A big thank-you to Tyler Gardner of the Northfield Public Library for constructing this banner, and to Raymonde Noer for my author photo!
One of the best things about having other poets as friends is that when they publish books filled with thoughtful, insightful, musical poems you can be delighted for them. I met Scott Lowery many years ago in his then-home city of Winona. It was the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Competition that brought us together. We both have had winning entries. Scott’s work–whether in traditional forms, like sonnets, or in more organic shapes–is truly stand-out. I am delighted that he arranged for a reading to showcase Mutual Life (Finishing Line Press, 2023) here in Northfield so that you can meet him, too.
Scott’s work is topical yet timeless. Each of the twenty-three poems in his new collection shimmers with specific observation and language that manages to be at once flinty, spare, and distilled, yet also lush, filled with melody, and extravagantly memorable. Taken together, these poems ponder how humans struggle through turbulent times, awash with keen (but often unarticulated) hungers for individual relevance and connection. This collection invites us to broaden our humanity, to look up and out, as well as deep within.
In addition to a selection of poems from Mutual Life, Scott will also share some of the poems in his award-winning collection, Empty-Handed, originally published in 2013 and recently reissued by its publisher, Northfield’s own Red Dragonfly Press. In fact, Scott’s idea is to make the event a little more “Northfield.” Scott and I realized that our work shares some key themes, including hometown life, a Minnesota sense of place, inspiration from the art of others, climate anxieity, and the lessons gained from family. When he asked me to share the podium for this event, we saw an opportunity for a reading in which our poems might have a kind of conversation with each other. It will be an experiment for us, and it is one I am looking forward to!
I hope that you can join us on Tuesday, May 7 to meet Scott and hear him read his wonderful poems. LESLIE
It is February, a month when young and old turn to thoughts of love, Valentines, and, of course, sonnets. It is also the month when the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest opens to receive new submissions.
2023 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest
Call for EntriesEntries are now being accepted for the 2023 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. The entry process is a one-step system. Sonnet(s) must be submitted with the Entry Form. Complete instructions for entering are available on our website. The Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest is an annual event that welcomes entries from around the world.
Cash prizes, totaling over $3,000, will be awarded in several categories, including:Top Four Sonnets Regional (Four Winners – Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa) Best Youth (Four Winners – High School and Younger) Laureate’s Choice (Sixteen Winners)There is a $5 Entry Fee for up to three sonnets per entry. There is no fee for entrants in the Youth category (high school and younger) or for undergraduate college students.
For complete contest information, visit:sonnetcontest.org The deadline for entries is June 1, 2023. Submissions should be made through our on-line process, with payment option by PayPal or check. If this process presents a hardship, instructions for entering by mail will be provided upon request. Just send us an email: entries@sonnetcontest.org
Based in Winona, Minnesota, this magnificent yearly contest is a treasure and an opportunity. Past winning sonnets are listed on the MWF website (link above). Why not read some for fun, and then, if the spirit moves, try writing one of your own? You just might have a prize-winning sonnet of your own! Not sure how? The Sonnet Contest website includes guidelines as well as examples, and lots more information about poetry and the arts.
And, while sonnets have been connected for hundreds of years to love poetry, the sonnet is an incredibly flexible and dynamic form that can express a multitude of tones, emotions, ideas, and imagery.
Want more sonnets? The Academy of American Poets is offering a month of sonnets on their Poem-a-Day pages. Curated this month by guest editor Patricia Smith, each day in February 2023 will love poems in sonnet form by African American poets–honoring also National African American History Month. Here is an interview with Smith (in print and in recorded voice clip form) and a bit more about her own work as a poet.
And if you already have a favorite sonnet, I would love it if you would let me know!
In 2022, for the second time, I was able to join in the judging of the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. This phenomenal contest, now in its tenth year under the patronage of Ted Haaland, husband of the late Maria W. Faust, has grown from 85 entries in 2013. In 2022, 700 sonnets were received from 42 US states plus Washington, DC and 10 other countries—an increase of 15% over 2021. Entries in the Youth category jumped 50%. Through the contest, poets around the world now know of Winona, Minnesota and its thriving arts community.
The contest encourages the creation of modern poems in sonnet form. It is made possible through the efforts of many, many people: not only the financial patronage and moral support of Ted Haaland (please see below for tributes to Ted in his tenth year as patron of the contest!) but also the dedication and vision of the Great River Shakespeare Festival, the Winona Arts Center, the River Arts Alliance, the contest judges (poets and long-time judges James Armstrong, Ken McCullough, Emilio DeGrazia, as well as, more recently, me,) and the “Sonnet Crew” led by Heidi Bryant and mightily assisted by Johanna Rupprecht, Steve Bachelor, and Jackie Henderson.
Click HERE to view the video of the closing ceremony held at the Winona Arts Center on Saturday, July 30, 2022. Hear a short statement by Contest patron Ted Haaland, as well as each of the sonnets read either by the winning poet or by Doug Scholz-Carlson or actor of the Great River Shakespeare Festival and the musical artistry of Winona’s woodwind quartet Flutistry. The Winona Post covered the event in two separate articles.
