New poetry column; student poetry winners to be announced
Saturday, May 7, 2005 11:40 PM PDT
By Staff
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Student winners
The winners of The Daily News Young People's Poetry Contest will be announced in the feature section next Sunday, May 15.
Pat Andrus, a poet and writing instructor at Bellevue Community College who has a special interest in children's poetry, judged more than 450 entries in our contest. Andrus reports that there are ties in almost all of the age categories. In all, we will be announcing a record 36 contest winners.
Andrus has an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. She is the author of two collections of poetry, "Old Woman of Irish Blood" and "Daughter," and has had poems published in more than 70 periodicals. A painter as well as a poet, she has been a guest reader on public radio and participated in numerous poetry events.
Poet to launch Salal Review
Peter Pereira, a physician and poet, will introduce the new edition of the Salal Review at Lower Columbia College with a campus workshop and evening event May 20 at the college.
Co-sponsored by the Longview Public Library's Northwest Voices, Pereira will present the workshop at xxxx and read his work at xxxx.
The college also invites the community to read "Saying the World," a three-part collection of Pereira's poems that "offers powerful images and vignettes from the life of a family practitioner living and working among the urban poor. ... Despite the pain and grief attested to in many of the poems, a lively voice of clarity, compassion and consent to the goodness of life" gives the collection "a note of celebration," one reviewer wrote.
New poetry column
Ted Kooser, the Poet Laureate of the United States who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year, is writing a weekly column on poetry for newspapers. The column, American Life in Poetry, will begin today and run weekly in the This Sunday section. Kooser will not write all the poems but rather choose and introduce worthy works.
Kooser was born in Iowa in 1939. He is the author of 10 collections of poetry and has won a slew of literary prizes, including two NEA fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Nebraska Book Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers for 2002.
A former vice president of an insurance company, Kooser is a visiting professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His wife, Kathleen Rutledge, is the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star, a Lee newspaper.
American Life in Poetry
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
We all know that the manner in which people behave toward one another can tell us a lot about their private lives. In this amusing poem by David Allen Evans, poet laureate of South Dakota, we learn something about a marriage by being shown a couple as they take on an ordinary household task.
Neighbors
They live alone
together,
she with her wide hind
and bird face,
he with his hung belly
and crewcut.
They never talk
but keep busy.
Today they are
washing windows
(each window together)
she on the inside,
he on the outside.
He squirts Windex
at her face,
she squirts Windex
at his face.
Now they are waving
to each other
with rags,
not smiling.
Reprinted from "Train Windows," Ohio University Press, 1976. By permission of the author.
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