Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Poetry Magazines and Poets in your Pocket

What do I love more than poetry books? Poetry magazines! Why? You get up to a half dozen to a hundred poets for a much lower price than buying an entire book of just one poet. Why is that good? Well, if you are starting to get back into reading poetry you might not know what kind you like just yet, which is why the magazines are great. You can discover voices that you enjoy and can then search the author out at the book-store. That, and it will clue you into poetry trends such as popular subjects, the way a poem flows nowadays, whether they all rhyme or not, and each magazine has its own style. The magazine Poetry, simply named, has no limits on the type of poetry it prints, and is one of the most widely recognized magazines. Most poetry journals don't allow foul language or obscene commentary, and Poetry has not allowed it as far as I can tell, nor does The Comstock Review. If you want something edgier or don't want just a poetry magazine, there's Tin House, which is edgy and can be taken as more liberal than others. For example, it takes more risks and allows their writers to use language or themes that might be seen as controversial by some. Tin House features fiction, essays, and interviews as well as poems. Perhaps, if you look through various poetry magazines and books you might discover a hidden "broadside" from the Guerilla Poetics Project. They type up poems by less known authors on card stock (four poems per piece of card-stock), cut them to size, and their operatives hide these broadsides in book-stores for people like you and me to find. If you like the poem you find, you can look up the author. And don't forget to register your Guerilla Projects Broadside on-line to see how far the operatives have travelled. That's all for today, thanks for checking in!

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