You Are Here

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

INVITE US TO YOUR INBOX!

Would you like to receive our monthly newsletter? Sign up here.

Hot Off the Press My chapbook When You Escape is now out from Five Oaks Press, under the wise and helpful editorship of Lynn Houston. The poems were written over the years, and many have been published separately in print and online journals. But there’s nothing like seeing them gathered together in a nice bundle you can hold in your hands. At least, that’s how I feel about this small collection, which is available from Amazon. Here’s the title poem, which appeared originally in Lunch Ticket, an online journal from Antioch University, Los Angeles:      What It’s Like When You Escape Running from Virginia to the other shore you’re halfway there in Topeka or thereabouts which is where you stay and serve coffee in an Edward Hopper truck stop where it’s always dusk and the interstate rolls flat out parallel to the sky straight as a chalked line snapped against a wall no curves or hills or valleys or stop signs to slow your progress toward that other shore should you decide to leave the warm circle of light that holds you and the coffee and the truck drivers who smell of work and loneliness and greasy burgers And let’s say you’re wearing a yellow dress the color of Kansas corn and your hair tassels down your back and you fall in love with every single truck driver who asks for apple pie because this is America by God and the apple pie smells like freedom and the coffee tastes like every dream you ever had even the ones that turned to ashes because this is America where dreams are the slippery currency of existence and we all know where existence leads in the end And let’s say you’re imagining that other shore with its palm trees and drive-ins and suspect blondness and you spill the coffee and damned if it doesn’t puddle neatly into the shape of California which is where America always wants to run but you with your Kansas-yellow dress you only managed to escape as far as Topeka so you tie your apron snug around your waist and mop up the coffee and cut another slice of pie Thank you Lynn, thank you Five Oaks, and thank you to all the small independent presses out there. Where would we poets be without them? .................................................................................................................................... On the Difficulty of Poetry What’s the hardest genre to write? In a recent online interview with The New Yorker, novelist Joseph O’Neill made a case for the relative difficulty of writing poetry versus prose: All of these forms are hard, but poetry has to be the hardest. The hardest technically, the hardest spiritually. I say this as a writer who started off by writing poems and quit because I found it too tough. It’s such an extreme, cold, high-up, no-ropes, precipices-everywhere kind of word-sport. Which is what makes the good stuff so important, especially in dark and untruthful times. ....................................................................................................................................

Welcome to the Garden Garden of Rain,, that is, the new collection of poems by Mike Maggio, a luminary in the Poetry Society of Virginia. Reviewers describe Maggio’s voice in these poems as “both refreshing and deeply disturbing” and call the collection “an existential quest” and “a wry voyage in which the sublime, like disaster, is always ahead and behind.” Here’s a poem from the book, one of Mike’s favorites:

Poets have their own individual answers to that question, and one intriguing explanation comes from the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. For a course I’m taking in Russian poets, I’ve been reading Hope Against Hope, a riveting memoir by Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Many poets, including her husband, she writes, have said “a poem begins with a musical phrase, ringing insistently in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words.”

The words do come, of course, but Mandelstam and his fellow poet Anna Akhmatova apparently saw writing poetry as something like composing a melody. In fact, Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts, “M. never talked of ‘writing’ verse, only of ‘composing’ it and then copying it out.”

The results, I’ve discovered, are stunning.

....................................................................................................................................

Readings: A Confession

I hate to read my poems to other people. At least, to people I don’t know. You’d think that at my advanced age, I’d have gotten over the reticence that kept me from making all those no doubt trenchant comments in college seminars. Oh, I gain a lot from workshopping poems with a friend or a small group, but reading to an audience? Not so much.

The other day I attended a terrific event organized by Mike Maggio for the Poetry Society of Virginia. Dubbed a Poet Exchange, the afternoon featured: Henry Hart, a professor of English and Humanities at William and Mary, and Bill Glose, a journalist and former paratrooper. Their writing could hardly be more different, but both have distinctive and compelling poetic voices.

Hart read from his four books of poetry, including Familiar Ghosts, which chronicles his family’s lives here and abroad. I was mesmerized by Hart’s haunting metaphors, such as this passage from “Lost in the Gobi Desert”:

Above blackened hills, stars inched
on their ancient routes. They looked as lost as us,
holding up little lights to find the way,
their maps and compasses useless in the dark.

Next up was Glose, who read powerful poems about his experiences in the Gulf War. He recited an amazing piece about the dire mathematics of soldiering, which rocketed from the simple math of 1 + 1 = 2 to the hundreds of thousands killed, maimed, and maddened by our recent wars. It left me on the verge of tears. And then it was time for open mic.

Talk about hard acts to follow. Why on earth had I put my name on the list? When my turn came (mercifully I wasn’t first), my voice deceived me, grating and whispering by turn. I just managed to get through a couple of pieces from “When You Escape,” my forthcoming chapbook from Five Oaks Press.

So why do I sign up to read at open mics? Because poetry is, above all, an aural art – an art that communicates as much by sound as by meaning. I don’t expect anyone to rush out and buy my books, but I nurture the small hope that someday, someone will hear a line or two and think, “Could be there’s something to this poetry stuff after all.”

.....................................................................................................................................

Fast Food

Maybe I was making too much of a simple fried potato, but when my husband started stacking french fries, I got to thinking. The result appeared earlier this summer in The Magnolia Review:

Meditation on a French Fry

You’re saving the crispy ones
stacking them log-wise
kindling in a fireplace
a fire to light your way
you tell me

It takes more than that
I think, having lost my way
somewhere between the yes
of wanting and the no
of hesitation

Angled across the stack
a perfect fry glistens oil and salt
its skin left on to prove provenance
to guarantee an origin in the ground

which is where we begin and end
grubby, humble, having dreamed
our lives away, somnambulists
between first wakening
and final sleep

.....................................................................................................................................

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:

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

....................................................................................................................................

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?” The Review Review asked a number of editors what they think. A few choice comments:

• 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 

• 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 

• 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 

....................................................................................................................................

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
Eric Forsbergh

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 & Solitudea> 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.

....................................................................................................................................

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

.....................................................................................................................................

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