Monday 27 February 2017

Poetry on the Lake Competition

There are three categories for this year's Poetry on the Lake Competition

Silver Wyvern
adjudicator : Carol Ann Duffy 
Theme for Silver Wyvern: Metal – may be interpreted widely but must bear a reference to the theme.
Max 40 lines

Formal
adjudicator: Kevin Bailey
no set theme
Max 40 lines

Short
adjudicator: Oz Hardwick
no set theme
Max 10 lines

All 3 adjudicators will read all , poems in his or her category

Deadline: 30th April 2017

Prizes: Silver Wyvern category winner: Silver Wyvern and €500.
2nd - €200; 3rd €100. Formal & Short categories: winners: €100 each
All prizewinners present at Celebration receive an object of design awarded by ALESSI

Fees vary depending on whether you post or enter online. 
£8 first poem (£10 online); further poems £6/£8 each OR
Euro: €12 first poem; 2 or more, €10 each.

Entry information link here

Saturday 25 February 2017

The Poetry Day Ireland and Butlers Poetry Competition 2017

The Poetry Day Ireland and Butlers Poetry Competition 2017 is now open for entries.

Deadline: 5pm on 24 Mar 2017
Poetry Ireland and Butlers Chocolate Cafés are inviting poets to submit poems for our Poetry Day Ireland 2017 competition. The theme of the competition is open, but poems should mention either chocolate or coffee, or give a flavour(!) of the coffeehouse and café. Poems should be no longer than sixteen lines.

Prizes
The winning poet will:
  • Have their poem printed on a Pocket Poem card, which will be distributed in all 19  Butlers Chocolate Café branches on Poetry Day Ireland, 27 April 2017. 
  • Win an hour-long one-to-one poetry clinic with Colette Bryce at Poetry Ireland.  
  • Win a ticket to every poetry event in either the International Literature Festival Dublin (20-28 May 2017), Cúirt International Festival of Literature (23-30 April 2017), or to West Cork Literary Festival (14-21 July 2017). 
  • Receive a 2-year subscription to Poetry Ireland Review. 
  • Win a pass for 4 people to the Butlers Chocolate Experience. 
The runner up poet will:
  • Have their poem printed on a Pocket Poem card, which will be distributed in all 18 Butlers Chocolate Café branches on Poetry Day Ireland, 27 April 2017. 
  • Receive a box of Butlers Chocolates. 
Free to enter
Submit up to four suitable poems.

Online application form: https://poetryireland.submittable.com/submit

Thursday 23 February 2017

International Women's Day - Women Aloud NI

There are some awesome women coming to Dublin from Northern Ireland tfor International Women's Day so make sure you get to at least one of the events.


Staccato Wednesday 8th March 8pm Toners, Baggot Street


The poets on the evening are: Maria McManus, Deirdre Cartmill and Nandi Jola.
Bernie McGill, Sheila Llewellyn and Annemarie Neary are all featured in Sinéad Gleeson’s wonderful anthology, The Glass Shore, the companion volume to the ealier The Long Gaze Back – both of them award-winners at the Irish Book Awards, and deservedly so.


See blog from Catherine Dunne, the organiser here

Irish Writers Centre, Saturday 11th March 11am

The Irish Writers Centre is delighted to collaborate with Women Aloud Northern Ireland, along with female writers resident in the Republic of Ireland, in a day-long literary readathon in celebration of International Women’s Day.


The event will consists of panel discussions, day-long opportunities to hear extracts from Women Aloud NI members and the Irish Writers Centre as well as networking opportunities which will serve to cement the relationships between women writers across genres — and across Ireland.
This event is one in a series of events from Women Aloud NI, including readings, bookstore and library visits and mystery events that will celebrate International Women’s Day from Wednesday 8 March. The aim of these events is to inspire women to write, read, and champion the literary work of local women, strengthen their relationship with local booksellers and librarians, and promote the performances, readings and literary endeavours of women writers.


Link here

Tuesday 21 February 2017

Sunflower Sessions Reading

I'm chuffed to be the first Featured Reader at the 2017 Sunflower Sessions Wednesday 22nd February.

This will be my last reading in Dublin for some time as I'm preparing to move south to Kinsale. A farewell tour! 

The Sunflower Sessions is on the last Wednesday of every month in Jack Nealon's Pub,165 Capel St, Dublin

We kick off as usual at 7.30pm and run until 10.30pm. As ever, it’s an open mic night plus a featured reader (more on that later in the week). Readers have between 3 and 7 minutes (depending on how busy it is) so if you’re going to read (and we really hope you do), you should bear that in mind.

Of course, it’s a night for listening as well as reading and it’s open to anyone and we have regular attendees who haven’t written a word :)

We’ll also have copies of Flare 02 for sale, our new quarterly compilation of readings from the Sunflower Sessions (as well as the last few copies of Flare 01), so be sure to pick up a copy if you haven’t had the chance (or pick up another copy to replace the dog-eared one that you’ve loved to pieces). Flare is entirely not-for-profit and funds go towards the annual costs of the open mic night.

So bring your words, bring your hearts and bring a friend.


