Our poem of the week is a contest winner from the fall issue of 3rd Wednesday. Another 50/50 contest is under way for the winter issue due out in December. The winning poet receives 50% of the contest entry fees or $50 (which ever is greater) and a one year subcription to the print magazine. The entry fee is just $3.
(Lamar University Literary Press, 2020) Release date: Aug. 1, 2020. $15, paperback
The poems in Some Electric Hum are set in Kansas and Texas and interrogate gender and social norms against the backdrop of a stark rural landscape. These brave and carefully crafted poems explore topics of coming of age, womanhood, immigration and human rights. With beautiful imagery and a clear voice, Some Electric Hum will appeal not only to lovers of poetry, but to all lovers of the written word.
Available from all major online book sellers
https://bookshop.org/books/some-electric-hum/9781942956792
https://www.amazon.com/Some-Electric-Hum-Janice-Northerns/dp/1942956797
“Janice Northerns’ debut collection, Some Electric Hum, disentangles the gnarled branches of a family tree into poems of complicated love and endurance. Deeply engaged with place, these poems range across Texas to Kansas to hold up the objects and people that created a personal history and “grapple with words just west of the tongue.” Intimate and invested in the lives of others, Northerns crafts narratives of tenderness and survival, reminding us all it’s always possible to move forward and carry our stories with us.” —Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
“It’s not often you see a whole life that’s gone into a book, but here we have just that. Janice Northerns lives this life intensely, and lives intensely in language. At the core of this book are the raw elements of birth, love, and death; while surrounding them are sophisticated yet impassioned readings of the violence of history, class, and social codes. These are poems to be read both largely and closely, for the stories they tell, and for their turns of poetic craft.” —William Wenthe, author of Words Before Dawn
“Poetry is the thinking mind bodied forth, and in Janice Northerns’ poems here that comprise a kind of extended meditation on the strange and difficult country of her youth, West Texas, the bodying forth–the impossibly precise, sharply honed imagery; flawless narrative flow; and dramatic landscape description–is breathtaking, a sure sign of poetic talent on a very deep level.” —B. H. Fairchild, author of Usher: Poems
A native Texan now living in Kansas, Janice Northerns holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including Ploughshares, Third Wednesday, and Southwestern American Literature. Awards include a Brush Creek Foundation residency and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship.
A good sonnet is hard to find. Here’s one from Leslie Schultz, who is currently helping us with reading for the winter issue of 3rd Wednesday. One of our editors commented: “”Memorial Day. . .”: Well-constructed sonnet, filled with what comes across as genuine emotion. YES.”
See Ron Koertge’s story, Manaquinn in the fall issue of 3rd Wednesday Magazine: Amazon.
Summer’s official end was yesterday but the memory of it lingers. Here’s 3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week from M. J. Iupppa. It’s from our autumn issue, avialable now at Amazon.
All the world’s a page, and originates on the stage? That is the provacative question posed by James B. Nicola’s Stage to Page.
Bravo! The marvel of James B. Nicola’s substantial collection is how his superb craftsmanship never once muffles the voice of his exuberant stage-struck heart. A warm-hearted, cold-eyed ode to the business known as show. —John Guare
Stage to Page is an exhilarating tour of show business, informed with the poet’s deep and lively involvement in theater. A master of meter and rhyme, James B. Nicola has the power boldly to experiment besides. All of us who care for staged comedy and drama, movies, music, and dance (and who doesn’t?) will cherish this unique and fascinating collection. —X. J. Kennedy
James Nicola’s Stage to Page…is a book for anyone who has waited in the dark, either backstage or out in the house, for the magic to begin, and Nicola’s spells, like Prospero’s, are powerfully transporting. This book is a delight! —David Yezzi
This collection is, like its author, a Shakespearean clown.… Thanks for allowing me the pleasure. The book is great. —Rob Corddry
Sprightly, graceful, often wise, these poems both study and inform. James B. Nicola is a light-spirited teacher with much to impart about the stage that is the world. —Rachel Hadas
James Nicola reminds us over and over that live theater is ephemeral… and I think all stage actors live with a quiet terror that, after we strut and fret our hour upon the stage…no one will remember. I think it’s something all human beings wonder. Stage to Page sure made me wonder. —John Cariani
James B. Nicola…entices the goddess of our subconscious lives to “emerge from the sea foam” and holds us spellbound about what goes on behind the scenes and in front of the curtain as he teaches us what it means to be both an actor and an audience. —Christina Zawadiwsky
Stage to Page is the kind of book you will want to relish a few pages at a time. —Philip Fisher
An incredibly insightful, truthful and entertaining series of poems that feels new and familiar at the same time. —Larry Pine
Stage to Page…is irreplaceable. There isn’t anything remotely like it. It’s beautiful. —Austin Pendleton
James B. Nicola’s full-length collections include Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018), and Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond (2019). His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award./
Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater
published: Word Poetry/WordTech Communications, 2016 (Cincinnati)
https://www.wordpoetrybooks.com/nicola_stage.html
Over the course of the 20th Century, T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Man” finally learned to Howl with Ginsberg, but has since evolved into the 21st Century’s Empty Man—and Woman. Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond is about a certain hope to answer the existential quagmire of daily life we find ourselves surrounded by: a poetic reminder that the same miracle that made Something to begin with, recurs every moment of our lives. These poems attempt to illuminate, investigate, and celebrate the mysterious place-that-is-no-place where the Center does hold: the moment that brings us from Chaos to Cosmos, from Void to Creation, from Nothing to Everything. . . . Hence the subtitle, for Quickening is a collection of Poems from Before and Beyond –plus what lies between.
James B. Nicola’s full-length collections include Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018), and Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond (2019). His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award.
published by Cyberwit.net, 2019
Order at https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/1217
Something special from the just released Autumn issue of 3rd Wednesday: A flash piece by Ron Koertge (yes, that Ron Koertge). Ron is a poet and novelist specializing in youth fiction. His latest poetry collection is Yellow Moving Van. His flash fiction collection, which he told me that wrote “one-a-day” is titled Sex World. I suspect Ron, like the Canadian rockers Barnaked Ladies, thought the name would mean a big seller.
You can read the issue free at our website and print copies are on sale at Amazon.com.
Black and white photograph from the fall issue of Third Wednesday.
