SDSPS was organized in 1927 and incorporated as a South Dakota non-profit on August 8, 1970.
Our Mission
To encourage and foster the writing and publication of poetry by South Dakota writers and to promote excellence therein; to arouse in students of high school and college age, interest in the creative writing of poetry; to foster or publish Pasque Petals, a magazine, on a regular basis, thereby continuing the publication which was begun before the Society was organized, which publication is devoted chiefly to poetry, to stimulate by such proper means as the sponsoring of contests, awarding of prizes, and by other means of encouragement, the writing of poetry; and by these means to aid in the cultural growth of South Dakota.
SDSPS acknowledges that we share the traditional lands of the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires nations, the proper name for the tribes of the Santee-Dakota, Yankton-Nakota, and Teton-Lakota people, referred to collectively as the Sioux.
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Kick Starting Publication
Just recently, for a 2017 South Dakota Festival of the Book panel, I was asked to share how I kick-started publication of my poems. In the hopes some of these suggestions could help new poets reading this blog, herewith is a condensation of some select material disseminated… The relative ease with which one can begin […]
Writing in Form: The Villanelle
In the fall of 2015, I took my first poetry class. The class was cross-listed for undergrad and graduate students, and it focused on poetry forms. I had limited form experience before this class: in sixth grade, I wrote some haiku, in 10th grade, I wrote limericks, and I had read various sonnets, mostly Shakespearian. […]
Plein Air Haikuing
Cottonwoods anchor banks above the Missouri. Chartreuse leaves dancing. A cormorant flies low over the gray water like a black arrow. For the past eleven years, I’ve spent a morning and afternoon on the bank of the Missouri River at Clay County Park near Vermillion, teaching children to write haikus, and haikuing alongside them. On […]
Annual Poetry Contest: 2016 Landscape Winners
The Annual Poetry Contest’s deadline is December 1, 2017. The contest has two categories: Landscape and Portrait. The poems are read blind and judged by an independent committee. For more information about the contest click here The following two poems won the first and second place prizes in the 2016 Landscape category: First Place Dakota Flamenco […]
Poetry of Presence Anthology and Book Bash
“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 […]
Developing Imagery in Poetry
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. […]