Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

I learned in early December that my poem, "Shakespearean Sonnet 101," had been short-listed for the 2021 Musketman Shakespeare Poetry Award (MUSPA), and learned on Christmas that it had received first prize. Poem below. The poem had to be 8 to 24 lines and mention #Shakespeare. Mine was a Shakespearean sonnet about Shakespearean sonnets (and how apparent limitations can enable freedom…). Read it below or at the MUSPA link here: https://musketmanshakespeare.blog/category/muspa-winners/ The face behind Musketman Shakespeare is Raphael Sóne, "a Cameroonian Canadian translator, Shakespeare lover and medievalist Africanist" as well as a novelist and Jesuit. He posts a "He said/She said" Shakespeare quiz each week, with the answer to the previous week's quiz at the bottom of the new quiz: https://musketmanshakespeare.blog/category/single-line-quizzes/ BTW, some of my favorite modern sonnets (two of them rhymed and Shakespearean) include thes...

I recently received news that one of my poems was accepted to be published in the sidewalk poetry project in the town where I live, Northfield, Minnesota. Northfield is home to two colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton), and in part because of that, has a relatively high interest in the arts: Though our population is only slightly over 20,000, we actually have an arts commissioner (the current one was formerly a local school principal, and is a personal friend). The judges deliberated without knowing who wrote the poems (we submitted without any names on the pages with our poems), and mine was one of those chosen. In recent years, I have tried a few ABC poems in the style of former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, whose poem in that form was published in the New York Review of Books; I discovered it when Dustin Hoffman recited it from memory on the Charlie Rose show. His ABC poem with one word per letter of the alphabet, in order. I have been experimenting in this form, taking the al...