The Poetry Box LIVE – January Edition

January 8, 2022 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific) / 7:00 PM (Eastern)

January Featured Poets: Chapbook Contest Winners

• Mary Warren Foulk (MA) – author of Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter)
• Linda Ferguson (OR) – author of Of the Forest
• Tricia Knoll (VT) – author of Let’s Hear It for the Horses

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

ABOUT THE POETS 

Mary Warren Foulk is the first-place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021 for her chapbook, Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter). She has been published in VoiceCatcher, Cathexis Northwest Press, Yes Poetry, Arlington Literary Journal (Gival Press), Los Angeles Poet Society, Pine Hills Review, Palette Poetry, Visitant, Silkworm, and Steam Ticket among other publications. Her work also has appeared in (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications) and My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems (Ghost City Press). Her chapbook, If I Could Write You a Happier Ending, is forthcoming from dancing girl press (2021). 

Mary has attended several writing workshops and conferences, including The Writers Studio and AWP events, as well as received several artist and educator grants, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities. She recently won the “Teach! Write! Play!” fellowship to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and her poem “The Inventory of Fumbling” received first place honors. Her poem “portrait of a queer as a young boy” has been nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net Anthology. A graduate of the MFA Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Mary lives in western Massachusetts with her wife and two children. She is an educator, writer, and activist.

Instagram: @mwfoulk
www.facebook.com/mary.w.foulk
Twitter: @mwfoulk

You can order Mary’s winning chapbook HERE

Linda Ferguson is the second-place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021 for her chapbook, Of the Forest. Linda started her career writing software how-to manuals before she even owned a computer. She also worked as a copywriter and journalist until she became hooked on reading, writing and performing poetry when she saw Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucille Clifton and Jimmy Santiago Baca in the Bill Moyers program The Language of Life. Here it was, she realized: a tool to say the unsayable while savoring the pleasure of piecing together intricate word puzzles.

As a passionate community-builder, she teaches affordable creative writing classes for adults and children. Based on her belief that artistic expression should be available to everyone regardless of income or experience, she creates a warm, friendly atmosphere where students are free to delve into imagination and memory to find their voice while relishing the camaraderie of their fellow writers.

A four-time Pushcart nominee, Ferguson is also a writer of fiction and essays. Her first chapbook, Baila Conmigo, was published by Dancing Girl Press, and her collection of feminist persona poetry, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in fall 2022.

She’s also an amateur dancer who loves to draw, paint, and shoot the breeze with her husband and their grown children.

Website: https://bylindaferguson.blogspot.com

Instagram: @ljd.ferguson.1

You can order Linda’s winning chapbook HERE

Tricia Knoll is the third-place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021 for her chapbook, Let’s Hear It for the Horses.

“A horse. A horse. My kingdom for a horse!” cried King Richard the Third. Tricia Knoll’s father thought this as a child until his practical father detailed the costs and suggested he rent one. Which he did, at Colorado dude ranches. On weekends in suburban Chicago to ride hell bent on trails through cornfields. Her father did everything he could to make sure Knoll loved horses too. Summer horse camps. Riding with her dad in Rocky Mountain National Park summer after summer. Sometimes riding at mad gallops with the suburban men. Horse shows and rodeos. He was at his best in his cowboy boots and pearl snap-button Western shirts.

Knoll has degrees in literature from Stanford University (BA) and Yale University (MAT). She taught high school English. Edited a newspaper for elementary students. Served as Public Relations Director for Portland, Oregon’s Children’s Museum. Acted as the Public Information Officer at the Portland Water Bureau and went to New Orleans as an emergency responder following Hurricane Katrina.

Knoll retired in 2007 to write. Her poetry collections address interactions of wildlife and humans in urban habitat (Urban Wild); people and creatures on an organic farm in Washington State (Broadfork Farm); change in a small town on Oregon’s northern coast (Ocean’s Laughter); her understanding of white privilege (How I Learned To Be White); and relationships that sometimes go askew (Checkered Mates). How I Learned to Be White received the 2018 Human Rights Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry. She is a contributing editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. For more information, visit triciaknoll.com.

