not quite. Sigh. My poetry collection, Brief Campaigns of Sting and Sweet, got as far as semi-finalist for the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Book Prize. These folks at Fence recently published a couple of my poems so, encouragingly, they seemed to have an affinity for my work. And this is a contest where your work is not submitted anonymously. So for the entire judging process, they knew my name.
And I really respect what Fence has been trying to offer the literary world since its founding by Rebecca Wolff in 1997. This particular nugget from their original manifesto definitely resonated with me:
Ҧ a marker of territory
Fence is a response to a perceived need. We wish to provide a reliable home for the fence-sitters: those writers who are intent on following the lead of what they truly hear as opposed to what they have heard before or what they have read about and with which they hope to align themselves.”
Still, it is hard not to be disappointed—and to just want to throw your hands up in the air and give up on this poetry contest racket for the foreseeable future. It is just so easy to get dispirited by all this submitting stuff, time and time again. To what end, I ask myself, especially these days of getting older and time running out? Plus, given all the utter madness that is currently upon this land, worrying about poetry can often seem like a first-world problem, right? In spite of not being the winner, I truly am grateful that the good folks at Fence valued my work and thought it worthy of advancing through the multiple hoops to make it closer to the end. I will be curious to learn how many manuscripts were submittted for this contest; maybe that will make me feel cheerier about being a bridesmaid once again?
The public domain image above is of the 1908 painting, The Bridesmaid, by Carl Larsson in the collection of the Finnish National Gallery.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Publication in Fence, Winter 2025 - March 22, 2025
- Ever the (Poetry) Bridesmaid, Never the Bride… - March 18, 2025
- Buy Nothing Day - March 1, 2025
