red lion sq.

Press play to listen online or right click "Episode 44" below the player and select "save as" to save the file to your computer or mp3 player.

Today's episode marks the one year anniversary of Red Lion Square! We're so proud of our little audio 'zine and so thankful to the wonderful poets who have shared their work with us and with you this past year. This episode is a very small sampling of some of our favorite recordings from the first 43 episodes of Red Lion Square.

We are going on hiatus for the summer. We plan to stock pile submissions and recordings, find new and exciting after parties, revamp the website and let the dust settle from some big events in our editors' and staff's lives--graduation, new jobs and a new little Newman. We will continue to accept submissions at submissions@redlionsq.com and continue to update our Facebook page. "Like" us over there for updates on how we're doing and when we'll return with more poetry that speaks.

Press play to listen online or right click "Episode 42" below the player and select "save as" to save the file to your computer or mp3 player.

In this week's episode, we announce the winners of our Big Poetry Book Giveaway. Two winners were chosen at random to receive autographed copies of Debra Kang Dean's Precipitates and Steve Kronen's Splendor! Because Debra and Steve kindly donated copies of their books to the giveaway, we are able to send two bonus winners copies of Accents Publishing chapbooks by Dan Nowak and Barbara Sabol!

If you did not win this drawing, we encourage you to "like" us on Facebook. We often do giveaways on our Facebook page. We also encourage you to support our wonderful contributors by buying their books!

Besides the giveaway, we have poems, of course: fast-talking rhymes by J.R. Campbell and a mellow piece called "Mice" by Dan O'Brien. In the after party, we offer a little soothing inspiration for those who may need it after the challenges of National Poetry Month. Enjoy!

As most of you know, April is National Poetry Month in the US. This year, Red Lion Square is participating in the Big Poetry Book Giveaway started last year by Kelli Russell Agodon, who blogs at Book of Kells. We will give away two books of poetry to two people who comment on this post between now and April 30, 2011. Winners will be randomly chosen and announced here on May 1st.

The idea of the giveaway is for poets and poetry lovers to share their favorite poems and poets. We're lucky to have recorded some of our favorite poets for RLS, so we'll be giving away two books by RLS contributors. 

Precipitates, by Debra Kang Dean

From the author's website: "Composed in three sequences, the thirty-three poems in Precipitates seek to find perfection’s still point in a world of constant flux while, paradoxically, also embracing change; in the process, these poems map a journey from doubt to faith. The longest sequence, a journal-in-verse, employs some of the link-and-shift techniques of the Japanese renku. The second sequence unfolds under the influence of the Buddhist Heart Sutra and the third, Ecclesiastes."

Splendor, by Steve Kronen

From Amazon.com: "Steve Kronen’s poems explore the hardships that daily challenge the human heart. Some of the poems in Splendor focus on our inescapable vulnerability due to aging or accident. Splendor also includes love poems to the author’s wife and daughter. Many of the poems are rhymed and metered and use formal elements such as sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, a Dantean canzone, nonce forms, and others."

All you have to do to enter the contest is leave a comment on this post on or before April 30, 2011. Include some way for us to contact you in case you win (you can spell out "at" rather than using the @ symbol in your email address if you fear the spambots). We'll randomly select and announce the winners on May 1st.

If you have a blog and want to participate in the Big Poetry Book Giveaway, find out more here, and be sure to come back often during April for lots more National Poetry Month excitement!

Press play to listen online or right click "Episode 38" below the player and select "save as" to save the file to your computer or mp3 player.

This week, we have poems about art and love by Jessica Broessel and Eva Tihanyi. I love the story Eva's poems tell.

In the after party, we continue our ongoing conversation about dance and art with Craig Johnson and Dario Moore of Orlando's The Center for Contemporary Dance. Learn more here.

Press play to listen online or right click "Episode 37" below the player to save the file to your computer or mp3 player.

This week, we talk about process and authenticity with Craig Johnson and Dario Moore of The Center for Contemporary Dance and The Moore Dance Project. That these concepts apply to poetry and life as well as dance should be apparent.

First, Jesse Ross, Holly Burnside and Leigh Anne Hornfeldt contribute poems about the complex dance of family life.

Learn more about The Center for Contemporary Dance.

Listen to another poem by Jesse Ross in the first episode of Red Lion Square.

Press play to listen online or right click "Episode 36" below the player and select "save as" to listen on your computer or mp3 player.

This week, on RLS, we have poems by Kathryn King and David W. Landrum, poems about growing things. And, speaking of growing things, in the after party, we talk with Craig Johnson and Dario Moore of The Center for Contemporary Dance about arts education and its impact on communities.

We'll have more of our conversation with Craig and Dario over the next few weeks, and we would love to have some poems about dance or the arts to compliment these after parties. Send your dance poems to submissions@redlionsq.com.

Hear another of David's poems in episode 18 of RLS.

Find out more about The Center for Contemporary Dance.