The Garbage Poem Contest
On December 20, 2023, the English department lost Teaching Professor and MFA alumnus Jeff Oaks. Oaks was managing director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series during its early years and more recently director of undergraduate studies for the Writing program. He has meant so much to so many of us in his more than three decades as part of the Pitt community. Jeff was famous in his classes for sharing from his collection of writing tricks, including assigning “garbage poems,” an exercise developed by MFA alumna Liz Ahl and her poet-friend Ann Hudson. It works like this: Everyone who is gathered must contribute one requirement and one restriction, then writers must compose a poetry or prose piece that meets all of the group-sourced specifications.
As we process our grief over Jeff's passing, a few of us in Pitt English have offered some "garbage" components and invite you to enter our spring T5F contest, to be judged by Assistant Professor Diana Khoi Nguyen.
Look at the list of do's and don'ts below, contributed by Jeff's colleagues Sten Carlson, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Ellen McGrath Smith. Compose a poem in verse or prose that follows these specifications. It can be about anything that rushes into your mind. The deadline for submissions to engalums@pitt.edu is April 15, 2024.
The writing must:
Include a dog (Ellen)
Include the name of a brand or product you use every day (Sten)
Include a list of seven items from your home (Diana)
The writing must not:
Use the word “but” (Ellen)
Use more than one adjective or adverb [colors are permitted] (Sten)
Use punctuation conventionally [aka must not follow the normal rules] (Diana)
About Diana Khoi Nguyen: Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), the chaplet Unless (Belladonna,* 2019), and the digital digital chapbook Homecoming (Cordite Poetry Review, 2019). Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Colorado Book Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and PEN America, to name a few. Her forthcoming collection of poems, Root Fractures, will be published by Scribner in January 2024.
Jeff Oaks's most recent collection of poetry, The Things, came out from Lily Poetry Review Press in 2022. Lily Poetry Review Press also published his first full-length poetry collection, Little What. His creative nonfiction has been widely published in anthologies and journals like At Length. You can read T5F's review of The Things here. Over the past decade, Oaks developed as a painter as well as a writer; read this feature in The Fifth Floor about the relationship between his writing and his visual art.