Ping-Pong, the journal of art and literature published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library, is pleased to announce the winner of its second annual poetry contest, Mark Lamoureux.

His poem, “Summerhenge, Winterhenge,” was chosen by judge, David Shapiro from among many entries.  As winner, Mr. Lamoureux will receive a 500.00 cash prize and his poem will be featured in the upcoming issue of Ping-Pong set for release in October 2014.

Click here to read the poem.

Mark Lamoureux lives in New Haven, CT.  He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Spectre (Black Radish Books 2010), AstrometryOrgonon (BlazeVOX Books 2008), and 29 Cheeseburgers / 39 Years (Pressed Wafer, 2013).  HIs work has been published in print and online in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Fourteen Hills and many others.

Our judge, David Shapiro grew up in Deal, New Jersey, in an artistic family. His grandfather was a cantor and composer, his father was a physician who had studied sculpture, and his mother was a musician. Trained as a classical violinist, he was considered a prodigy and appeared on the Voice of America program at age five.

As a teenager, he played with a number of orchestras. Shapiro also came to poetry early, publishing his first poem in Poetry magazine when he was just 16, and his first collection of poems, January (1965), when he was 18. Shapiro’s subsequent volumes of poetry include Poems from Deal (1969), A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel (1971), The Page-Turner (1972), Lateness (1977), To an Idea (1983), House (Blown Apart) (1988), After a Lost Original (1994), and New and Selected Poems (1965–2006). Shapiro has been identified with the New York School of poets—he wrote a study of John Ashbery’s poems, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (1979), and was friends with Kenneth Koch.

In the Rocky Mountain Review, Carl Whithaus wrote, “To call David Shapiro a poet of the surreal, of collage, of the erotic, of endless transition, of formless form, of fin-de- siècle regret is to touch upon the variety of poetic techniques he has explored … he has refused to write poetry which organizes the real into a clean and neat poetic.” He recently completed a new collection.