But Does It Rhyme

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Welcome to But Does it Rhyme?
We're a small, but hopefully growing, band of poets who like to talk about our craft and share what we've written. We'll highlight favorite poets, review new books, and explore the process of writing poetry from inspiration to conclusion. (We might venture into essays and short fiction, too.) We hope you'll like our blog — and contribute your own thought and poems.

Sally Zakariya, Poetry Editor
Richer Resources Publications

Charan Sue Wollard (LivermoreLit)
Kevin Taylor (Poet-ch'i)
Sherry Weaver Smith (SherrysKnowledgeQuest)

Richer Resources Publications

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ARCHIVES

What's in Your Pocket? April 24, mark the date. Sure, the whole month is National Poetry Month. But the 24th is special. It’s Poem in Your Pocket Day, the one day of the year when it’s not just okay but A Very Good Thing to distribute poems freely around your school, your office, your community, anywhere. I’m planning to design postcard-size handouts of a few of my short poems, like the one here.

About to be gone the bird lights on the wire a slight disturbance in the air around his trembling wings signals impending flight creates a silent space that will be emptied For info and ideas, go to the source, Academy of American Poets.

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Congratulations Are Due … Again

Hats off to poet Eric Forsberg for winning the 2014 Edgar Allen Poe Prize, sponsored by the Poetry Society of Virginia—a noteworthy event under any circumstances but especially so this year because Eric also won the prize in 2013. Eric, whose book Imagine Morning was published last year, won for a new poem, “Under the Influence of Internet.” Nice work, Eric!

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Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

The poem arrives in pieces, a line here, a word there. I write it quickly before it can escape, wake early and revise it, then revise again. It’s brilliant—surely my best work to date! Subtle! Smooth! Deceptively simple! And so on.

But let the poem rest a day or so and the brilliance fades. What I thought was clever is clumsy. What I thought creative is derivative. And so on. (This was the case with the poem about the fly posted earlier, about which enough said.)

Does this happen to you? What do you do when it does? Tear the poem up, keep revising it, or put it away with the hope that it will seem better a month from now? Tell us your story.

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What Are You Writing?

Why should we get all the bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if the poem is accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of an e-mail message to:

poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com