Monthly Archives: March 2007

Poetry Contest

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I entered the National Writers Union (Chapter 7) poetry competition this year, judged by Adrienne Rich. Got the announcement of the winners the other day. I didn’t win, but I didn’t expect to. Though I have won competitions over the years, whenever I enter a competition I take the attitude that it’s mostly a crapshoot. Not that the judging isn’t honest, at least sometimes — it’s just that there are so many contingencies. I was a reader for a couple of national competitions years ago & I know how many minor things can tip the decision one way or another.

Duemer’s Poetry Competition Formula: Take a contingency factor of 10 & multiply that by the number of poems entered in the competition, then divide by some factor representing the screeners’ & final judge’s integrity & acumen — say 9.5 for Ms. Rich & 1.5 for Jorie Graham — & you will have a number representing the chance of any given poem winning a competition. Or something like that.

The winner of the Writers Union competition was Luisa A. Igloria, for her poem “Descent.” (Here is the title poem of her most recent book.) Second place went to Hila Ratzabi, for “Seeing.” Her blog, which is mostly about knitting, is here. Melissa Tuckey placed third in the competition: her website looks to be under construction. I couldn’t find anything of substance online about one of the honorable mentions, Elisa Pulido, except that she seems to be a political activist in the Bay Area; but I found a poem in Rattle by Glen Morazzini, the other honorable mention. I wouldn’t attempt to make any broad generalizations about the winners, except this: they seem to be making their way within the American cultural economy. Like me. There were no real outsiders, but then outsiders don’t enter contests, even those sponsored by left-wing organizations like the Writers Union.

My congratulations to the winners. According to the contest guidelines, Igloria’s poem will appear in Poetry Flash, but I hope the other poets’ poems will become available online. Otherwise, one might think this was just a way for the Writers Union to raise a little cash from entry fees. At $5 a poem, if a thousand poems were entered — a conservative estimate — that’s $5000. Subtract the prize of $1000 & an honorarium to Adrienne Rich & you have a small but tidy profit. A web page with the winning poems would cost essentially nothing & would be a fair & decent way to reward the winners within the context of the cultural economy in which they work.

Waiting it Out

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Dear diary: It started snowing yesterday afternoon & has kept snowing steadily for the last twenty-four hours. About a foot so far. Most of the snow we’d had in February had melted last week, just leaving some crusts in shadows & hollows, but we are definitely back to winter conditions. In the north country March comes in like a lion & leaves like a lion. I pretty much blew today off, I’m ashamed to say. It’s not like I don’t have any work to do; it’s just that the weather slammed the lid down on my energy & ambition. Read the news, surfed the web, installed a WordPress plugin to deal with the mountains of spam that suddenly started hitting the site, watched golf on TV.  In a few minutes I’m going to go down to the kitchen & make some chicken burritos & that will be the most focused & creative thing I’ve done all day. So I’m waiting out the snow, waiting out winter.

Spring Break?

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I don’t have classes to meet on Fridays, so in some sense today is the beginning of my Spring Break, but I can’t let myself think of it that way. I have about sixty student essays to grade & I need to make substantial progress on getting my Vietnam course fully on-line for its summer debut. Those two things alone add up to many hours of work, so I’m essentially on eight to ten hour work days over “break.”

I briefly noted a couple of weeks back that I was using Turnitin.com’s Grademark tool. Now that I have had more experience with it, I’m even more impressed than I was initially. It has loads of useful marks preloaded & it allows me to create custom comments on a clipboard, give them names & reuse them. The system allows me to underline, highlight, strikeout, & attach a comment to any of those marks. The comment hides in an icon until a student puts their mouse over it, which keeps the text relatively uncluttered. The interface is easy to use once you get used to it. I have found that I make more substantive comments because all the picky, mechanical issues can be handled by dragging & dropping a preformatted mark into the text. There is also a feature that allows me to make a general comment at the end of the essay. The result is that it takes me about the same amount of time to grade an essay, but in that time I can give the student a greater density of useful feedback.

Now, off to load some content for the summer course into Blackboard, a program with a much less intuitive user interface. On the upside, I’m sitting on my bed with three sleeping terriers surrounding me & a chocolate lab on the floor. Pretty good working conditions. Love having the laptop.

And Candy Makes Four

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Dogs that is. (Boy am I going to get splogged on that post title!) Anyway, here is a picture of the newest Jack Russell, who joins two other JRTs & a chocolate lab in our household. We got her from the shelter yesterday after our friend Amy spotted here there. Amazing how quickly she settled into the pack, though I do catch the other dogs pouting occasionally. It’s always tough having a new baby in the house. First thing she said to the two other JRTs when she arrived: “Well, at least I was smart enough to keep my tail.”

Candy

Update: Couple of little dust-ups this morning, the first between Candy & the old terrier Penny. Candy apparently got in Penny’s face with a chew toy & Penny’s dignity was insulted. Carole picked Penny up & I took Candy out of the room. No blood was shed, no skin broken. And a minute later the old lab knocked Candy over for being a little too much in his face. This is just how dogs figure out where they stand in the pack, though it can be a little unsettling to us humans. And then a minute ago Candy was sitting on my lap & began growling at her own reflection on the glass covering a painting on the wall a few feet away. Our other dogs have never paid much attention to their own reflections, but this is the second or third time I’ve seen her do this. Last night she was very curious about why we keep a terrier behind the oven door in the kitchen. Here is the rest of the crew: Jett, Penny & Angel:


Jett Penny Angel