Tag Archives: sonnets

Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest Celebration 2022

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Maria W. Faust (image courtesy of Ted Haaland)

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.

Sharing Good News: Poet Ted Haaland & the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Celebration on August 4, 2018

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Ted Haaland: River Arts Alliance Member of the Month

Ted Haaland discovered his art later in life after losing his wife Maria W. Faust to cancer in 2011. Her deep appreciation for the art of poetry awakened his muse and he began writing poems every day.

With a collection of over 7,000 poems to his name, Ted is a strong believer in the New Formalists concepts of poetry, he admires rhyme and meter and their use in all poetic forms; he writes sonnets, of course, but also haiku, limericks, longer poetic forms and two-line “zingers.” Often amused by the strange twists of word definitions and usage, he ventures that he has never met a pun he didn’t like, which is to be expected, since the pun is the beginning of metaphor and metaphor is the foundation of poetry.

In 2012 Ted asked and received permission to direct the Great River Shakespeare Festival Sonnet Contest and renamed it the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest of the Great River Shakespeare Festival. He directs the contest today with the help of the three Winona Poets Laureate, who serve as judges, David Marshall, who organizes entries for the judges, and Heidi Bryant, who directs communications and manages the online entry process and website.

Ted has seen the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest grow to include not only sonnets from almost all of the United States and its territories and possessions, but also from nations around the world. The contest is now widely internationally known and highly rated in literary magazines and on the Internet.

 

 

Winners of the 2018 Sonnet Contest will be announced at the Awards Ceremony on Saturday, August 4th to coincide with the end of the GRSF season. The public is invited to meet in the Dorothy B. Magnus Black Box Theatre in the Performing Arts Center on the Winona State University Campus at 11:00 am to hear winning sonnets read (some by members of the GRSF acting company), meet some of the winning poets, and enjoy snacks and music by Flutistry starting at 10:30 am. All are welcomed to attend this free event.

This year, Tim and I are planning to attend the readings for the third time. From there, we’ll head across the river to Maiden Rock, Wisconsin to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. Here is a photo of us on our anniversary last year, in our own garden, just before motoring off north to the American Swedish Institute for the day.

Peanut will be staying across the street, vying for Janet’s attention with half-sister, Sophie!

Wishing you all the late summer pleasures of these dog days!  LESLIE

Newsflash! Maria W. Faust Winning Sonnets Announced–And One Was My Poem, “Carp”!

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Goldfish

On July 30, 2016, Tim and I traveled to Winona, Minnesota for our annual treat–listening to the reading of the winning sonnets from the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest–a closing event for the famous Great River Shakespeare Festival. We then spent the day along the Mississippi River to celebrate our anniversary which falls in early August.

Since I first learned about this contest in 2013, I have been not only impressed by the great variety, beauty, and power of the winning poems, I have begun, much more frequently, to “think in sonnet form.” What I mean by that is that the meter, rhyme schemes, and rhetorical structures offered by the sonnet form(s) are now etched more deeply into my poetic consciousness. Consequently, while I have been writing sonnets for thirty years, I write many more of them these days–Shakespearian, Petrarchan, the odd “curtal sonnet” (with homage to Gerard Manly Hopkins), and fourteen-line poems I call “sonnet-like objects.”) Of course, with all of these sonnets arriving, every year I select a few to enter in the contest, despite knowing that the competition is steep.

This year, I was surprised and pleased to get a phone call the week prior from Ted Haaland, husband of the late Maria W. Faust, who runs the contest. He told me that my own poem, “Carp,” written this spring, was one of this year’s winners, and asked whether I would like to read it at the event. It was great fun.

A list of winners from all nine years, and the texts of winning sonnets for 2015 and 2016 can be found HERE. For those of you who want to try your own hand, the site also has a very helpful section on the mechanics of sonnet creation. Contestant poems can be received sometime in January for the 2017 contest–you can also bookmark the site and check back in the New Year for the exact date.

Meanwhile, do enjoy reading the work online, and consider purchasing the beautifully made anthology showcasing winning poems from the first five years (2008-2012) of the contest.

sonnet Cover Melody

(Copies can be ordered from Ted Haaland, whose contact information can be found at the link above.)

And when you think of Winona, nestled into the limestone bluffs next to the storied waters of the Mississippi, think, too, of the annual movement of fine sonnets, from all over the nation and beyond our borders, flowing into the little jewel of an art town.

Enjoy the waning days of summer!  LESLIE

Flowers Initials

News Flash! I’ve Published a Sonnet in ABLE MUSE

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able_muse

When I learned that the literary journal Able Muse had accepted my poem, I not only felt like dancing, I’m told by my family that I did, in fact, do a little happy dance. My sonnet, “Visage,” appears in the Winter 2015 issue, just out, and also in the online publication (complete with a voice clip of me reading the sonnet–scroll down a bit.)

Able Muse is one of the journals I most admire. Based in San Jose, California, it began in 1999 as an online journal published twice a year. After ten years, the founding editor, Alex Pepple, expanded it to include a print version of rare physical beauty, while continuing to publish a companion digital version. Each issue contains poetry (mostly metrical) along with art and photography, and fiction and non-fiction (including reviews, essays, and interviews). To learn more, and to subscribe, click HERE. (A subscription would make a wonderful gift for a literary friend or for yourself.)

At the Able Muse site, you can also learn about their press, their book prize, their anthology, and their companion forum, Eratosphere, designed to encourage respectful and insightful comments on poetry as it grows from inspiration (Erato is the muse of lyric poetry) into polished form.

My own work can sometimes take a long time to polish. For “Visage”–the one just published in Able Muse–it took rather longer than usual. I wrote the first version of my sonnet when I was in my early twenties, and I have kept revising it over the years. It is in response to William Shakespeare’s sonnet #73, which goes like this:

That time of year though mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare’s masterful work is one I love. Over the years, I have memorized it and enjoyed it, but I don’t always agree with it. My own sonnet is a response to this one that was written from the point of view of a middle-aged man. Neither sonnet is the whole truth, of course, since getting older is a many-sided and universal process. For me, the truth is certainly riddled with duality: I love my life as it is now–all its shapes and contours–and I also struggle to accept certain changes (both internal and external).

I do know that I wouldn’t be twenty-three again for anything! And I am glad that I kept faith with this poem, kept tweaking it here and there, and that I lived long enough to see it published in such a multi-faceted jewel of a journal.

LESLIE

 

 

Sonnets, P.S.

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In the post I just published, “In Celebration of Sonnets”, there is a new feature: audio clips of me reading the first four sonnets. This did not translate into email, at least not in my inbox. It is there on the website: www.winonamedia.net. To find the post with ease, return to the original emailed post and just click on the blue headline!

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Love technology!Sonnet Ice Heart