Contributor M.B. Powell's poem "Slack Water", which appeared in Volume 8 issue 2 of The Raintown Review, won first price in the Princemere Poetry Journal contest. The prize was $250 and publication. Previous publication by The Raintown Review will be noted.

The new issue of The Raintown Review is out, with poems by Ned Balbo, Paul Bone, Greg Alan Brownderville, Michael Cantor, Jehanne Dubrow, Maureen Gallagher, Kevin Higgins, Rose Kelleher, Rick Mullin, Timothy Murphy, Aaron Poochigian, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, and others. We have incisive book reviews by Nick Friedman, Fintan O’Higgins, and Aifric Mac Aodha. Editor Anna Evans surveys the general run of metrical poetry-oriented magazines (we come out looking well, strangely enough), while Associate Editor Quincy R. Lehr is on a tear about something or other in an essay entitled “Down with ‘Good Poetry!’” (Just read it; the title makes sense in context.) In short, you are going to love it! (Contributors and subscribers should start receiving copies within a week or so.)

Speaking of which, if you haven’t yet, or haven’t recently, think about subscribing. Yeah, yeah, we know that there are a gazillion magazines out there asking for your hard-earned cash. But The Raintown Review is "essential reading for the formal poetry community" or so it says in Anna's essay...

And that means YOU!

(Selected poems and prose from the new issue will be uploaded to the website over the next view weeks as time permits.)

We are pleased to announce the following nominations from the 2009 Spring and Fall issues:

"Marat"  by Mike Alexander
"A Brief History of Women's Swimwear" by Caitlin Doyle
"Morning Beam" by Ray Pospisil
"Bribes My Family Made" by Jehanne Dubrow
"The Autopsy of David Tihokahana" by James Wilk
"The Darwin Vampires" by Patrick Chapman

Congratulations to all the above-named, and good luck in the judges' selection process!

The three winning sonnets will be published in the Spring 2010 issue of The Raintown Review, as will the winners for 2010. Guidelines for the 2010 NESF Sonnet Award will be available on the NESF website early next year. Our thanks to Stephen Scaer, contest organizer and former contributor to The Raintown Review.

Current issue contributor Justin Quinn has a poem in this week's New Yorker, dated September 14th. The poem, in loose pentameter quatrains, is entitled "Seminar," and springs from Quinn's experiences teaching English and American literature in Czechoslovakia.

This essay, which appeared in an earlier edition of The Raintown Review, is an excellent resource for teachers and students. It appears here by kind permission of the author.

Poetic Meter:
An Old-Fashioned Simple Explanation
 
 
I was much bemused, reading in the current issue of a literary magazine an essay which said how hard it was to explain the traditional meter of poetry in English and presented a new "simplified" system. This has been done many times. As always, the "simplification" was far more complex than what was being simplified, and I was reminded of Byron's remark on the philosophical Coleridge,
 
Explaining metaphysics to the Nation.
I wish he would explain his explanation.

Continue Reading This Essay

"One Fish, Two Fish" by Erica Dawson is the featured poem on Verse Daily  today, Saturday February 28th. Congratulations Erica!

Editor Anna Evans attended AWP for the first time this year, scoping out the famous conference with an eye out for opportunities to increase the profile of The Raintown Review. It was a delight to meet in person former contributors such as Dick Allen and Annie Finch. Initial discussions have also taken place with West Chester Poetry Conference Director Mike Peich regarding a panel at West Chester 2010.