Reminder: Frank O'Hara Prize Reading - This Sunday

Join us next Sunday, September 22nd at 2:00pm for the 2013 WCPA Poetry Contest: Frank O'Hara Prize Winner's Reading.

Readings from contest winners Ann Sweetman, Helen Marie Casey, Missy Hall Nicholson; Honorable Mentions Jennifer Freed and James Kobialka; and contest judge Alice B. Fogel.

First Unitarian Church, The Bancroft Room, 90 Main Street. Worcester.

Volume 34 Cover Unveiled

That's right!  Volume 34 - Wormtown Jazz:  From Cole Porter to the Twenty-first Century is almost here!

Your sneak peek: The Cover, designed by Monica Elefterion.

Thank you for stopping by at stART on the Street

We'd like to thank everyone that stopped by The Worcester Review table at stART on the Street today.  We appreciate it and hope you will swing by all the great poetry venues happening around the city.

Join us for the 2013 Frank O'Hara Prize Reading on Sunday, September 22nd!

The Worcester Review and the WCPA will host the 2013 Frank O'Hara Prize Reading on Sunday, September 22nd at 2:00PM.

Readings from contest winners Ann Sweetman, Helen Marie Casey, Missy Hall Nicholson; Honorable Mentions Jennifer Freed and James Kobialka; and contest judge Alice B. Fogel.

Refreshments will be served.

First Unitarian Church, The Bancroft Room, 90 Main Street, Worcester

What happens at The Review in the summer?

The Worcester Review is an annual publication. So you might be wondering, what exactly do we do to keep busy all year long? Turns out one of the reasons publishing is such a slow industry is that it takes a long time to prepare, design, and layout an issue. In the months of May and June, those are the primary tasks around here. Yesterday, my husband and I had the pleasure of visiting Worcester Academy to take some photos for the 2013 Feature Section on Cole Porter. It wasn't as glamorous as a photo shoot for Glamour, but it was cool to see the memorabilia. Photographing other photos (faded, fragile, and framed photos at that) did prove a challenge. Here's a peek inside the action:

We can't wait for the publication to appear this fall so we can share all the stories and images that Frank Callahan, Worcester Academy's historian, shared with us. Coming this fall!

Yusef Komunyakaa's "Gingkoes" (The Worcester Review, Volume XXXIII)

This month, we present you with the second sample poem from Volume 33, the latest issue of The Worcester Review.  The theme of this issue was "Chris Gilbert: Into the Emerging Landscape." 

Gingkoes

by Yusef Komunyakaa

When I retrace our footsteps
to Bloomington I recall talking jazz,
the half-forgotten South
in our mouths, the repitlian
brain swollen with manly regrets
left behind, thumbing volumes
inscribed to the dead in used
bookstores, & then rounding
griffins carved into limestone.
The gingkoes dropped fruit
at our feet & an old woman
scooped the smelly medicine
into a red plastic bucket,
laughing.  We walked across
the green reciting Hayden,
& I still believe those hours
we could see through stone.
I don't remember the girls
in summer dresses strollng
out of the movie on Kirkwood,
but in the Runcible Spoon
sniffing the air, Cat Stevens
on a speaker, we tried to buy
back our souls with reveries
& coffee, the scent of bathos
on our scuffed shoes.

           -- for Christopher Gilbert


Yusef Komunyakaa has published extensively: Copacetic, a collection of colloquial and jazz poems, 1984; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau (1988), The Dark Room Poetry Prize; The Chameleon Couch (2011); Warhorses (2008); Taboo: The Wishbone Triology, Part 1; Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), Pultizer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Magic City (1992).  His prose work is Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000).  He co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991), and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1995).  He received many awards including the National Endowment for the Arts, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.  He lives in New York City where he is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University's graduate creative writing program.

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Want to purchase a copy of TWR?  You can purchase a copy of Volume 33 by using the Purchase The Worcester Review dropdown list in the right column of the website.  You can also subscribe to future issues by visiting our Subscribe page.

Submissions Update

A note from your friendly managing editor

Dear Submitters:

Thanks to all who submitted during our winter submission period. Our editors are hard at work reading your poems and stories.

In case you were wondering how our process works, each piece is read by two separate editors. Editorial pairings are made such that each pair includes one scholar and one creative writer. The editors do not consult one another, so for a piece to be accepted, it must have independent approval from two editors. We accept less than 5% of submissions.

I have begun notifying submitters of the status of their work this week. I will continue responding to both paper and electronic submissions as editors complete their reading. I anticipate that I will be able to notify all submitters by mid-May. If you do not hear from me by mid-May, please drop me a line. I have had several emails bounce back to me already. If an email does not go through, I send a letter via snail mail, but if you did not include a SASE, I have no way to reach you.

If your work has been accepted elsewhere, please let me know as soon as possible. Further, if you submitted online, you can log on to your account and withdraw work yourself. I understand that we are slow to respond and we encourage writers to send simultaneous submissions, but it is very important for us to know if your work is no longer available.

On our end, we are working hard to improve reporting times. If you submitted between November 2012 and January 2013, your response time will be 4-7 months, which--while still slow--is much faster than our previous record of about 12 months. We will continue striving to improve in this regard, but please know that we are a volunteer editorial board. The Worcester Review is truly a labor of love, and we are grateful for the chance to read your work. We'd rather take our time to thoughtfully consider each piece than rush through the submissions.

We will reopen to submissions on May 1. We look forward to reading more great stories and poems!


Sincerely,

Diane Mulligan

Contact Diane