Update: Winners announced here


BIG POETRY GIVEAWAY

For National Poetry Month, I am participating in a giveaway of my favorite stuff, poetry. By the end of April, you can win one of  three books, just by posting a comment here at my site. While I hope that my poet and writer colleagues will post, I'd very much like to hear too from old and new friends who don't much read poetry.  Here are the three titles (ta-dah!), followed by info and links to each book

***Crossing State Lines: An American Renga

***The Trouble Ball

***The Places We Find Ourselves 


***Crossing State Lines: An American Renga (hardback)
Edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes
 

I've been fascinated by the online collaborative work at renga over on the Cleveland Poetics this past autumn raging into and through winter. So I am hoping that some of its poets might be interested in this hardback collection edited by the inimitable Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Duke. It includes fifty-four poets "responding to ideas of America-- and to one another. Among them are Heather McHugh, Adrienne Rich, Phil Levine, Cleopatra Mathis, and David Baker (who lives in Granville, Ohio).


***

The Trouble Ball (hardback)

by Martin Espada

This book reflects on the lives of prisoners, Latin Americans (including my favorites, Nicaraguans), immigrants, and other heroes, as well as Espada's own life from childhood to his work as a tenant lawyer and legal advocate to his current work as poetry professor at U Mass Amherst.

For my money (and I have bought two copies), this Espada's best book to date.  He is reading in Northeast Ohio for National Poetry Month, and with luck, I will get this hardback copy of the book signed for you.

***

The Places We Find Ourselves, is my third chapbook of poetry, spread across my 30+ years as a poet. During those years, I worked teaching, with the most years, nearly 20, at The University of Findlay, where I started a creative writing program that included a writers series both on campus and in prison. After that, I taught for a decade at Bentley University in suburban Boston, and currently, I am back in my hometown of Canton, teaching sporadically as I help to care for my father. Some places in my book are on the map, such as first poem set in Ohio, and the last set in Massachusetts. (Also there is a wonderful place just outside of Cleveland in the great cover photo by Steve Cagan.) But the book is more about the places in our heart these places leave, as the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney wrote, standing at his mother's grave:

And we all knew one thing by being there
The place we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep.

Here is the last poem in the book written after I had moved to the East Coast following the death of my sister after her two year struggle against cancer.

EGG ROCK

Lynn, Massachusetts

I came to this point three years ago.
Last winter, early morning on the beach,
I heard dog walkers argue how it looked.
One swore a chunk had moved, or a new one, risen.
The other said no, old outcrop: he’d bet a quarter,
staking his claim on Egg Rock’s being
“stable, solid, everlasting,” the way the poets
saw it in the first one hundred fifty years
of Egg Rock poetry now on the net.

Plath must have stared long at it, too,
from south of here in Winthrop, and she
used this site twice as backdrop for a suicide,
seeing a stony godlessness that doesn’t
give or take the riptide, just sits it out.
I can’t weigh in with her certainty or on the walkers’
wager--or Pascal’s. I’d like to know
I could cash in my chips as gamblers do these days
on “Horizon’s Edge” casino cruises pulling into harbor.

Then I view two centuries of online Egg Rock art,
and from the antique paintings, I’d have to say
the rock still looks the same. Oh, I know
the lighthouse keeper’s dog Milo and the near drowned
toddler in Landsmeer’s famous Saved are gone—
or as my friend Marion, who survived cancer says,
say it: are dead—along with swimmers who didn’t survive,
but the rock, I mean, the rock still looks the same.

Art tends to make me feel more hopeful
than life without art would—in fact, sustains me,
but from my second story window this rock itself
could be a new grave, cairn, or egg. Low rider,
close to this earth, it could go under any moment
in a nor’easter or a blast. Lovely loaf in the Atlantic,
it glitters and streams the light’s uncertainty,
all I had before coming here, too.
Leave a comment here on  my blog (see below) and you will be automatically entered in the Big Poetry Giveaway. I'll draw three names on May 1st and announce the winners shortly after that. You needn't have your own blog to enter, just a comment! I will mail the books to the winners, free, no postage, no catch.

Interested in more poetry give aways? Check out the lot of them here:
http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2014/03/big-poetry-giveaway-2014-celebrating.html

(**To Subscribe, go to the very bottom of this page, and click on Subscribe to Posts. This is not necessary to win.)

46 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Sure enough, R.K. Somewhere, somehow, let me know how to reach you. (You can always b/c me at diane@dianekendig.com.) Love your blog! My partner is often referred to as "Dr. Bombay" by students who can't pronounce his overly-voweled name (Beauvais), and I sometimes call him that in jest myself.

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  2. Happy Poetry Month, Diane! Please do sign me up.

    literaryaustin [at] gmail [dot] com

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    1. You are IN, Allyson! Thanks for the email address.

