No ideas but in things

I'm the author of the chapbook "Call it a Window" (Midwest Writing Center, 2012). This is a collection of inspirations.

Call for Submissions: New York City Poets

Sweet poets,

No, Dear is inviting you* to submit your finest poems to our upcoming spring issue - #9. 

For this one, the theme is: NINE. However you interpret this theme is up to you.

Submit up to three pages of poetry (no more than one poem per page) and include a brief bio and your neighborhood of residence. Send as a word doc or pdf attachment by March 15 to nodearmagazine@gmail.com.

*NYC-based poets only please. Please forward to all your NYC poet friends.

We look forward to reading your work,

Alex, Emily & guest editor Ekoko Omadeke

nodearmagazine.com

My chapbook, “Call it a Window,” was the winner of the 2011 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest, and will be published by Midwest Writing Center Press this spring. And that’s my author photo above!  Eamon Grennan had many kind words about the poems: “What I admire about Monica Wendel’s poems is their solid grounding in the world of hard localized facts, yet how everything is imaginatively shifted, animated, tilted into the semi-weird. In a speedy, narratively alert voice that is at once sharply colloquial, tough, tender, often humorous, as well as wise, she reveals a world of political and cultural forces at work on one imaginative consciousness and conscience. What she calls a window is in truth her passage into a restless yet companionable visionary space where ‘we will sleep under the stars.’” Edit: You can read some of the poems from the manuscript here, here, and here.

My chapbook, “Call it a Window,” was the winner of the 2011 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest, and will be published by Midwest Writing Center Press this spring. And that’s my author photo above! 

Eamon Grennan had many kind words about the poems:

“What I admire about Monica Wendel’s poems is their solid grounding in the world of hard localized facts, yet how everything is imaginatively shifted, animated, tilted into the semi-weird. In a speedy, narratively alert voice that is at once sharply colloquial, tough, tender, often humorous, as well as wise, she reveals a world of political and cultural forces at work on one imaginative consciousness and conscience. What she calls a window is in truth her passage into a restless yet companionable visionary space where ‘we will sleep under the stars.’”

Edit: You can read some of the poems from the manuscript here, here, and here.

Other stuff that happens.

For someone who is currently on an extended vacation, I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping busy, mostly by setting completely unrealistic goals and then working rather realistically towards them (I’m going to publish a book this summer! And run a half-marathon! Or at least I’ll try!). 

Of course there are setbacks. I was out of town for a few days, drank too much beer, and didn’t train (for the half-marathon), write/revise (my manuscript) or read more than, say, 10 pages of Underworld. Today I got back into the swing of things by going for a short run on the beach, and going to writers group where I worked on a poem.

But back to my goal of publishing: I’ve compiled a list of places to send poetry manuscripts (full-length and chapbook). The following is just the forthcoming June deadlines:

Read, revise, submit. Then read more and revise more. I think that this is applicable for many fields.

Useful.

Useful.

Just got sent the galley proofs for Jellyroll … excited for my poem to be up there in the winter issue!

Good Poetry Is Like Good Food

flapjacksal:

… The Atlantic’s Adam Roberts explains Small Presses and “Chapbooks”:

In the world of literary culture, the small press is probably the closest equivalent to your local farmer’s market. (The carrots might look funnier, but, after you’re used to it, they taste about five times better.) There are tons of small presses, spread out over the country, and they’re often run at either no-profit or a loss. These are labors of love—not engaged in the production of commodities for consumption, but something closer to Lewis Hyde’s notion of “the gift.” Hand-sewn chapbooks take time to make, the poems in them take time to read, and the poets (most likely) took a lot of time to write them. Their production occurs on a smaller (and less grandiose) scale, and like the Slow Food and broader Slow Culture movement, they want to restore to us a sense of time that our current world system strips away from us. Perhaps they wouldn’t want to be in the airports, even if we let them. But they can, like the local food economy (which is growing at a spectacular rate, nationally), become viable alternatives with our support.