More Perihelion:
High School Poetry Contest Winners
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Martha Zweig
Martha Zweig, this issue's featured poet
is the author of two full-length poetry collections, What Kind, Wesleyan University Press, 2003, and Vinegar Bone, 1999, also from Wesleyan. Powers, published by the Vermont Council on the Arts, is her chapbook. She received a Whiting Writer's Award, and her poems have appeared widely in literary journals including: Northwest Review, Manoa, Boston Review, The Journal, Ploughshares, Literary Imagination, The Gettysburg Review, The Progressive, Field, and The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Vera Kroms received a BA and MA in mathematics, and she currently works as a programmer in Boston. She has studied with Lucie Brock-Broido for many years. Recent work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Full Circle and Birmingham
Poetry Review.
Li Bo (701-762), perhaps more recognizable under the old romanization of Li Po, was one of the most eminent poets of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), if not the greatest of China. Possibly of Turkic origin, he grew up in Sichuan (Szechwan). In the 720s he traveled toward the capital of Chang'an, and in 742 managed to be appointed to a post in the Hanlin Academy by Emperor Xuanzong. At court he acquired a reputation for his drunken insouciance. The instability of his political support resulted in his expulsion from the court two years later. He spent his remaining years attempting to restore himself to favor with the court. Some one thousand poems of his survive, many of which were representative of the cult of spontaneity in Chinese poetry. His subtle, self-conscious celebration of his own talent sowed the seed for the idea of artistic genius in China. Widely translated in the Western languages, he captured the imagination of Ezra Pound, whose rendition of one of his minor poems became the well-known "A River Merchant's Wife: A Letter." This issue of Perihelion offers a different interpration. For further reading, see the translations by Elling Eide, Poems by Li Po (Lexington, 1984), or by David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Li Po (New York, 1996).
Christopher Mulrooney's poems can be found in Folio, Euphony, Combo,and Poetry Salzburg Review, among others. He is author of notebook and sheaves.
Ander Monson's work appears in Fence, Quarterly West, Many Mountains Moving, Willow Springs, Pleiades, Meridian, and The Florida Review. He is also an editor and designer for DIAGRAM and New Michigan Press
Melissa Ahart is a web associate at The Academy of American Poets and webmaster for Poets Out Loud at Fordham University. Her work has appeared in 2River View, Conspire, Eleven Bulls, The Gallatin Review, and The Minetta Review.
Arguably his country's most eminent and widely honored writer, Ursachi, having defected from Romania to the US in 1981 after previously enduring imprisonment and solitary confinement for an earlier escape attempt, returned after the December 1989 revolution. In 1992, he was awarded the first national Mihai Eminescu Poetry Prize since World War II. In 1998 Ursachi published his tenth book of poetry, a career retrospective, Madness and Light, which will also be the title of Adam Sorkin's book of translations now in progress. Some of his works have appeared in Artful Dodge, Third Coast, Runes, River City, Many Mountains Moving, Tampa Review, Archipelago, Modern Poetry in Translation, Prism International, and West Branch (among others). Ursachi was Romania's Nobel Prize nominee in literature in 2001.
Sommer Browning is published in Gulf Stream Magazine and Del Sol Review and has poems forthcoming in Spork. She is in the MFA program at University of Arizona in Tucson.
Donna Johnson grew up in Tennessee, but now lives and works in the Boston area. She has published poems and reviews in Birmingham Poetry Review, Café Review, Green Mountains Review, Tulane Review, Two Rivers Review and Del Sol Review. In 1999 she won the University of Nevada's Black Rock Press Poetry Broadside Competition. She received an Honorable Mention in the Fall 2002 Two Rivers Poetry Prize contest.
G. C. Waldrep recently won the 2003 Colorado Prize for his collection, GOLDBEATER'S SKIN which is forthcoming in December, 2003 from CLP/University of Colorado Press. Other poems have appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review and he has work forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Conduit, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, and Tin House. His nonfiction book, Southern Workers and the Search for Community was released in late 2000 from University of Illinois Press. Mr. Waldrep lives in North Carolina.
Karen D'Amato teaches composition and poetry writing at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in anthologies including Summer Home Review, When a Lifemate Dies: Stories of Love Loss and Healing, and Grolier Prize 1998.
Maria Terrone's first book of poetry, The Bodies We Were Loaned, was published by The Word Works in 2002. Her work appears in several anthologies: The Heart of Autumn (Beacon Press, forthcoming, fall 2003); The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (The Feminist Press, 2002); and The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line Press, 2003). Her poetry, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Award, has appeared in magazines including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Hudson Review, and Poetry International and has been featured on the Web site Poetry Daily. The recipient of poetry prizes from Willow Review, Passages North, and Wind, she directs communications for Queens College of the City University of New York.
Rahel Bluwstein (1890-1931) was born in Vyatka in Russia and arrived in Eretz-Israel at the age of 19. She first worked as a laborer in Rehovot and later joined a training farm near the Kinneret. Eventually she settled in Tel-Aviv, where most of her poems were written during the last six years of her life. She published two books of her poems during her lifetime, Safiah and Mineged. Her collected poems was published posthumously in 1935 and has since appeared in many editions.
Known also by his pen name, townee, davis has composed well over 2, 000 poems. davis works for UPS and the state of California; shares time & space with a gifted woman, susan kim, and they expect a daughter late in august. He has two others, kate davis and lake davis. He has twice hiked Mt. Whitney. davis served a term in the U.S. Army, visiting Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and France. His verse is printed in the Sacramento anthology 100 poems and in many other publications including Pierian Springs, Kota Press, Stirring, Locust magazine, Octavio, Kinte Space, La Petite Zine and Pig Iron Malt.
davis writes because he was called "ink" in a vision.
Li Qingzhao (1084 - c. 1151) was arguably the foremost woman poet of China. Born in Licheng (in what is known today as Shandong) into a literary family during the waning days of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), she endured much tribulation from political and military turbulence. Had she been a man, her talent would have give her quick rise to fame in the male sphere of government. Her ambitions were limited to a private life, and it appears that her marriage was blissful, though as their contemporaries realized her husband had far less literary talent. An incursion by the northern Jurchen tribe proved quite traumatic to her personally as it deprived her of all her belongs and forced her to flee alone for months. After her husband's death she remarried and quickly divorced for malfeasance and mistreatment. Little is known of her life after that. Only a small fraction of her work, which encompassed poetry, painting, literary criticism, and epigraphy, survive: approximately 100 poems and five essays, including the "Discourse on the Lyric." For a translation, see Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, Li Ch'ing-chao: Complete Poems (New York, 1979).
Sophie Wadsworth's poetry has recently appeared in Sycamore Review, Meridian, and The Malahat Review. She lives in Harvard, Massachusetts.
Yaakov Fichman was born in Bessarabia in 1881. He left home at the age of fourteen and spent the next thirty years moving among various cities in Russia, Western Europe, and Palestine. He remained an adherent of the classical lyric tradition which was reflected in biblical poems, elegies, and the literary works which he edited in Warsaw and Israel. An influential editor and anthologist, he gained recognition for his impressionistic critical essays and his conscious artistry. He died in 1958
Todd Samuelson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston. He recently received a Donald Barthelme fellowship and is a Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast magazine. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Fat Matter Press, his imprint, produces letterpress editions of poetry. He lives in Houston with his wife and daughter.
Sarah Busse lives with her husband and son in San Mateo, CA. She
has poems forthcoming in Four Corners magazine.
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