Poem of the Month

Dear Friends,

Send me your poems. It’s time for NinaAlvarez.net, after 10 years celebrating published poems, to start offering new poetry to the world.

In conjunction with my publishing company, Cosmographia Books, I’m announcing the NinaAlvarez.net Poem of the Month contest. Every month I will post the winning submission here. Cost to enter is $3. Winner (one a month) will receive publication and $50.

Submissions are open now, and continually, on a rolling basis.

We’ve reached a time in our collective history when we need, more than ever, art that transcends the small and meaningless and mundane. Art that carries silence and searching and wisdom. Think “Ithaca” by K. P. Kavafis, or “The Journey,” by Mary Oliver, “The Lost Son” (my favorite poem of all time) by Theodore Roethke, or “Deathless Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind,” by Sappho, or “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” by Adrienne Rich, or “For the Young Who Want To” by Marge Piercy, or “Brothers” by Lucille Clifton.

Think:

Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.

-from “Deathless Aphrodite of the Spangeled Mind” by Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

-from “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by Adrienne Rich

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

-from “The Lost Son” by Theodore Roethke

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

–from “Ithaca” by K. P. Kavafis (C. P. Cavafy)

so.
having no need to speak
You sent Your tongue
splintered into angels.
even i,
with my little piece of it
have said too much.
to ask You to explain
is to deny You.
before the word
You were.
You kiss my brother mouth.
the rest is silence.

-from “Brothers” by Lucille Clifton

Guidelines

I am open to all styles and approaches, including prose-poems, hybrid, multi-media, and experimental.

No length requirements. Just don’t send me The Iliad. On second thought, if you’ve written The Iliad, PLEASE DO send it to me.

Subject

No limitations on subject matter, and you certainly don’t need to drive home a moral. I’m looking for the experience of transcendence. Not a forced joy, but an allowed opening into something we might call spirit, meaning, love, compassion, transcendence, even if it’s through a subterranean dark night of the soul.

Again, any subject is fine, but here are some subjects I tend to love:

• sacred geometry
• spiritual ecology
• transcendence of life after death
• tarot
• energy
• healing
• mysticism
• the mysteries of existence
• the search for meaning
• the mysteries of childhood, aging, mortality
• philosophies of life, creativity, and the workings of the universe.
• humanity/humanism
• Undertones of the spiritual, strange, surreal, supernatural, sacred: all good.
• The secular, small, sanctimonious: not so much.

About Nina Alvarez

I am a professional editor and publisher. I have an editing and author services company, Dream Your Book, and a exciting young publishing company called Cosmographia Books. I am also a published poet, short fiction writer, and playwright.

I’m a Modernist at heart. I believe in the projects of subjectivity and the search for personal meaning and expression. That said, I’m also a pretty hard-core mystic with no interest or time for art that is all mind with no space for higher self. I suspect, if you frequent this blog, you may be the same.

We still need wisdom. In fact, we need it more than ever. We need the prophets and channelers and true artists and healers to step forward. You are large, you contain multitudes.

Over 1,000 people follow this blog. It averages about 40,000 views a year even though I haven’t posted in a year and a half. But I haven’t posted anything new since the end of 2015 because the joy wasn’t there. I think this is what the joy was waiting for.