By Harrison Flowers
In accordance with National Poetry month this April, OBU is inviting students to submit their work for the 2024 Creative Writing Awards. Works must be a fictional piece or poetry, and submissions will only be accepted through April 28. Students can submit one fictional work, under 3,000 words, or three poems no more than 150 lines. The awards are made possible through the generous donation by an English department faculty member.
Dr. Brent Newsom, Chair of the Division of Language and Literature and Associate Professor of English, had tips for students looking to submit their work.
“In general, I would encourage students to craft fictional stories that have vivid and complex characters that are developed in a way that makes their action plausible,” Newsom said.
He goes on to say that students should be wary of their grammar and make their work as clean as possible.
“Make it your strongest writing,” Newsom said.
For students looking to submit poetry, Newsom encourages them to think deeply about their writing style.
“I think students ought to be thinking about how poems are grounded in imagery that appeals to the senses and is able to evoke, in the reader, a response by rooting their ideas or feelings in concrete imagery and figurative language.”
Any form or style of poetry is accepted.
The Prizes for each category (Fiction and Poetry):
1st – $125
2nd – $75
3rd – $50
National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world. Established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, it was created to encourage the reading and writing of poetry. At OBU, poetry is celebrated, in the classroom and out, through awards such as this and through featuring in class curriculum.
Newsom shared his thoughts on the importance of poetry.
“Poetry connects with human experience and can express human experience in ways that ordinary language does not,” Newsom said. “It’s different from reading an essay or a journalistic piece or a nonfiction work. It’s imaginative, it’s engaging your senses, and it’s able to sort of penetrate the reader and connect with the reader in ways that can be really powerful.”
“Poetry has the capacity to enrich the reader on one hand, and certainly has the capacity to enrich the life of the writer as well and you don’t have to be a great poet to have that experience,” Newsom said.
Poetry goes farther than just expressing humanity, it also helps us to understand the world.
“Reading poetry is one of the best forms of art, in terms of making meaning of the world, to figure out what it is to be human, and it works upon people’s emotions,” Dr. Edward English, professor of English said.
However, poetry can be hard to digest. When reading the works of famous poets such as T.S. Elliot and Walt Whitman it’s easy to get lost. What is happening? What do they mean by this imagery? Why am I reading this? It’s easy to get discouraged.
“You should approach a poem more as an experience than as a kind of hidden meaning that you have to crack somehow,” Dr. Myers, an OBU professor and director of the Honors Program said.
He said students should enjoy poetry to the level they understand it, and not get discouraged if they do not like the type of poetry they are reading.
Myers compared the like of music to that of poetry. He said that when you don’t like a type of song, you don’t dislike music as a whole, just that genre.
“There’s a great variety of poems and different things are going to appeal to different people,” Myers said.
He encouraged students to try out different genres of poetry to see what appeals to them, just as with music.
In celebration of poetry at OBU, Newsom coincidentally recommended reading the excellent poetry of Myers.
“His poems are not difficult to understand, but they are really artfully written, and both deeply felt and deeply thoughtful,” Newsom said.
In 2015, Myers was honored with the position of official poet for the state of Oklahoma, titled Poet Laureate.
Myers began engaging in poetry at an early age.
“My parents were writers; we had a house full of books. So, it just came naturally to me,” Myers said.
As Poet Laureate, he was tasked with raising awareness in all levels of schools and in different community groups.
“So, just basically encouraging people to not be afraid of poetry,” Myers said.
Myers has authored numerous books, articles, essays and reviews on poetry. Below is a piece by Myers titled Possum. Included also is an OBU student written piece by Spencer Barnhill called Laughing Dust.
Possum
On feet bare like a desert saint’s, it pads
across the porch and toward the dry cat food
my wife pours out for strays. It doesn’t scare
when I stomp, bellow, toss a pebble
at its rump, just hisses at me, geezerly,
and keeps on chewing. Eyes like little radio
dials and fur like coal snow, smog sky, or anything
smudged, dirty, it reminds me of the boy
in school we called Possum for how he slept
through class and how his eyes were beaded black,
his nose sharpened to needle fine. When at last
I knock it off the porch with one quick blow
from a snow shovel, it scuttles under
a shrub and disappears into the house’s
cracked stone foundation, knowing more than I—
beneath the sound of footfall, chair-scrape, voice
descending like the ash of distant fire—
the saint’s strange way to practice death.
—Benjamin Myers (Published in the First Things Journal, 2022)
Laughing Dust
Vanilla puff once hazel kernel;
Bough-draped rubber once floating balloon.
Crumbling twig once purple orchid;
Hazy dawn once misty moon.
Colored arc once clouded sky;
Tallest oak once budded seed.
Scorching blaze once lone ember;
Trimmed shore once abundant reed.
Herbal tea once peppermint leaf;
Red butterfly once green cocoon.
Mountain cottage once rocky hill;
English letter once Roman rune.
Bitter drink once coffee bean;
Crisp apple once pink flower.
Silver bell once iron rod;
Twelfth day once eleventh hour.
November gust once distant sound;
Distant sound once November gust.
Laughing baby once family dream;
Dying body once laughing dust.
-Spencer Barnhill; OBU Student