Tributes to Ted Haaland:
“Ted’s sponsorship of the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest makes Winona an international sonnet center. Poets who are challenged and inspired by the classical sonnet form now have a place to showcase their art. Thanks to Ted’s vision, area sonneteers—experts and novices alike—have the opportunity to attend poetry events, and young poets are being specifically encouraged to connect with the tradition. Ted has found an excellent way to spread his love of poetry and to help expand Winona’s reputation as an arts destination, and we are so grateful to him.” —Jim Armstrong
“Being a judge of the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest has been a boon to me personally, in my own writing. Reading so many sonnets has, by osmosis, calibrated my poem-making apparatus to 14 lines, mostly iambic pentameter; I get in, say what needs to be said, then get out. I know that I will have the opportunity to make several turns at critical junctures within those 14 lines. I still write an occasional longer poem, but the sonnet has converted me. Thanks to Ted Haaland’s generosity, our contest has grown exponentially, in quality and in reputation, and with it the receptivity of Winonans to poetry in general.” —Ken McCullough
“Ted Haaland knew too well how important honest and heart-felt words are. He had many for his beloved Maria and spent many hours honoring her with those he had crafted himself. He has been most generous in passing on to others, including the young, his sense that poetry is a vital sustainer of good life, especially in life’s darkest times.” —Emilio DeGrazia
“Ted Haaland is a generous-minded visionary. His love for his late wife, Maria, who was a passionate supporter of the arts, has moved him not only to write his own sonnets, but also to celebrate and encourage the creation of new poems in this versatile and powerful sonnet form by more than a thousand poets, people he has never personally met. By his unwavering support, he has created a truly living memorial, not just to Maria, but to powerful comfort that love—and love of true, artfully rendered words—offers to us all.” —Leslie Schultz
Ted’s head is filled with words. Images and music find their place . . . As the day unfolds, words react to something, escape, focus and find themselves organized on paper, Part of the day’s thought and experience, now captured in a poem. The word supply in Ted’s head is inexhaustible. The words wait for a new day’s living that will tickle them into action.
What a marvelous contribution Ted continues to make to our welfare honoring his wife in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest.” —David Marshall
Click HERE to read the 2022 winning sonnets in a digital book form.
I learned only recently about the extraordinary poetry of Melissa Range through the upcoming opportunity to hear her read and discuss sonnets that will be happening at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 12, 2022 in Winona, Minnesota. This event is the kick-off celebration for the annual international Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Go, if you possibly can! It should be an extraordinary experience. Here is a short description form the MWF website: Turn and Turnabout: Contemporary Sonnetswill be presented by Melissa Range. From Melissa, “The sonnet is one of the most flexible of poetic forms, lending itself to all kinds of formal innovations. We will look at a handful of contemporary sonnets and talk about how contemporary poets both follow and break the rules of the sonnet, as well as how the flexibility of the sonnet affects us as readers and inspires us as writers. Time permitting, we may also do a short sonnet exercise!”
Range’s work inScriptorium: Poems[a winning manuscript in the 2015 National Poetry Series] is, as former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith notes in the introduction, “All the many formal commands to which Range’s poems gladly bend are in the service of something urgent, something having to do with a view of language as a means of survival.”
Indeed.
Poet Melissa Range
Background for My Poem, “Wyvern”:
When I run across an unfamiliar word in my reading, especially one I like the sound of, I look it up. Sometimes I jot it down in my Alphabet Soup notebook as the title for a someday poem. Earlier this spring, I happened on the word “wyvern” and it intrigued me. Its etymology winds back through Middle English and Old North French to the Latin word “vipera” which suggests not only “viper” but, by association, “snake,” “serpent,” and “dragon.” I have learned that the wyvern could be regarded as a littler dragon-wannabe. In mythology and heraldry, wyverns (which have but two legs and beaks, as opposed to four-legged dragons who have open mouths glittering with teeth) are smaller. They don’t breathe fire or lay waste to whole landscapes or amass and guard golden hoards or debate sagaciously with the gold of their word hoards. They are smaller and less impressive, usually stingingly vicious and generally unpleasant but not so deadly. Yet they appear in heraldry not infrequently, even for modern sports teams in the U.S. and Britain, as an emblem of persistence. Perhaps think mosquito rather than grizzly bear?
I am sure today’s poem was influenced by my recent enjoyment of Range’s work.
My loose sonnet construction imagines an upstart wyvern being slapped down by a proper dragon, and, as an aside, a comment of literary ambition.
For some reason, I keep thinking of this photograph I took at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden:
What better way could there be to celebrate National Poetry Month in April this year than by writing a sonnet or three and submitting it to the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest?
Interested in trying your hand? Take a look at their website: entries@sonnetcontest.org. If you like, you can opt in for email updates. And if your are able to be in beautiful Winona, Minnesota on Tuesday, April 12, 2022, you won’t want to miss a very special sonnet celebration–readings and discussions at the Blue Heron Coffeeshop with poets Melissa Range and Ken Mogren. (I will have more later in the month on Melissa Range’s dazzling collection of poems (including sonnets) called Scriptorium (Beacon Press, Boston, 2016).
