Mezzo Cammin is a semiannual online literary journal devoted to formalist poetry by contemporary women [1] [2] as well as to bring attention back to work that was more famous in previous eras. [3] The journal's title comes from Judith Moffett's poem "Mezzo Cammin", which in turn takes its title from the opening line of the famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Inferno. The journal was associated for a long time with the West Chester University Poetry Conference. [4] The founding editor in chief was Kim Bridgford. [5] Its advisory board consists of well-known poets such as Annie Finch, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson, and Molly Peacock. Since Kim Bridgford's death in June 2020, the journal has been edited by Anna M. Evans.
The first issue of the journal came out in the summer of 2006. It was created in response to "the tendency that persists in academia of choosing the work of male poets to define a given era or literary style". [6]
Mezzo Cammin emerged from community of women poets at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. [4] The magazine was also affiliated with Fairfield University early on. [7] In 2010, Kim Bridgford, Mezzo Cammin's editor in chief, became the director of the WCU Poetry Center 2010. The magazine affirmed its link with West Chester in its Fifth Anniversary Issue. [4]
Launched on March 27 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, [8] the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project [9] is expected to become the world's largest database of women poets. [10] [11] The date of the launch was symbolically chosen to be at the end of Women's History Month, just before National Poetry Month. [9]
The database started with information about 15 women poets, which will be expanded over time. [8] The project will include biographical articles of the poets, including photographs and reprints of their work when possible. One of the early challenges of the project has been the obtaining of copyright permission for the republishing of works online.
Russian formalism was a school of literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Julia Randall was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems . Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets”, her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1980), the Poets’ Prize (1988) for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1968), and a Sewanee Review Fellowship (1957).
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
The Formalist: A Journal of Metrical Poetry was a literary periodical, founded and edited by William Baer, which was published twice a year from 1990 to the fall/winter issue of 2004. The headquarters of the magazine was in Evansville, Indiana.
The West Chester University Poetry Conference is an international poetry conference that has been held annually since 1995 at West Chester University, Pennsylvania, United States. It hosts various panel discussions and poetry craft workshops, which focus primarily on formal poetry, narrative poetry, New Formalism and Expansive Poetry. It is the largest poetry-only conference in America and possibly the world as well as the only conference which focuses on traditional craft.
The Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award was established in 1994 by The Formalist. The award, honoring the poet Howard Nemerov (1920–1991), was an open competition for sonnets in English that drew about 3000 entries annually. The award was $1000, and from 1995–2004, the winning sonnet and the eleven finalists were published inFollowing the discontinuation of The Formalist in 2004, the winning sonnet and eleven finalist poems were published in the literary magazine Measure. The creation of this award is associated with the "New Formalism" movement.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
The New Formalist was a United States-based literary periodical published monthly in electronic form and once a year in print form. Distributed by The New Formalist Press and edited by Leo Yankevich, it published many of the leading formal poets writing in English today. The magazine ceased publication in 2010.
Dr. Ravi Shankar is an American poet, editor, and former literature professor at Central Connecticut State University and City University of Hong Kong and Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He is the founding editor of online literary journal Drunken Boat. He has been called "a diaspora icon" by The Hindu and "one of America's finest younger poets" by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen.
Meredith Bergmann is an American sculptor, poet, and essayist whose work is said to "forge enriching links between the past and the concerns of the present." She studied at Wesleyan University and graduated from The Cooper Union with a BFA. While at Cooper Union she discovered sculpture and then traveled around Europe and studied in Pietrasanta, Italy. Her memorial to Countee Cullen is in the collection of the New York Public Library. In 2003, she unveiled the Boston Women's Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston which includes statues of Phillis Wheatley, Abigail Adams, and Lucy Stone. In 2006, Bergmann's statue of the famous contralto Marian Anderson was unveiled on the campus of Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In 2010, Bergmann created a sculpture of an enslaved girl named Sally Maria Diggs, or "Pinky," whose freedom was purchased for $900 in 1860. Bergmann also completed a commission commemorating the events of September 11, 2001 for New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine entitled Memorial to September 11. In July of 2021 the Roosevelt Island Disabled Association unveiled Bergmann's "FDR Hope Memorial" on Roosevelt Island, New York City. In 2023 New York Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled a bas relief portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Bergmann for the “Million Dollar Staircase” in the State House in Albany, NY. Bergmann serves on the advisory board of The New Historia and is an Honorary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet's Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
Kim Suzanne Bridgford was an American poet, writer, critic, and academic. In her poetry, she wrote primarily in traditional forms, particularly sonnets. She was the director of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference, established in 2014 and first held in May 2015. She directed the West Chester University Poetry Conference from 2010-14.
Poets & Writers, Inc. is one of the largest nonprofit literary organizations in the United States serving poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. The organization publishes a bi-monthly magazine called Poets & Writers Magazine, and is headquartered in New York City.
Kim Roberts is an American poet, editor, and literary historian who lives in Washington, D.C.
Maryann Corbett is an American poet, medievalist, and linguist.
Susan McLean is an American poet, a translator of poetry, and a retired professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota.
Marilyn L. Taylor is an American poet with six published collections of poems. Taylor's poems have also appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including The American Scholar, Able Muse, Measure, Smartish Pace, The Formalist, and Poetry magazine's 90th Anniversary Anthology. Her second full-length collection, Subject to Change, was nominated for the Poets' Prize. She served as the city of Milwaukee's Poet Laureate in 2004 and 2005, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin for 2009 and 2010. She also served for five years as a contributing editor for The Writer Magazine. A retired Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, she taught poetry and poetics for the Department of English and later for the Honors College. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she presents readings and facilitates workshops throughout Wisconsin and beyond.
Michael Ray Burch is an American poet.
Mary Meriam is an American poet and editor. She is a founding editor of Headmistress Press, one of the few presses in the United States specializing in lesbian poetry.