The summer issue of Third Wednesday is in the mail.
It’s summer at last and here is issue 3 of volume XII. This issue features the winning poems from the third edition of our popular One Sentence Poetry Contest. Once again our contributors have come through with some fantastic examples of what a poet can do with the basic building block of writing – the sentence. In addition to the winning poems, we have published a number of poems we found of “considerable merit”, our euphemism for honorable mention. This time we lead off the contest poems with a fine example of a one sentence poem from 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser.
Until August 15th, we’re accepting entries for the 3rd annual George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest (named in honor of Third Wednesday’s first fiction editor). Flash fiction is a fast-growing sub-genre with new outlets springing up daily. We’ve notice a lot of poets beginning to experiment with this art form. Perhaps that’s because poetry and flash share the obvious need to pare work down to the essential. Our guest judge for this year’s contest, Jeremy Griffin, is the faculty fiction editor of Waccamaw, A Journal of Contemporary Literature, a wonderful publication of Coastal Carolina University.
Our featured poet is Jennifer McGowan, who lives near Oxford, England. We were taken with her experimentation with a traditional form. As she says in her introduction, “My sonnet sequence starts with a perfectly traditional Petrarchan sonnet then, through the sequence, modifies form, vocabulary, rhyme, and theme, to see exactly how much violence I can enact upon them and still have them be recognizable.”
The issue is rounded out with three pieces of short fiction, our usual feature of student poems from the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, and poetry by voices, both new and familiar, to Third Wednesday’s audience.
David Jibson, Co-editor
Third Wednesday Magazine 