BASS RIVER PRESS – CALL FOR ENTRIES

Bass River Press seeks cover art for its fifth annual poetry publication. The winning artwork will be featured on the cover of FROM THE FARTHER SHORE: DISCOVERING CAPE COD AND THE ISLANDS THROUGH POETRY, an anthology set to release in the spring of 2021.  

Please read the complete guidelines before submitting your work. 

Bass River Press in an imprint of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod. 

Guidelines 

ENTRIES MUST BE SUBMITTED THROUGH CAFÉ AT WWW.CALLFORENTRY.ORG  

If you are a true luddite and simply cannot manage this procedure, please contact Lauren Wolk at lwolk@cultural-center.org 

Bass River Press will accept only original artwork. Art submissions may be either vertical or horizontal in orientation. All media are accepted, including painting, drawing, photography, and photographs of three-dimensional works. Multiple submissions are accepted but must be accompanied by a separate entry fee for each submission.  

The winning artist will retain their original work, but the Cultural Center will possess copyright of the artwork for limited use pertaining to the needs and requirements of Bass River Press. This includes, but is not limited to, the use of the selected artwork for publicity purposes, cover design, future editions of the publication, and more. The artist will retain ownership. 

Submission Fee 

There will be a non-refundable submission fee of $15 for the first piece of art submitted, $5 for additional pieces. The maximum number of submissions allowed is 20.  

As an independent, nonprofit literary press, Bass River Press will use submission fees to cover some – but by no means all – of the cost of reviewing, publishing, and distributing materials. 

Deadline 

The submission deadline for cover art is October 1, 2020. No late entries will be accepted.   

Prize 

The winning artwork will be featured on the cover of FROM THE FARTHER SHORE: DISCOVERING CAPE COD AND THE ISLANDS THROUGH POETRY, a poetry anthology to be published and distributed by Bass River Press. In addition, the artist will also receive a cash prize of $200, along with two complimentary copies of the publication upon release in 2021.  

Any Questions? 

Please contact Supervising Editor Lauren Wolk at lwolk@cultural-center.org or 508-394-7100 with any questions, or consult our website at www.cultural-center.org.  

Other Criteria 

Please review the following sampling of poems for inspiration and tailor your submission accordingly. We seek art that is “suggestive” of the history, people, place and “spirit” of the Cape & Islands, not necessarily representational. 

All work is copyrighted by the poets and may not be reprinted in any form. 

The Properties of Light 

Isn't the whole world heaven's coast? 

—from Heaven's Coast,    Mark Doty 

I come for the light, the artist says.  

Dawn and again at sunset, 

he goes to the Provincetown beach,  

sets up his easel. At just the right angle,  

he can catch that light on the canvas. 

He uses words like shimmer, glow, radiance. 

He talks about what our forefathers must have seen  

when they woke that first dawn just off the coast. 

He darkens the room, lights up the wall  

with his slides. We see 

not the play of light against dark,  

but the play of light against light. 

We see it in the rocks, the beached whale, 

the bones of dead fish.

In the last days of my father's life,  

he kept calling me—Elaine, Elaine—
even though I was in the next room  

or the same room and he didn't need  

or want anything. He kept doing it. 

If I answered, he'd know 

he was still alive. If I didn’t, 

he was dead. 

The last time he called, he held out 

his hand, all blue veins and bones now. 

His head fell back, and the skin  

on his face smoothed out. 

What I remember is the light, 

how it slipped into the room and took him.  

In that moment, the light was different,  

and I saw my father as I had never seen  

him before—young, full of wonder, 

and in no pain at all. 

Diane Lockward 

For Those Who Stay 

It is winter in Cotuit, my village cradled by the sea. 

North wind scours gray shingles, scrubs away all 

traces of summer ease, bleaches the air white 

as frozen sheets.  

In humble cottages, sand shirrs across bare floors. 

Ghosts hungry for jelly sandwiches, settle into wing chairs 

by the cold fireplace, listen for laughter caught in wall 

cracks, bureau drawers, linen closets stuffed with towels. 

Summer houses shiver and sigh, faceless windows stormed 

with snow. We walk by, whisper condolences to plates in musty 

cupboards, dried-up spigots, a timed lamp in a corner, unslept 

beds, yellowed fliers stuck in doors. 

We pass a single crow on the beach, walk up Main Street, past 

library, post office, busy tavern to home, its furnace breathing,  

its leftovers in the fridge, frying pan in the sink, thirsty geraniums,  

vacuum cleaner left in the hall. 

