Category: Uncategorized
2 Poems by Ken Meisel
3rd Wednesday Winter Issue
The first print issue of our 15th year is in the mail to subscribers and contributors. Click the cover image to download the free digital issue in PDF format. We put some nice stuff in this issue. We hope you enjoy it.
This issue marks a substantial change in the way we publish 3rd Wednesday. We look for ways to expose our contributors to an ever wider audience, and beginning with this issue, the first of our 15th year, each of the poetry pieces included was posted on our website with a brief biography of the contributor as the piece was selected.
Protective Coloration / David Jibson
In this splendid collection of engaging and unmistakably American poems, David Jibson manages to find beauty in utterly unexpected places: piled up on a back shelf at the Salvation Army Store, for example, or strung along the bedraggled length of the Ohio Turnpike—or perhaps in the lovely, tentative dance of a blind woman learning to walk with a white cane. Along with a faint echo of Ted Kooser or Billy Collins at their conversational best, you’ll be captivated by Jibson’s own irresistible voice: that of a witty, insightful observer of the astonishments that surround us.
Marilyn L. Taylor / Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Emerita
To read David Jibson’s poems is like leafing through a pile of photos of your life and suddenly rediscovering feelings and events you had forgotten or never knew. Each snapshot is replete with carefully selected images organized to create unity and fulfillment. His poems range from trivia to exotic, from people we recognize to those we would like to meet. Topics include science, religion, philosophy, history, music, art, and (the requisite for all good poetry) basic old-fashioned entertainment.
Lawrence W. Thomas / Founding Editor of Third Wednesday Magazine,
Honorary Chancellor, Poetry Society of Michigan
See a video reading from Protective Coloration by the author at 3rd Wednesday’s YouTube Channel.
Protective Coloration
The Walking Stick is indistinguishable from his habitat,
as is the Dead Leaf Butterfly, the Pygmy Seahorse,
the Tawny Frog-mouth of Tasmania and the Giant Kelp-fish.
So it is with the poet of a certain age hidden in a corner booth
at the back of the cafe as quiet as any snowshoe hare,
as still as a heron among the reeds.
To Have and Have Not
In the balcony rows where the lovers sit
it’s not so far from heaven
where the beam from a projector
slices the darkness and we,
playing at Bogie and Bacall,
splash ourselves up on the screen,
an etching of a former world,
where we wish we could
live out our lives in two dimensions
in the deep shadows of a darkened theater,
the objects of every envy.
Available Now from Kelsay Books and Amazon:
3 Books by Leslie Schultz
Available at Kelsay Books, Amazon & Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minnesota.
Leslie Schultz has been a frequent contributor to the pages of 3rd Wednesday Magazine.
Concertina
“Art sings a whole from a world in tatters,” writes poet Leslie Schultz in this remarkable collection. Schultz employs precise poetic forms to locate the “mineral music of our very bones.” The poems proclaim the material world – “the essential necessities… that make dreams real” – to celebrate poetry’s “ethereal alchemy.” Each poem creates a conversation between the poet and her many-layered audience. In “Open for Business,” the writer tells her father, “I’m still listening.” The poet’s voice here is accomplished, formal, witty, strange, and listening hard: to family stories, to nature’s notes, to the rooms of her house, to days “distinct with wonder.” In “Taproot,” a “crown” of 18 sonnets for and about Schultz’s great-great grandfather, each sonnet begins with the last line of the prior sonnet and transforms it to reshape the story. One sonnet turns an assertion to a question: “Can I build as lightly as birds/word shelters for the living and the dead?” This collection says yes. — Susan Jaret McKinstry
Cloud Song
In Cloud Song, Leslie Schultz is a master gardener. The beauty and abundance of her poetry springs from both a generous nature and a cultivated sensibility. Like the couple in her delightful character study “Gilbert’s Hobby,” she tends the “rampant garden” of free verse and the carefully shaped bonsai of formal verse with equal attention and skill. Her poetic garden is filled with sunlight and color and changing weather. What she offers is not an untouched Eden, but a real world populated by deftly-drawn characters existing in various states of fallen grace, a place where the poet’s attention always wanders from ideas of order toward the real beauty of the ephemeral: “sun slipping/behind the western trees, fish/tumbling in sparkles over the dam,/this garden in riots of color and seed.” — Rob Hardy
Still Life with Poppies: Elegies
Still Life with Poppies: Elegies by Leslie Schultz is what the name implies: bright joy against a sorrowful landscape. Death is everywhere in the world Schultz writes about—its relentlessness, its creativity, its suicidal call. Yet life in all of its various forms continues—some beautiful, some not. Cruelty may show its aftereffects for generations; a harsh set of comments may freeze creativity, at least for a time. While many may become cynical or depressed as a result, Schultz perseveres. Her poems about myth, in particular, are standouts. Schultz also understands in a profound way that the most emotional personal moments are mythical: emblemized by something as simple as plastic fruit in a blue bowl, or as iconic as a childhood home. For the depth of this understanding alone, you should read this book. — Kim Bridgford
Leslie Schultz’s poetry has appeared in Able Muse, Blue Unicorn Journal, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Swamp Lily Review, Poetic Strokes Anthology, Third Wednesday, The Madison Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and The Wayfarer; in the sidewalks of Northfield; and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers’ Publishing House). She received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017 and has twice had winning poems in the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest (2013, 2016). Schultz posts poems, photographs, and essays on her website: www.winonamedia.net.
