Happy New Year and thank you all for writing with us last June! Jon Thrower and Arwen Careaga chose the best poems from last June. Together they will be co-editing the 2023 anthology. Scroll down to see which of your poems will be published! And if you’d like to help us publish our next anthology, head over to our Patreon!
*and July, and August…
Dear Lexington Poets and Poetry Fans,
I want to start out expressing my gratitude for everyone’s participation and appreciation of our niche little project:
Thank you.
I know that doesn’t seem like much, but I genuinely mean it and want y’all to know how much it means that I am lucky enough to give folx the opportunity to share their voice, create while in an encouraging environment, and interact with other like-minded locals, ex-pats, and Lexington-oriented writers. So again:
Thank you.
Read more: Is It Just Me or Did June* Fly By?As in previous years, I have some statistics about the event to share:
288 Poets
2,993 Poems
3,100 Site Visitors
179,649 Page Views
11,859 Comments
We actually had fewer registered poets this year (last year we had 299), but more poems (compared to 2,907.)
So yeah: after 10 years, the LexPoMo Writing Challenge still holds strong.
We want to know how this year’s Writing Challenge went. More importantly, we want to know how you felt about this year’s Writing Challenge, along with your feelings about the local literary community, the published anthology, and Lexington Poetry Month in general.
With that in mind, we’d love you to take this survey. (Click here to fill it out.) It should only take a couple minutes and is completely confidential.
One part of the survey is related to online communities, specifically Discord and whether or not to have a LexPoMo Discord server. If people would like that, I’d be more than helpful to accommodate the technical side of things. But I also am not personally interested in moderating and mediating conflicts within an additional online community.
While I’ve been relatively lucky that our group is so chill and hasn’t drawn the ire of anonymous hate mobs or 4ch@ń trolls, I also understand how much emotional, mental, and even physical labor is involved in maintaining a volunteer community of passionate people in vulnerable positions (since sharing your art is an inherently a vulnerable act). I don’t take that lightly and would not feel comfortable creating that sort of environment unless it were appropriately monitored and moderated with empathetic people fully committed to bettering the world around them.
So in addition to sharing your honest, anonymous feelings about the event, I would like any and all people to contact us if:
If you’re interested, or have some concerns to express, please send a message through our contact form. If you have my personal email address, please use the contact form anyway, because I let my personal account build for weeks with unread emails before I purge (so you likely won’t be heard for weeks.)
And with that, I want to, again, thank you all. And even though it seems like a ways away, I’m excited to see what happens for next year!
Sincerely,
Bronson O’Quinn
Hey everyone, just wanted to let y’all know that you’ve been invited by the Kentucky State Poetry Society to read your poetry in front of a live audience.
Poets who are participating in LexPoMo 2023 are invited to read their poems at the KSPS open mic that will be held via Zoom on Tuesday, June 20th, 8:00 pm Eastern time. Space is limited, so sign up using this link:
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C084DABAC29A2F4C61-ksps1
After signing up, please share the event on your social media platform of choice.
(And a special thanks to Mary Allen of the Kentucky State Poetry Society for the opportunity.)
Welcome to the second half of the month! Whether you write and post every day or write, agonize, and revise to post only the 5 poems required to be considered for publication, you’ve contributed to the 1,700+ poems already posted this month.
Each June, I’m amazed by you all. If this is your first time writing with us, thank you for trusting us with your writing. If you’ve been with us for years, know that you’ve built an inviting safe community for people to create and explore life through poetry.
A short anecdote before I let you get back to your line breaks: I was in a non-poetry related meeting, when I happened to mention Lexington Poetry Month (as I often do during June), and one of the members of the meeting said, “Do you mean LexPoMo?!” He was just as excited to talk about it as I was. Funny thing though, he isn’t writing with us. He just liked “reading all the different kinds of poems.” A friend had introduced him to the site a year ago.
That floored me.
So, I invite you all to share the work you are doing this month those around you who may not write or even read poetry, you never know what could happen. And for the second half of this month of writing, ask yourself: what evokes awe and wonder in your life?
Chris
Good afternoon, poets. We have an events calendar!
I’m rushing this a bit so I can get it ahead of tonight’s KSPS Open Mic with special guest (and perhaps LexPoMo 2023 Writing Challenge participant?) Teja Sudhaker, so there are still a couple graphical glitches. But feel free to browse the handful of poetry events as well as submit your own on our updated Contact Form.
Lexington Poetry Month was always intended to be a community celebration of poetry. Back in the days of Accents Publishing, Katerina Stoykova encouraged other organizations to do their own LexPoMo events and made it clear that anyone could freely use the label.
Over time, the Writing Challenge has remained the one consistent LexPoMo event (aside from anthology readings, which are based on work created during the Writing Challenge, so that’s kind of the same thing.) And a large part of that, I believe, has been the Writing Challenge’s strong sense of community and creative support.
When the site moved from Accents to Workhorse, I personally retired from the role of running Accents’ blog, where I wrote daily posts and (as a side effect) also kept track of poetry events. This led to an unintended separation of Lexington Poetry Month from the LexPoMo Writing Challenge. The community on the website was great, but – and this might just be my perspective, as I also had major life changes during this period – the community outside of lexpomo.com didn’t thrive and flourish the same way as the website did.
To help encourage more LexPoMo events, as well as spotlight any local (or tangentially locally related) events, please feel free to make LexPoMo your own and share with us your gatherings. This is, after all, Lexington’s poetry month, and I’m excited to see what everyone’s doing!
Head on over to the Sign-Up page, if you haven’t already, and join our 11th consecutive Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge.
(click to continue reading…)Howdy Poets! It’s the holiday season so here’s a little gift: a poem of yours has been selected to be published in the 2022 Lexington Poetry Month Anthology! You can scroll down and see all the poems selected (or crtl+f the name you wrote under last June to find yours). Thank you for writing with us last June, and if you feel like it, consider supporting our community through our Patreon Page!
Pauletta Hansel has made her choices for the 2021 anthology! Checkout which of your poems will be published in the print anthology and join the ever growing number of poets supporting the publication of this anthology, chapbooks, and a new literary journal called Yearling by becoming a Workhorse Writer on Patreon!
Don’t see badges for all the years you’ve participated? Well, we’ve finally caught up for demand and assigned them. All you need to do is go to your Dashboard and make them visible by following these instructions:
(click to continue reading…)Meet our Guest Editor: Pauletta Hansel!
Below is last year’s video with some instructions about navigating the website!
