Chance Chambers
As more local writers take their turn at the Poetry in the Boro open mic, many are beginning to wonder how to get started publishing poems. One resource that I recommend is the website authorspublish.com, particularly its guide Submit, Publish, Repeat. This book covers the basics of submitting, how to find both print and online journals that may be a good fit for your work, how to know when your work is ready to submit, and much more. It’s a free download if you register for the site’s email newsletter, or you can buy and download it from Amazon.
This month, Poetry in the Boro returns to Murfreesboro Little Theatre on Wednesday, May 16, a departure from the group’s usual second Sunday events. Featured poets are Chance Chambers and Lisa Dordal.
A longtime Nashville resident and behind-the-scenes contributor to many efforts in the local poetry community, Chambers has published poetry in numerous journals and as part of a public artworks project funded by the Bonnaroo Works Fund and The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.
Dordal is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, recently published by Black Lawrence Press, and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize and the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, among many other distinctions.
Doors open and open mic sign-ups begin at 6:30 p.m. Featured poets start at 7 p.m., and an hour of open mic follows. Find full details on the Poetry in the Boro Facebook page.
More local poetry news:
If you haven’t noticed, the poetry section at the Murfreesboro Barnes & Noble has recently expanded again. New selections include a number of area poets, including Amie Whittemore, Bryanna Licciardi and Kerri French, whose book Every Room in the Body is a finalist for the First Horizon Award honoring superior work by debut authors. B&N also has on its shelves the Tennessee volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Khristos Cantos, a retelling of Christ’s crucifixion by former Methodist minister and storyteller Michael Williams of Nashville. Williams, a recent featured reader at Poetry in the Boro, unexpectedly passed away in late March.
Murfreesboro poet Aaron Shapiro will be one of the featured readers at Lyrical Brew, a monthly event at the Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt, 2501 West End Ave. in Nashville, on Friday, May 25, at 7 p.m.
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Here’s a poem by Lisa Dordal which appears in her book Mosaic of the Dark and first appeared in the journal Public Pool.
To Say Something Is Alive Is Not Enough
by Lisa Dordal
Because everything is in motion:
bone, ivory, shell. And blood
doesn’t hold on to anything
but itself. Because there are worlds
within worlds—geometries
of ant and whale, girl and boy.
And some infinities are larger
than other infinities. Because iron filings
can reveal invisible lines of force.
And my mother’s last words were:
help me. Because my father loved
Lincoln’s general—the one who drinks
and still wins the War—and the past
is a fine skin that does not protect.
And I did not know that loss could be
so ordinary: my mother reaching
into a cupboard for a glass, saying
take something, anything.
And I don’t know if memory
is a place or a map of the place.
Only that I did not come this time
to find her. And I never did ask
what war.
