Poets Illya Kaminsky, Bruce Beasley, and Alexandra Teague are among the faculty of the Centrum Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, which will take place July 15 – 23 at Fort Worden State Park in Washington.  Scholarships are available. For more information, visit www.centrum.org/theport-townsend-writers-conference.

It was fun returning to SFSU to attend the Creative Writing Student Awards Reading and Reception, and to share my memories of Kay Boyle.  The campus never looked better, just the way a bustling urban campus should look: the expanded library sparkles in its glass skin and the new humanities building adds a note of verticality.  My thanks to Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff of the Poetry Center for making me feel so welcome, and congratulations to all of this year’s graduates and honorees. I thought that all of the students who read were amazing, and everyone showed the kind of originality and attention to detail that can make a writing life.       

The Southern Humanities Review is sponsoring the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, open through June, to honor the late Jake Adam York…WaterWood Press is sponsoring the Carolyn Forche’ Prize for Humanitarian Poetry, open through mid-August…The Spokane Prize for Short Fiction offers an award of $2,000 and publication, open until June 15th…Information on hundreds of writing grants and awards can be found at www.pw.org.

Reading Reynolds Price’s preface to his Collected Poems (1997), I came across a reference to Poetry as a Means of Grace, by C.G. Osgood.  “Conceived in the 1940s as lectures to young Princeton theologians, Osgood’s still keenly provocative chapters propose that, in a hectic and book-filled world, a thoughtful person might well choose a single inexhaustible poet and fix upon that poet’s work as a lifelong spring of refreshment in the driest times.”  Price’s choice, early on, was Milton, but he also had a special kinship with Dickenson. When I met him, Price was fresh from his first literary success and teaching a class in fiction writing. At the time, I had no idea he wrote poetry, that you could do both, but it’s clear that poetry remained for him a saving grace through youth and old age, health and disability.  In “Pears,” he depicts the ephemerality of experience and memory with quick brushstrokes, and in “Neighbors,” inhabits his dilemma in the form of inquiry:

“My name is Edward Reynolds Price,

So here on the ward, I’m Edward Price.

 

Last night I looked at my new neighbor’s door.

He’s Edward Reynolds, plain as ink.

 

Which one is the other’s doppelganger?

Scapegoat?  Porter of an alternate fate?”