Archive
Watermark
We’re very pleased to announce the publication of the first-place winner of our 2010 poetry chapbook contest, Watermark, by Clayton T. Michaels, in dual print and electronic versions.
- Order from our online store (more of your support goes to qarrtsiluni)
- Order from Amazon
- Visit the online version at WatermarkPoems.com
- Download the podcast (27 minutes, 30.5 MB)
The print edition, published in collaboration with Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, is 32 pages long and has a full-color, glossy cover with a black-and-white interior. The list price is $7.95.
The online version features a minimalist design to foreground the content with thumbnail-sized images from the same artist who did the cover for the print edition, Nancy Botkin. An audio player with a reading by the author accompanies each poem, for those who prefer to absorb the book in increments rather than listening to the full-length audiobook-podcast. The latter includes a guitar theme written and performed by Clayton specially for this project.
The book is Creative Commons-licensed (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives) to encourage the sharing of its content on blogs, Tumblr sites, Facebook, etc. Let us know if you write a review — we’ll link it up in the Watermark news blog as well as in qarrtsiluni’s Twitter stream.
In case you missed it, we wrote about the chapbook contest selection process in the announcement of the contest results on July 1. If you entered the contest, you’ll be receiving a complimentary copy of Watermark shortly. Thanks to everyone for supporting independent publishing on the web.
—Beth and Dave
drylung (videopoem)
poem from Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels
video by James Brush
watch on YouTube – watch on Vimeo
Tomorrow we’ll begin showcasing poems from each of the finalists in our 2010 chapbook contest, but to kick off the series, we teamed up with regular qarrtsiluni contributor and blogger James Brush to produce a video for a poem of his choice from the winning manuscript by Clayton T. Michaels. We were extremely impressed with James’ first go at the genre two months ago, God Bless Johnny Cash. It turned out that, in addition to being a fine poet, he also has a degree in film.
We have a strong interest in promoting videopoetry, also known as poetry film and cinepoetry — see Dave’s site Moving Poems, for example — so we decided to do this in preference to a more standard book trailer (itself an interesting new genre). Once the book is officially launched on August 30, other filmmakers will also be welcome to explore videopoem possibilities with the author’s permission. In the meantime, we encourage everyone to link to and share this video. And needless to say, we’d love to get more video submissions to our regular themed issues, too. (You can see all the posts in our Videos category here.)
James Brush lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, cat and two rescued greyhounds, and teaches English in a juvenile correctional facility. His poems have appeared in various places online and in print — see the complete list of publications on his blog. He published his first novel, A Place Without a Postcard, in 2003. He has been fascinated by Martian landscapes since he saw the first Viking images in the mid-1970s.
qarrtsiluni 