Knoll lives in the woods of Vermont. Stables for dressage horses, a herd of pintos, and a one-horse family barn are less than a quarter mile in any direction. She smells them on warm days.

You can order Tricia’s winning chapbook HERE

The post The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 8, 2022) appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Please enjoy today’s selection: “Checking Fencelines” by Tricia Knoll, which appears in Broadfork Farm:

Checking Fencelines

~ for Gillian Galford and Dave Trevithick,
Wedding at Broadfork Farm on July 25, 2015

Marriage is hands-on farm management.
Balance books with dreams and sunrises.
Chase piglets that squirm through fences.
Let kittens abide in the hayloft.
Make dogs leave chickens alone.
Collect blue eggs in a wire basket.

Cultivate to reap.
Weed between bean sprouts.
When you hear the creek run,
bless it.

Every day, every week, every month
walk the perimeter of your marriage.
Look inward from the boundary,
seedlings here depend
on the sprawling tree there.
See one big picture
in your album pages.
Savor hedgerows.
Check the fenceline.

Share repairs.
The sun sets on the mountain
at different times each day.
Let love rock you
to sleep.

The post Poem of the Day (04-11-2018) appeared first on The Poetry Box.

The Chubby Buddhist Monk of Trout Lake Abbey

His abbey sits in fields of echinacea and lavender
beyond the llama pasture, surrounded in sunfl owers.
The summer winds stir a dozen temple bells.

He wears robes of brown and melon orange,
grows huge helianthus, nurtures barn bats, tends
a garden of one hundred Buddhas.

Kozen, the man, trains his rollicking mutts.
He stopped in the small town across the Columbia
to let them sniff and express dog-nature

when a man assaulted him screaming epithets
against Muslims, cut his face, kicked his car door
and fled. A hate crime on the police sheet.

Kozen to the TV camera: You are completely forgiven.
The Buddha tells us all of our suffering
comes from anger, desire and ignorance.

At home, prayer wheels and wind chimes
play in limbs of trees near the end of their time.
Long grasses in the mountain’s breath.

The post The Chubby Buddhist Monk of Trout Lake Abbey by Tricia Knoll appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Thursday, July 27, 2017
7:00 pm

Book Launch
Broadfork Farm
by Tricia Knoll

at

Another Read Through
3932 N. Mississippi Avenue
Portland, OR 97227

Featured readers include:
Tricia Knoll, Sara Bokich and Vargus Pike

Everyone welcome to attend and share the love of poetry.

Tricia’s Book will be available at the event or you can also order copies of the book in our Bookstore, and for sale at Another Read Through.

The post Broadfork Farm by Tricia Knoll – Book Launch appeared first on The Poetry Box.

The Helper in the Capitol Hill Library

His thin back is bent. He’s balding.
What little hair he has frizzles.
He often wears a long gray cardigan.
He is not in charge here.

Recent automations do not prevent him from pushing carts,
swiping undisciplined cards in red lasers, pointing north
for read-to-me DVDs, south for mysteries, east for poetry,
west for picture books. The New York Times Book Review
stands behind his desk with Kindles.

Before Christmas I searched for a book on haiku
enlightenment, out of print, not in our catalog system,
more than seventy dollars on E-Bay for 175 leafy pages. He
led me through a sequence of screens. A national search.

I got an email alert after New Years. Come pick up a book
at my neighborhood library, just past Walgreens,
up hill from the middle school, past the mosque.
It’s the 12th day of Christmas.

He turns to the inter-library loan shelf.
Distance: 2,426 miles from
Ohio Wesleyan University. No charge.

His eyebrows meet in the middle. He gets it,
how happy I am. Some other one,
the history librarian at Wesleyan,
donated this book to their shelves.
Librarians as elf.

the wind turns over
old leaves on the driveway
my path to the fig tree

The post The Helper in the Capitol Hill Library by Tricia Knoll appeared first on The Poetry Box.