Coming from the Greek word for mask, persona poems, also known as dramatic monologues, draw freely in their craft and technique from the genres of playwriting, fiction, and poetry, making them, to my mind, a hybrid-genre form rich with exciting cross-genre possibilities. Paradoxically, the dramatic monologue, or persona poem, emerges from a tricky welding together […]
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“Some poems are good medicine. and some “good medicine poems” are mindfulness poems.” So say Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson, both members of the South Dakota State Poetry Society, who are celebrating the recent publication of Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems. Cole-Dai, a resident of Brookings, and Wilson, who lives in
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The South Dakota State Poetry Society belongs to the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, which hosts many poetry competitions. You can check out the Strophes publication here for more information about specific contests and submission opportunities around the country. Featured image by kiler129, under the creative commons license.
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When the first South Dakota Festival of Books was held in Deadwood October 3-5, 2003, my attention was caught by articles in the newspapers that tried to explain the concept. I did not attend that first Festival, even though I had written poems in my school days. I was still too caught up in the
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Christine Stewart-Nuñez, an associate professor of English at South Dakota State, writes poems that are often narrative and often about her family, including the death of her sister (in Keeping Them Alive) and her own experience as a mother of a child with special needs (in the forthcoming Bluewords Greening). Her poems always pay close
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As Jane Hirshfield writes in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, “Images…are forms that let us inhabit abstraction as if from within, and so begin to know our kinship with the wide field of being.” I love that sentence although I admit, I need to ponder it a bit each time I read it.
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Marcella Remund, who lives in Vermillion and teaches at USD, has been writing poems for years but only recently begun publishing. Drawing on rich religious and cultural tradition, her poems are concerned with language, feminism, and emotion. Here’s a poem of hers from the online journal Stirring, from Sundress Publications: RELIC I keep this shard
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Many people admit to thinking of only cowboy poetry when considering poetry from South Dakota, so I’ve focused on many non-cowboy poets so far; I’ve also been doing them in alphabetical order, so it’s taken a while to get to my very favorite cowboy poet, Bruce Roseland. I worry about that adjective being too limiting,
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South Dakota’s current Poet Laureate, Lee Ann Roripaugh teaches in and runs the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota. She’s published three books of poetry and one that’s harder to characterize but walks the line between poetry and lyric creative nonfiction. Her first book won the National Poetry Series, and she’s also
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Staci Schoenfeld is a relatively new South Dakotan, a transplant from Florida via Kentucky who’s here to get her Ph.D. from USD. She hasn’t yet published a full-length collection, so I have less information from which to draw my sweeping generalizations in this introduction, but I’ll proceed anyway. She’s already well-lauded, though, with a 2015
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