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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)
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Message in a Bottle Sometimes when I submit poems for possible publication, it seems like casting a message in a bottle into the sea, to be tossed by waves, washed up on a deserted beach, and ignored. Luckily, the bottle occasionally reaches a kindly editor who likes what’s inside. One of my poems found a home in the Summer 2016 issue of Little Patuxent Review, a handsome print journal now celebrating its tenth anniversary. Here’s the piece: |
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Between the Words
By Sally Zakariya
Nature has the last word,
always does, so when I send
you a message in a bottle,
the sea scrubs the ink off
the paper, and when the bottle
washes up ashore, the sand
welcomes a long-lost
brother, somehow evolved
into glass without the hell
of the furnace
And when I sing a song
for you in my old voice,
cracked and off key,
a blustery breeze
blows the tune away,
and finches drown
me out with their own
avian halleluiah
chorus, praising sun
and seeds and airy
acrobatics
So instead I write you
a poem with imaginary
spaces between each word,
spaces so deep and wide
there’s room for both of us,
and as you read, the clock
ticks slowly—so slowly
nature’s daily round will seem to last
forever
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One Poem or More?
Should you submit more than one poem to a journal? What if you’re not sure all the poems you could send are equally strong? In a blog post titled “Submitting Etiquette: How Many Poems Should You Really Send?”
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One poor poem in a batch of five won't lead an editor to reject them all just because that one was poor. Even four poor poems in a batch of five does nothing to take the gleam away from a decent poem of publishable quality. I'd suggest always sending as many poems as allowable per the publication’s guidelines. – Devin McGuire, Unorean Poetry Broadsheet
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Even if the poet believes one of the poems in a submission not to be his/her strongest, I think it is doing the poet a disservice to submit any less than what the publication is listing as the maximum number of poems per submission. A submission is a mini portfolio. – David Svenson, The New Poet
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Editors ask for more than one piece because they want a sense of the poet's range and aesthetic. This is difficult to determine from one piece. Plus, sending multiple pieces actually increases the likelihood the editor/publisher will find something he or she likes. – Ralph Pennel, Midway Journal
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A Hundred to One
A teacher once told me you should read 100 poems for each one you write. I’m not sure about the exact ratio, but I can’t deny it’s good advice. After all, reading lots of poems by lots of poets is a great way to expand the store of image, voice, and technique you can draw on in your own work. Books and classes are obvious ways to find those poems, and so are regular emails such as the Academy of American Poets’
Poem-a-Day or Garrison Keillor’s
The Writer's Almanac.
Another, and particularly pleasurable, way is by belonging to a poetry group that meets regularly. Not only are you exposed to a wide variety of styles and topics, but you come to recognize and appreciate each writer’s particular approach. A case in point is Eric Forsbergh, a member of the Northern Virginia Poetry Salon who consistently writes nuanced, meticulously paced poems characterized by strong visual images. One of his recent poems will resonate with anyone who has watched the diminishment and death of a parent:
An Unseen Path
Supposedly I knew, due to my own mother’s death,
how to walk this scrubby path,
tilted woods, moonless field.
I could grope at air, but could not see,
the line of her departure.
I had wiped her mouth,
held her hand, a bent flightless bird,
changed her garment often
as though always getting ready for a trip.
She complied in wordless ways
Two months before,
persevering at her one garbled request,
she motioned to me to raise her to the window
to view impossibly the Irish Sea to Wales’ west.
From the cliffs, its eternity of sun-picked water
jostles, a shimmer of blue broken glass.
After she died, I had to remember
the path back in the dark,
still thinking myself alone,
as when she’d enter silently,
my child lip in quiver,
and I’d feel her unexpected weight on the bed,
not seeing her hand rise to stroke my hair.
My wife, in another state,
phones from her mother’s hospice room,
and asks if I’d describe the route.
As a kitchen toddler, her small fingers
had once memorized a hem of gingham dress.
Mixing memory, her mother now insisted
on that dress to travel in,
to a deep Tennessee forest where leaves of scripture
flock in trees beyond the rail fence.
Eric Forsbergh lives in Virginia. His collection
Imagine Morning: Poems of Companionship & Solitude was published in 2013 by Richer Resources Publications. Three of his poems appear in
Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse
RRP’s Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse, accompanied by two recipes.
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Image and Imagination
The image is the raw material of poetry; it is, in the words of Ezra Pound, “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Don’t burden the image with abstract language, he went on to say, or dress it up with ornament. The image itself is the central element of the poem.