Watch a video of Leslie reading on 3rd Wednesday’s YouTube channel.
Two Poems by Sally Zakariya
That December / Peggy Hammond
Advice / Terry Belew
Terry Belew lives and writes in rural Missouri. What excites him most about poetry writing is the process and seeing a poem develop from a raw piece of emotion or snippet of thought into something meaningful.
Big Changes for 3rd Wednesday
Since its founding 15 years ago 3rd Wednesday has been a quarterly literary and visual arts journal in print. For the first twelve of those it was available only in print to subscribers and contributors. Two years ago, we started offering an electronic version of each issue free to anyone who wanted to read it. With that change, readership increased substantially.
Now it’s time for the next step. With the Winter issue we become a true hybrid of electronic and print publishing. We have always operated by offering no-fee submissions on a rolling basis and will continue to do so, but in our new hybrid model we will publish accepted work online at the time of acceptance. This means our website will be continually updated with new material and our print and electronic editions will be a compendium of pieces selected over the previous quarter.
Entries in the annual fiction and poetry contests will, of course, not be published online prior to release of the print edition of the magazine.
For contributors this means that published work will be immediately available to share with friends, family, on social media platforms, and on author websites using the link to the 3rd Wednesday website. This drives traffic to the website and, while guests may come to read a specific piece, many will stay to read another and another, leading them to download a free issue or two.
Be sure to follow our blog by email to receive a notice each time a new piece is published.
Each accepted piece will appear on the website at the top of a menu on the right side of the screen. As new pieces are added, previous ones will move down one position on the menu. The most recent 10 posts will show on the menu and once a piece finally moves off the front-page menu, it will continue to be viewable by clicking on the 3W Blog button in the top menu of the home page. These posts are sortable by category to make posts easier to find.
The submission forms at Submittable now include a box for a 100-word 3rd person bio and an upload space for an author photo. Both are optional and will only be used on the website when provided.
Nothing will change in the number of pieces or in the way that pieces are selected. Publishing standards will not change.
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Wrinkles In Time and in Love / Nancy Jo Allen
Nancy Jo Allen proudly announces the release (March 20, 2021) of her first collection of poetry through her publisher Kelsay Books and Amazon. The book is entitled Wrinkles in Time and in Love, and includes the poem “Art” first published in Third Wednesday’s Vol.XI, No. 4 edition.
“Allen’s poems take us on a journey through the difficulties of relationship and identity: daughter, wife, mother, ex-wife, friend, and wife again. At each stage, we’re asked to reconsider our preconceptions and ideals in favor of the lived experience of those realities—a thoughtful and polished collection.”
—Marta Ferguson, former poetry editor for The Missouri Review, and author of Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett
“Nancy Jo Allen’s poems are deeply felt and well crafted. She has an excellent ear and eye.”
—Bruce Taylor is the former Poet Laureate of Eau Claire and host of Off the Page a reading series at the Local Store Gallery.
“Like the haiku, Allen’s poetry captures small moments of life with images from nature. And like a haiku, the collection is perfect in word, rhythm, and line. Through her poems, we travel through the landscape of memory and vicariously touch grief and let it go. We recognize defeat and replace it with contentment. We love again.”
—Lori Younker, author of Mongolian Interior: An Expatriate Experience and Sioux Beside Me, former Columbia Chapter Missouri Writers Guild president, and author and founder of World So Bright.org, a collection of cultural essays.
Nancy Jo Allen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and now lives in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband Terry and their pup Jayden.
Click to see a video recording of Nancy reading from Wrinkles in Time and in Love.
Third Wednesday Magazine 