Link here

Monday 20 February 2017

Unesco’s World Poetry Day - Poetry on the Lake



CALL: Crossing Lines, poems for immigrants and refugees

During March 2017, in the ambit of the celebrations of Unesco’s World Poetry Day, Poetry on the Lake will dedicate a webpage of http://www.poetryonthelake.org/ to poems for immigrants and refugees.

Send poems (published or unpublished) to poetryonthelake@yahoo.co.uk subject: Crossing Lines.

N.b. There is no fee and no payment.

Saturday 18 February 2017

The York Literature Festival / YorkMix Poetry Competition 2017

Poems must be in English, run to no longer than 40 lines, and fit on a single A4 page.

They must be original and not previously published .

Entrants must be over 18 and live or study in the British Isles.

Full rules and to enter here.

Winning and commended poets will be invited to read their entries at a gala evening prize-giving at Friargate Theatre, York, on March 26, 2017.

The prize-giving event will also feature a reading by Antony Dunn who is the sole judge of the competition and will read every entry.

Poets may enter as many poems as they wish. The minimum entry fee is £5 for a single poem. For an entry fee of £10, poets may submit two or three poems.

Deadline: February 28, 2017

Thursday 16 February 2017

Abridged 0 - 49: Babel Submission Call

Speaking one language was living one language when they came together to build something that reached toward the above and beyond. In an utopia of unification and pure communication they were elevating themselves together. They were the makers of an axis of worlds, bridging earthly and heavenly, heavy and weightless, rough and holy, body and mind, mess of matter and the idea of perfection beyond such mess. The bridging tower would mean completeness, the unification of all that it meant to be. And its foundations and substance were the cooperation of its unity of builders. And communication made them one in their building, a whole of the parts. And they were making a whole of the parts of the universe, earth and sky. But, so the story goes, man has no right to such unity, or ultimately no such capacity. Some great force, whether from the earth or the heavens, shattered their plane of one language into shards of multifarious tongues. Each shard became alone, growing and modifying alone. There was to be no jigsawing. There was to be no single tower of completeness but millions of individuals, each in their own way reaching and crumbling, each standing alone. With such a fragmenting, so fragmented the links not only between divine and profane and between person and person, but between being and thinking, between person and self. They were left floundering in acquired and diverse language systems, seas of words that submerged the known world, that remain somewhat alien as an element, filling the gaps between bodies, filling mouths when they try to speak truth.


We are post-truth. So we are told, so we have been informed with such unrelenting frequency recently that even this term could be at risk of losing its meaning, of becoming only the sounds and shapes that make up its utterance, more verbal clutter littering the ether. Post-truth: it means words have overwhelmed us. It says they are treacherous, no longer nourish us with knowledge but instead suffocate with meaninglessness. As God before, truth is dead. Post-truth is the burdensome corpse of communication


Abridged 0-49 is Babel, concerning the fall-out from the reactionary combination of two elements that have become fundamental in contemporary life: post-truth and social media. Our lives orientate around the aspiration for maximal connection. Online, it seems, is a parallel existence to our "real world" in which we are never alone, and where we have the capacity to speak out on a global platform, to anyone and everyone. But could it be that this new apparent root-system, this verbal deluge turbulent beneath each moment of our daily lives, leaves us ultimately detached?
"Too much contact, no more feeling."




Abridged is looking for poetry and art for its 0 – 49: Babel issue.
Up to four poems can be submitted and art can be up to A4 landscape and should be 300dpi or above.
Submissions should be sent to abridged@ymail.com Deadline:24th March 2017.
Please note that this is a landscape issue.


www.abridgedonline.com 

Monday 13 February 2017

Cloud poem competition

The sky is low, the clouds are mean
So said Emily Dickinson. Of course, it’s not necessarily the case. Clouds can be whatever we want them to be, which is why we’re teaming up with the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS) to find the very best new poems about clouds for a new Candlestick Press pamphlet due out this summer.

How to enter


  • Entry is free and by email only. 
  • Poems should be in English and no longer than 40 lines. 
  • You may enter as many times as you wish, although no entrant will receive more than one prize. Attach your poem(s) in a Word document, using font Times New Roman, point size 12, single spaced.
  • Make sure your document contains no identifying details, 
  • send it as an email attachment to clouds@candlestickpress.co.uk. 
  • Include your name, address and contact information in the body of the email, along with the poem title(s). 
  • Please don’t send anything that has already been published elsewhere (including online) although we’re happy to accept entries that are being simultaneously submitted to other competitions.

The competition will be judged by Katharine Towers, Candlestick Press Assistant Editor and CAS Poet in Residence. The judge’s decision is final and no correspondence can be entered into.

Deadline: midnight on 17th March 2017 and winners will be notified by 1st May 2017.

Prizes

The winning poem will feature in Candlestick’s forthcoming pamphlet Ten Poems about Clouds which is due for publication in July 2017. It will also be posted on the CAS and Candlestick Press websites. The winner will receive 30 copies of the pamphlet, in addition to a Cloud Appreciation Society membership (or a top-up subscription if already a member).

Ten commended poets will each receive five copies of the anthology and their poems will be posted on the Candlestick Press and CAS websites. The winning and commended poets will be invited to read at the launch of Ten Poems about Clouds in July.

Link here