The ideas of Pound and other early 20th century Imagists have deeply influenced contemporary poetry – and continue to challenge novice poets today. In
Learning Image and Description, California poet Rachel Richardson presents a mini-master class on the image.
“In order to imagine,” she writes, “we begin with an image.” She goes on to suggest ways to approach constructing images, working with close observation, memory, and sensory detail. Her lesson includes background on the Imagist movement and, most helpful, close reading of images central to a number of well-known poems and the literal and figurative language that supports those images.
Lots to think about in this brief but compelling piece
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Introducing a new book One of the most productive experiences of my career as a poet was conceiving and editing Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse. Yes, it was a lot of work, but it put me in touch with a wonderful group of talented poets, among them Zilka Joseph, whose evocative “Eating Puchkas” appeared in the anthology. Wayne State University Press has just published a full-length collection of her work, Sharp Blue Search of Flame. Here is a poem from the book that resonates with a haunting beauty and sadness: |
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The Blessed
By Zilka Joseph
wings still glossy, she’s slouched
in the shade of the marauding fig
wild roots swallowing
cracked bricks
at the lip of our kitchen window
she waits, lopsided
tail ragged
as if rat-bitten
gaze deeper than hunger
my hands scrape down my plate
some meat I leave on the bones
extra grains of rice
she hops near
balancing this edge
who will care for us, little sister
we who are broken but not by our own hands
tap-tapping her beak
she picks cleanly
it’s for bullies I keep watch
my eyes scour the sun-white rectangle of sky
small cousin of the rook
and of the hard-beaked raven
how cruel are our kind
we are not ravaged by fury but fear
so eat at my house, my one-eyed beauty
rest here then O bent-bodied bird
my wild, starved, one-legged one
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Dessert anyone? Speaking of Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse, the other day I took advantage of the season’s bounty and made a fruit salad. Combining blackberries, strawberries, cherries, nectarines, peaches, oranges, and apples, I realized that each of these fruits is represented by a poem in the anthology. As are other luscious desserts, including cream cheese cookies, apple goody, poppyseed cake, chocolate cake, pavlovas with berry topping, peppermint chiffon pie – even Emily Dickinson’s recipe for gingerbread. If you’re getting hungry for some delicious poetry, spiced with a handful of recipes, copies of Joys of the Table are still available. Bon appetit |
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Your Name Here
That’s what I called a brief essay I wrote recently for the Mothers Always Write blog
The 25th Hour. I’d been thinking a lot about getting my poems published, in print or online, and I came up with some tips for other writers hoping to do the same. (See the post
here.)
My advice was nothing startling: know the market, submit often and widely, keep careful track, follow the submission guidelines, and above all, don’t give up. You’ve no doubt read similar suggestions already. But the real trick is putting them into practice.
This morning I got another impersonal rejection email. Too bad, but I guess at least it shows I’m trying. The other day I counted up my submissions so far this year. I’ve had 10 acceptances out of a grand total of 78 submissions, a 12% acceptance rate. (Rejections are running at 23%, with many submissions still “under review.”)
Is 12% good? I don’t know, but I’ve learned one thing: don’t take those rejections personally. When I was a magazine editor, I rejected far, far more over-the-transom submissions than I accepted. After all, a print magazine has only so many pages. And even online, where page counts don’t count, there’s no accounting for taste. One poem that was dear to my heart was rejected 10 times before an editor accepted it. So I keep on.
By the way, writers who are parents should take a look at
Mothers Always Write, a fresh young site for parents of all ages. Fathers welcome, too, I understand.
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Coda
From Beat to Buddhist to Sufi poet,
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
was an American original, a prolific poet who wrote playfully, insightfully, ecstatically about the Big Questions of life, death, and the divine. He was also a dear friend, and we mourn his loss from a cancer that he faced with characteristic grace and humor and sweetness.
(Mini Epiphany En Route to Athens, GA)
Abdal-Hayy always seemed to have one foot in this world and one in the next. Now he is fully there, no doubt writing poetry in paradise.
Here’s how my husband, Arabic-script calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya, described him on the back of one of the poet’s many books: “Abdal-Hayy lives the poetic life. He is the real thing. He has been there. He has seen it, written of it, and come to tell us, in his own voice, all about it. If you want to know what ‘it’ is, ask him and he will tell you, with cosmic music, with wit, with the intensity of a well-banked fire that warms but never burns.”
At a recent gathering, I read a few of his poems, ending with this small gem:
In an airplane there’s really very little
between you and the air
In this world there’s really very little
between you and the next
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
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