Engen Books is proud to announce the winner of April's Blackout Found Poetry month: David Lynch!
Lynch was born in St. John's Newfoundland but says that he was "fortunate enough to grow up in Bellevue Beach when our television had only two stations and cell phones were non-existent. Books filled the void beautifully." He is currently working on a high fantasy series titled The Egimian Chronicles.
In October 2020, Lynch won the third annual WANL "Nightmare on Water Street" contest.
He was featured in 2021's Mythology from the Rock with his short story, ‘Influence.’
Engen Books was proud to have teamed with awesome local poets and poetry advocates for the 2021 #NationalPoetryMonth!
We celebrated with this special FOUND POETRY CONTEST, which ran through April 2021! Found Poetry, in this case, is the act of taking an existing text and blacking out large portions of it, leaving behind only the words of the poem you've created!
We encouraged entrants at the local #SJFM St. John's Farmer's Market to RIP UP old, remaindered copies of the early ashcan editions of Black Womb, Transformations in Pain, Smoke and Mirrors, Roulette, and Ghosts of the Past. To tear out pages and make new art from them!
Those who didn't have access to our old books could write us and we made random pages available digitally for editing!
Judging this year were:
Local Poet Samm Joyy! Samm is an astonishing poet living and working in St. John's, Newfoundland. She is an outspoken advocate of poetry in the province, and is one of the currently-service volunteers with Spoken Word St. John's, a group that plans and promotes monthly poetry open mic nights in the St. John's metro area. Her influences include Neil Hilborn, Mary Melfi, and W.B. Yeats.
Travis House is the poet behind Houseless poetry and its first publication, All I Brought Back. His work is inspired by a lifestyle of adventure, hitchhiking, vanlife, and meditation, all of which he has cultivated into a body of work that strips away the subterfuge of commercial living to find the hidden truth of the human experience. He can often be found writing Freestyle Poetry at the St. John's Farmer's Market. His influences include Jack Kerouac, Gary Synder, and Lao Tze.
Runners up included: Lisa M Daly, Hannah Jenkins, Shannon K Green, and Jennifer Shelby!
Thank you to Travis House and Samm Joyy! We look forward to working with you in the future! Congrats again to David Lynch!