Looking back on the 2017 Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series

Here was the schedule for this year's Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series. 

A special thank you to all the poets who read!

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2017 Litchfield Tea & Poetry

3 – 4 p.m., first Thursday of the month, Jan. – Apr.

Waccamaw Neck Branch Library

41 Saint Paul Place, Pawleys Island, SC

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Please join us for our eleventh year of the Series!

Book signing after the reading

Refreshments: tea & homemade confections by Deloris Roberts

Brief reading/writing recommendations in “Poet to Poet”

Free & open to the public

Linda Ketron, series co-founder, linda@classatpawleys.com

January 5 – Brookgreen Gardens: Nights of a Thousand Candles (CLASS, 2016). Editor Linda  Ketron and photographer Anne Swift Malarich will talk about the experience of publishing this beautiful book celebrating Christmas and the winter holiday season at Brookgreen Gardens. Several contributors will read a selection of their poetic responses to the book’s images.

February 2 – Jennifer Bartell; Len Lawson

Jennifer Bartell teaches at Spring Valley High School in Columbia. She has an MFA from the University of South Carolina; and her poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Pluck!, and the museum of americana, among others. 

Len Lawson is the author of the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line Press) and co-founder of the Poets Respond to Race initiative. Recent honors include a fellowship from Callaloo Creative Writing. He teaches writing at Central Carolina Technical College. 

March 2 – Jonathan Kevin Rice; open mic

Jonathan KEVIN Rice, of Charlotte, is a poet and visual artist. His most recent poetry collection is Killing Time (Main Street Rag, 2015). He is also the founding editor of Iodine Poetry Journal.

Open mic will follow Jonathan’s reading. All who attend are invited to read one of their own poems. (Please keep your reading to a single poem no longer than a page.) We’ll all look forward to hearing a variety of voices, including yours. Please join in!

April 6 – Kate Daniels; Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry

Nationally known poet KATE DANIELS, professor and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University, is the author of several poetry collections—the latest, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret. Among her many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and Pushcart Prize. She will offer a reading of her poems, including her work in the new anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2016). Introducing her will be co-editor Daniel Cross Turner, who will also talk about the anthology’s focus. Author George Singleton describes Hard Lines as “a wonderful selection of writers wrestling with, and extolling, the most intricate, beautiful, and perplexing aspects of our South.”

Cosponsored by

Waccamaw Neck Branch Library

&

The Poetry Society of South Carolina

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For further info about the events, contact series facilitators

Susan Laughter Meyers at bardowl2@aol.com

or Libby Bernardin at libbypoet@gmail.com

April 6, 2017: Litchfield Tea & Poetry 2017 grand finale: poet Kate Daniels

What a finale to the 2017 Series, our eleventh year!

Thanks to poet Kate Daniels, of Vanderbilt University, for making our last event of the 2017 Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series a finale that was truly grand. Yesterday she read some of her poems from the new anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), as well as a selection of her other poems. Hard Lines was edited by Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright. This final program of the season was a celebration of the anthology, as well as of Kate's poems.

Please join us in 2018--on the first Thursday of Jan., Feb., Mar., and Apr.--for readings by a roster of talented poets from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Libby Bernardin and I have enjoyed coordinating each event this year. We're delighted to be joined next year by poet Cliff Saunders, who will work with us as a third coordinator. The three of us have lots of ideas for the coming year! Much gratitude to our cosponsors, The Waccamaw Neck Branch Library and The Poetry Society of South Carolina. Thanks, too, to Deloris Roberts for our receptions of delicious homemade confections and tea--and to co-founder Linda Ketron. The events are held at the lovely new library at 41 St. Paul Place, Pawleys Island. We look forward to our twelfth year of tea and poetry!

Recent anthologies I'm proud to be included in

Thank you to the editors of the following anthologies for including my work among that of so many poets and writers I admire:



THE SOUTHERN POETRY ANTHOLOGY,
Volume VII: North Carolina.
Eds.Jesse Graves, Paul Ruffin, William Wright
(Texas Review Press, 2014).






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CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
LITERARY FESTIVAL ANTHOLOGY:
A Celebration of Ten Festivals.
Ed. Diana M. Donovan (Press 53, 2015).






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FOUND ANEW: Poetry and Prose 
Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library 
Digital Collections.
Eds. R. Mac Jones and Ray McManus
(Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2015).



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BROOKGREEN GARDENS:
Through the Seasons in Images and Words
Photographer Anne Swift Malarich,
ed. Linda Ketron (CLASS, 2015)

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THE DOLL COLLECTION

Ed. Diane Lockward
(Terrapin Books, 2016).







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THE WORLD IS CHARGED: Poetic 
Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. 
Eds. Daniel Westover and William Wright
(Clemson Univ. Press, 2016).






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THE CRAFTY POET: A Portable Workshop.
ed. Diane Lockward (Terrapin Books, 2016).







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BROOKGREEN GARDENS:
Nights of 1000 Candles. 
Photographer Anne Swift Malarich,
ed. Linda Ketron (CLASS, 2016).

Mark Smith-Soto has won this year's James Applewhite Poetry Prize

Congratulations to Mark Smith-Soto, winner of the 2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize for his poem "Last Retreat to Topsail Beach." The winning poem and those of the finalists will be published in the North Carolina Literary Review (NCLR). Mark's poem was selected by poet James Applewhite from the work of six finalists chosen by NCLR Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin. Almost fifty poets submitted to the competition.

Here are the finalists:

• 2nd place: Laurence G. Avery’s poem “Only Yonaguska”
• Honorable mention: Grace Cloris Ocasio’s “Little Girlfriend”
• Other finalists:
• Richard Betz’s “Picking Blackberries on Yellow Mountain Road” 
• Samantha Lee Deal’s “North Carolina, This Will Be The Last Poem”
• Susan Laughter Meyers’s “Banding Hummingbirds” and “Beggar’s-Lice”

NCLR has further details at its website.

The rewards of working with poets on their manuscripts

Congratulations to North Dakota poet Madelyn Camrud, whose poetry book manuscript was recently accepted for publication. Oddly Beautiful will be released in the fall of 2013. (I'll wait to name the press, so I won't steal its thunder.) I had the pleasure of working with Madelyn this past spring, when she hired me to help with the editing and sequencing of her manuscript. A talented poet, she's the author of This House Is Filled With Cracks, as well as the chapbook The Light We Go After.

one of my favorite poems

The City Limits
by A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

From The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 by A. R. Ammons