MOST RECENT OPA NEWS
Read the Winning Poems from OPA’s Poet Choice Category
Read all of this item.Fall 2021 Adult Contest Winners in the Poet’s Choice Category
Judge – Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has seven full-length books of poetry, most recently One Small Sun, from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Calyx, and the Internet’s Poetry Daily. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she received the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. In 2013 she was Willamette Writers’ Distinguished Northwest Writer. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose a poem from her book The Voluptuary as the lyric for a choral composition that’s now part of the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College Cambridge.
Judge’s Comments: OPA poets submitted 136 poems in the Poet’s Choice category. And from those 136, I had to choose just 6 poems to be honored. Egads! Too many strong poems. Too few prizes I could award. So … ...
MEMBER NEWS
- Posted: October 28, 2021
Beautiful new book of haiku by Pepper Trail set to the bird photographs of Marie Read
Oregon poet Pepper Trail has collaborated with bird photographer Marie Read to produce “For the Love of Birds: Visions and Meditations.” Pepper’s haiku are set are to Marie’s extraordinary photos, producing a book both ravishing and serene. Responding to the ...
LATEST BOOK REVIEW (EXCERPT)
OPA reviews Grim Honey, by Jessica Barksdale, reviewed by Alicia Hoffman
Read all of this item.
Reviewed by Alicia Hoffman
Grim Honey by Jessica Barksdale
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7354002-1-1
Available at https://sheilanagigblog.com/sheila-na-gig-editions-quick-shopping/jessica-barksdale/Exigence and Apocalypse
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
– William FaulknerLike the horrific tragedy of 9/11, everyone will remember where they were when Covid19 shut down the globe. In early March 2020, days before nation-wide school closures, I was standing in a room full of maskless high schoolers, reviewing for the upcoming AP Language exams. We were studying the rhetorical concept of exigence, the idea that writers often come up against a situation that demands action or remedy. It is this impulse, this urgency, that often calls us to act, that prompts utterance, that begs us to better understand our place in the world’s vast and complicated chess game.
When the pandemic came ...
MOST RECENT POET’S SPOTLIGHT
2020 Spring Contest Winners: Poet’s Choice: 1st Place Winner
June 3, 2020Baby, It’s Cold Outside
(a Vivianne sonnet variation)
As embryos we each explore the wall
of womb that holds us. It’s the first place joy
is felt—mom’s heartbeat like a lullaby.
Cocooned in touch, that’s how we interact.
We’re chastised just as soon as we can crawl
or walk. Just look! Hands off! That’s not a toy.
We’re told to view, to listen, smell that, try
a taste of this—but touch … and hands are smacked.
And so begins our isolation. All
those inhibitions finally destroy
instinctive comfort found in touch, deny
the core of who we are. Our lives contract.