Virtual Blog Tour

Magical Mystery Tour? Depends on how you look at it. In fact, the Virtual Blog Tour is a sort of cyber-tag. One poet tags another, sending a few questions to be answered on that poet’s blog. I’ve been tagged by Erica Goss, whose book Vibrant Words I noted a few posts ago. You can read Erica’s Q&A on her blog. Here are my answers to the questions:

1. What are you currently working on?

I’m putting together a small collection of poems about family and place--a kind of domestic history--which I hope will be more interesting than it sounds. I’m also editing an anthology of poems on food and eating for Richer Resources Publications. We’re receiving some terrific work for the anthology, and I’m pondering how to organize the poems, which vary widely. (By the way, there’s still time to submit … )

2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure it does. Like many poets these days, I write free verse almost exclusively. Poetry has to have music, but that doesn’t necessarily mean rhythm and rhyme--I’m more interested in tone, cadence, and imagery. Perhaps my work is less academic than a lot of contemporary poetry, though--I was an English major in college but never studied creative writing.

3. Why do you write/create what you do?

I mostly write about small everyday events, trying to lift them above the ordinary. I want to find in the seemingly meaningless stuff of daily life some meaning that will resonate with the reader, something that will make a person pause in recognition and perhaps appreciation.

4. How does your writing/creating process work?

It’s more a series of false starts and backtracks than a process. I write every day, even if nothing much comes of it. But often, a line or phrase arrives seemingly out of the blue. I write it down and tuck it in the back of my mind, where it simmers until I simply have to deal with it. The first few tries usually wind up in my False Starts folder. Later, I might see a better direction to take the line, or part of it, or its shadow, and I keep going back to edit and tweak. Careful reading and insightful criticism by other poets help me see what I’ve been blind to and strengthen the poem.

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Crash and Burn

OK, there was no fire, but my computer crashed fatally a month ago, and so did the external backup drive I had trusted to keep everything safe. Some geek wizardry and $$$ later, I have most of my old files back, including my poems. Rummaging through the older ones is like looking through a family album, a mixture of wry smiles and shudders of embarrassment. Here’s a short piece I rediscovered from years ago:

Black Hole, or The Inevitability of Love

When I walked through that door
I knew I would not be coming back

Two dwindling stars circling a black hole--
how close could I come before I reached

the point of no return, succumbing
to the power of your implacable pull

A knot had been tied in the universe
that could not be untied

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Protest Poetry

“For centuries, poets were the mouthpieces railing loudly against injustice,” writes NPR critic Juan Vidal in a thought-provoking essay “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” There’s plenty to rail against today, from Ferguson to ISIS, but the poetry of protest is at an all-time low in America. “We need our poets now more than ever,” Vidal writes. “In fact, they should be on the front lines--at rallies and marches--questioning and rebuking whatever systems they deem poisonous to civil society.”

I plan to take up his challenge.

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Three Squares a Day

You eat food, don’t you? You write poetry, don’t you? So send us your poems about food and eating for possible publication in an upcoming anthology. See our Call for Submissions, below.

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Rejected, Dejected

Scratch almost any poet and you’ll uncover a sad trove of rejections from poetry journals. What does it mean when a journal says no (or anything other than yes)? Liz Kay addressed that question not long ago in her blog. A founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and burntdistrict, a journal of contemporary poetry, Kay divides rejection notices into four dreaded and not-so-dreaded categories:

1. The Form Rejection
2. The Encouraging Form Rejection
3. The Non-Form Rejection with Specific Feedback
4. The Conditional Acceptance

You can read her advice on how to handle all four here.

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One Day to Live

Beth Isham is a woman with stories to tell. A nurse in World War II, she cared for Japanese POWs with tuberculosis and contracted the disease herself. Beth went on to nurse and teach nursing for years. And to write poems and memoirs. Here’s her rumination on the mayfly, a characteristically sharp piece of observation:

Mayfly Mayhem by Beth Isham Awake, sleepers! Arise! Up and about! Your day has arrived. Climb from your deep sleep. Rise up and join the horde lifting to the sky. A huge army about to attack. A cloud of mayflies darting this way and that as they hurry to mate. To stroke each others’ translucent, transparent wings, to wriggle twin tails. Drop your fertilized eggs to the water’s surface and let them sink to a year long sleep. Fly away toward the light at the end of the tunnel. To the street lights, the marque lights, the neon lights, the headlights that will end your day, your final day, leaving your lifeless body on window sills, spider webs, curb sides and in the path of oncoming cars to mash you to a crackly nothingness as the automobiles skid in your juices and trade fender dents with each other. Your day has come and gone. These two or three hours have turned you to dust. In the depths of the pond your progeny await one day to live.      Next year.           Same time.                 Same place.

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Call for Submissions

We’re planning an anthology of poems about food and eating, to be published in 2015. We’re defining the theme loosely and welcome a chance to read poems on everything from the sublime to the delicious. Here’s the drill:

• Send up to 3 original poems to poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere. Previously published poems are fine too—we’ll credit the original publisher.
• Please give your full contact info, plus the titles of your poems and a brief (50-75 word) bio, in the body of the email.
• Attach your submission to the email as a .doc, docx, or .rtf document, one poem per page, with your name and email address on each page. No fancy formatting, please!
• We will review submissions as expeditiously as possible, so please don’t query us unless you haven’t heard from us in two months.
• Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2014

We’re looking forward to your poems.  

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