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Echo – Jennifer A. McGowan
Our poem of the week comes from the Summer issue of 3rd Wednesday. It was part of series of mythology inspired sonnets by our featured poet, Jennifer A. McGowan.
A Grammar For Snow – Richard Luftig
A Grammar for Snow is available from unsolicited.com or richardluftig.com; $19.99 postage and handling included.
As One Fire Consumes Another – John Sibley Williams
3rd Wednesday contributor, John Sibley Willams is the winner of the Orison Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, As One Fire Consumes Another.
John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. […] The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence.
–Poets & Writers
John Sibley Williams’ collection As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family and history and country, beyond the body’s tragedies, the “silenced bones of others.” These poems rise as invocation, as testimonial to life’s unfiltered beauty, violence, and faith, to the “light . . . already in us.”
–Vandana Khanna, judge of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize
John Sibley Williams is the author of the poetry collections Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. He serves as the editor of The Inflectionist Review and has edited two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013).
As One Fire Consumes Another is avialable from Orison Books and at Amazon.
Crossings – Jude Dippold
The Old Gardner Homestead
Each year, the forest reclaims more
of the old Gardner homestead
in the glen on the mountain;
but the crows still come
80 years after the family left.
They perch on an ancient oak,
looking out over the sapling-clogged field
as if harboring ancient memories of corn.
(First appeared in 3rd Wednesday, Volume VIII, No. 4)
Crossings, a chapbook by 3rd Wednesday contributor, Jude Dippold is available at Finishing Line Press or Amazon.
This small book of short poems encompasses a surprising span of the territory of the human heart. After you read Crossings, don’t return it to the shelf—keep it handy. Go back to it now and then. Open it to random parts and feel the pulse and poignancy of your own humanity reflected in this wise and wonderful mirror.
– Reginald Darling
Jude Dippold was educated and trained as a philosopher, spent his career working as an editor and communications specialist, and now finds refuge in the worlds of poetry and photography. He has spent most of his life on the edge of Allegheny National Forest where he found both solace and inspiration. He now resides in the North Cascades of western Washington and has traded the Allegheny River for the Skagit. In addition to Third Wednesday, his poetry has been published in literary magazines at Jamestown Community College, the College of Central Florida, and most recently in Exult Press’ “The Yes Book, Writings About Yes.”
Tallahatchie River Speaks of Lonliness
In just six lines in a single sentence, Krystal Nikol of Detroit has produced a poem of immense power. It was one of three winning poems in our One Sentence Poetry Contest, a contest we’ll repeat for the winter issue, opening for entries in mid-August.
Third Act Poems – Buff Whitman-Bradley
Frequent 3rd Wednesday contributor, Buff Whitman-Bradley has a podcast. You can hear some of his poems, including some originally published in T. W. At Third Act Poems. Click on Buff’s picture to head over for some audio poetry.
Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poetry has been widely published in print and online journals. His latest book is “Crows with Bad Writing.” Of late, he has been writing more and more about aging, memory, and mortality, and his podcast, “Poems for the Third Act,” features poems reflecting on issues related to growing older.
Mary Oliver
Here is Third Wednesday’s Poem of the Week. It’s from the newly released summer issue.
Volume XII, No. 3.
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
Objects in the Mirror
Our “Poem of the Week” is a preview of the summer issue of 3rd Wednesday, now at the printer. It’s one of three winning poems from the 3rd edition of our popular “One Sentence Poetry Contest”. It’s the second win for Michigan poet, Jane Wheeler, who can pack a lot of story into a single sentence.
Third Wednesday Magazine 