Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Oregon Poetry Association”
Not long after I returned to poetry writing, I began to enter my work in the adult contests sponsored by the Oregon Poetry Association. The Oregon Poetry Association (OPA) is a vibrant organization spreading its passion for poetry to every corner of the state of Oregon and beyond…
My poem, “Sword Ferns on a Tree in Portland, Oregon” has won First Place in the Members Only Contest of the Oregon Poetry Association Fall 2026 Contest. Contest winners will be invited to read their winning poems at the Oregon Poetry Association’s 70th Anniversary Conference to be held at the convention center in Salem, Oregon on August 28 & 29, 2026 …
My prose poem, “The Singer,” has won Second Place in the Oregon Poetry Association 2026 Poetry Contest for Members Only. Contest winners will be invited to read their winning poems at the Oregon Poetry Association’s 70th Anniversary Conference to be held at the convention center in Salem, Oregon on August 28 & 29, 2026…
A few months back, I entered the Fall 2025 Adult Contest of the Oregon Poetry Association. One of the categories this time was called Extended Prompt. The rules were one page and one poem maximum in any form following the prompt, “Turning Point.” The judge, Richard Tillinghast, provided some additional guidance: “Write a poem about a turning point in your life, a landmark event or life-choice. Something—
good or bad—has happened that changes everything.”
I was when fifty-four years old when I wrote this free-verse sorta/kinda sexy love poem, “My Bikini Goes to Goodwill.” I remember the day I was cleaning out closets and drawers to fill a box I would later drop off at the Corvallis Goodwill store. That was when I found the forgotten and quite skimpy, two-piece bikini…
My yet-unpublished prose poem, “Thresholds of More Oblivious Blossoming,” has received the First Honorable Mention in the Form/Prose Poem Category of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2024 Contest. The category judge, Rana Tahir, wrote…
Here is another one of my old chestnuts I Publication News: “Remembering Gravity”
Here is another one of my old chestnuts, as I call them—ditties I wrote when I was just taking up the pen and paper again almost twenty years ago and trying to re-learn what makes a good poem. Looking at these oldies but goodies again now, in 2024, I can see I would write them very differently now!
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I started my creative writing journey in the wilds of prose, specifically fiction. My SUNY-Binghamton graduate school classes concentrated on fiction; my master’s thesis was a novel-in-progress. Even when I started making the shift to writing more poetry, I still dabbled in the prose poem—it felt familiar and doable to me. According to the Poetry Foundation, a prose poem is “a prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.”
In Fall 2012, I volunteered to be the judge for the New Poets category of the Oregon Poetry Association (OPA) contests. The OPA definition of a new poet is someone with no more than two poems published in print or online journals. Anything self-published or posted on a personal website or blog also counts as published…
“A Month of Sundays” is a freewheeling, leaping, highly experimental poem that glories in sonics and sound. In it, I took the English names for every month of the calendar year, fractured them into syllables then refashioned them into the language used in a dozen quatrains, beginning and ending with the month of July. I remember it was fun to write
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