After a storm, when there is no light, no heat, when doors 

seal with drifts, silence works its way into the heart, speaks 

of an exquisite loneliness human as blood and bone, winter’s 

poem for those who stay. 

Diane Hanna 

Pitch Pines 

Some trees loft their heads 

like symmetrical green bells, 

but these, blown one-sided 

by winds salted out of the northeast, 

seem twisted from the germ. 

Not one will lean the same way as another. 

Knotted but soft, they mingle 

ragged branches and rot to punkwood, 

limbs flaking and dying 

to ribs, to antlers and spidery twigs, 

scaly plates slipping off the trunks. 

Hanging on, oaks rattle maroon clusters 

against winter. But these, resinous in flues, 

blamed for a history of cellar holes, 

snap in the cold and fall 

to shapes like dragons asleep, 

or thin out by dropping sour needles 

on acid soil. For one week in May 

they pollinate windows, a shower 

that curdles water to golden scum. 

From Bartholomew Gosnold's deck, 

Brereton saw this cape timbered to its shores 

with the hardwoods that fell to keels 

and ribbing, to single meetinghouse beams 

as long as eight men. 

Stands of swamp cedar, cleared for cranberries, 

were split to shakes or cut lengthwise 

for foundations, while sheep cropped 

elm and cherry sprouts 

and plows broke the cleancut fields 

Fifty cords at a time, birch and maple 

melted bog iron in pits; elm and beech 

boiled the Atlantic to its salts; red oak 

fired the glassworks at Sandwich— 

till the desert floundered 

out of the backlands and knocked 

on the rear doors of towns 

and this peninsula drifted 

in brushfire haze, 

and, clenching their cones 

under crown fires, the grandfathers 

of these pines held on until 

heat popped their seeds 

to the charred ground. 

Brendan Galvin 

Nantucket Bluff 

Someone must have set it so— 

this lone Adirondack chair 

on a whiskered bluff 

where sea blots sky 

beyond the veer. 

How many visits to get the angle right? 

There had to be a giving over 

as sand echoed off 

its splintered legs until 

the chair sunk no more 

and anyone could lean, 

then lean back, 

watch shells buff to porcelain. 

Or was it tossed like so much wrack and spawn, 

bladders of kelp, 

the sea a rigging 

of scallop-shuck and straw? 

And what of the lone beachcomber 

dallying here 

at the bottleneck waist 

of the sandbar during low tide? 

She walks through 

brief tidal pools. 

Eddies rush her like run-off, 

mollusks scribble beneath sand. 

Her tracks fill in 

with Arcturus’drift, 

risen, glinting. 

Mary Fister 

Stanley’s Garden 

(for Stanley Kunitz 1905-2006)  

Keeping the ocean on my left,  

I wended through Provincetown 

the summer after he died, 

past the landscape galleries,  

roller skating drag queens, 

the ice cream and T-shirt shops, 

and hand-carried dogs  

with apologetic eyes— 

to a quieter part of town. 

I didn’t know if I could find  

his house, but there  

was the rusty gate. 

Here were the good bones of the stone 

terraces he’d built, hauling loads 

of seaweed from the beach  

half a century ago.  

I’d imagined it as somber,  

overgrown, since he’d died.  

But the leaves and petals  

shimmied in the sunlight, 

his beloved wind anemones 

swaying gently. All, all  

was nearly vibrating with joy.  

He’d caressed these plants,  

just as, the one time  

I met him and read him a poem, 

he took my face gently  

in his hands, a poet  

a hundred years old  

touching me as if  

I were a flower.   

Cathie Desjardins 

East End Postcard  

Provincetown, December  

I love the mosaic these shacks make  

as they gerrymander the air for their views  

of the harbor. Some tiptoe on stilts  

right down to the water, precarious  

as drag queens in Fifties stilettos.  

An unleashed Labrador studies the jetties.  

Laundry lines shiver with year-rounders’ skivvies.  

At night Route 6 wears a fabulous topaz  

necklace on the décolleté bay, the marina,  

a tiara of lights near where I stay.  

What life might I live were I brave enough  

to love the right woman? Hourly all of us fall  

in the circle of P-town’s sole church bell—  

the gulls, quaint cottages of lovers, and me.  

Time has no tourists, unlike the sea,  

or love, although unwillingly. 

Jennifer Rose