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  3. Would love to be entered. I have taught Crossing State Lines: An American Renga in a class before, but don't have my own copy. Plus the others sound great. Thanks for your generosity. www.jessicagoodfellow.com

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    1. Jessica, okay you are IN. Crossing was just recently recommended to me by a librarian. I love collaborations, love Holman and many of the poets in it. And I just tuned into your website. What wonderful connections we are making here.

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  4. Count me in! And whether I win or not, I'm having a ball exploring all the blogs and adding poetry books titles to my wish list!

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    1. Kimberly, you are IN, babee! How interesting to read our bios, such opposite childhoods, such intertwining places. I hope our paths cross in the world outside the web as well as this sojourn within.

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  5. Thanks for the opportunity to enter your giveaway. Have a great week! Andrea Beltran - drebelle81@gmail.com

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  6. Welcome onboard, Andrea!--dlk

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  7. Happy NaPoWriMo! Count me in, please!

    Email: roquedog504@gmail.com

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  8. I'd love to play! All thanks!
    (robertkc@whitman.edu)

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    Replies
    1. Glad to have you on the team! Thanks for the email.

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  9. My favorite book of these three is The Places We Find Ourselves, and I really like the poem Egg Rock. Lu

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    1. Look who just signed up! You gambler, you!

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  10. Diane,
    Love your poem, "Egg Rock" and so sorry that you lost your sister to cancer. Thank you for sharing your work. Please enter me in the drawing to win the books you describe. I am especially interested in the one you authored. Marianne Mersereau - marianne4art@yahoo.com

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  11. Thanks so much for reading, responding, signing on. Thanks for including your email. Thanks, thanks, and again thanks.--diane

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  12. Hi Diane, thanks so much for doing this. I'd love to win the The Trouble Ball. Please enter me in the drawing and Happy Poetry Month! My name is Brian Wong and my e-mail is: thebripod@gmail.com

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    1. Thanks, Brian: you are IN! Hope you are having a good NPM.--dlk

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  13. I'd love to add any of these to my collection
    memurrish@gmail.com

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  14. i would love to win any of these!
    renee emerson
    thisquiethour at gmail dot com

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  15. Sign me up, please! All sound great. Karen
    KJWeyant@gmail.com

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  16. Sign me up! Feel free to enter my giveaway as well. Thanks! Lynn

    lynn.pedersen.poetry@gmail.com
    lynnpedersen.wordpress.com

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  17. I would be happy to see The Places We Find Ourselves

    thank you

    (and.. I have been too late to take official part in this year Giveaway but am giving away some books any way - so feel free to stop by and join in if you see something fitting you)

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    1. Guy, I have been all around your page and don't see a book giveaway, but I've read your ABOUT and read your poems online and most of all, I have loved your Leonard Cohen quote, having been his fan since 1970. Happy National Poetry Month!

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    2. Please send an email address to me, dianekendig@yahoo.com

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    3. L. is ever such a great inspiration for me. many days of the year I spend with his Book of Longing in my bag, to remind me about life and love and simplistic.

      Sorry for the link issue i will try to sort it out better next year
      have send you an email.

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  18. Would love to win. Your poem is such a treasure. Thank you for sharing it.

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    1. My email address: feywriter@hotmail.com

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    2. Please send an email address to me, dianekendig@yahoo.com

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  19. Diane - Please add me to the drawing. Thanks! Michael

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    Replies
    1. Please send an email address to me, dianekendig@yahoo.com

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  20. Would love to win any books! I admit I mostly read a lot of classical literature when it comes to poetry, so I'm hoping this giveaway finds me some new and modern people to adore!

    Lissa Clouser
    quidam87@gmail.com

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  21. Please sign me up for your giveaway.
    robinasams@gmail.com

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  22. Hello. I would love to participate in your blog giveaway. :)
    thank you

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  23. I'm late getting around this year. Please add me to the names.
    margoroby@gmail.com

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  24. Please count me in, and thank you for doing this!

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    1. Please send an email address to me, dianekendig@yahoo.com

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  25. Replies
    1. Please send an email address to me, dianekendig@yahoo.com

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  26. Jeff, trying to figure out how to contact you. I've been all around your hangout and haven't gotten an address. Let me know.

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  27. Deborah, Andrew, Jeff, Michael, Radish King, Guy Treiber, and in a way, Ruth--I need contact info for you guys.

    diane

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  28. Ruth, I should have your email address, but I am not sure I do. Can you send it to me? Please send an email address to me, here or at dianekendig@yahoo.com

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  29. I'd love to win "Crossing State Lines"! Thanks for entering my name in your drawing. newzoopoet@aol.com

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