Lame House Press

First of all, don’t you love the name? Second, definitely not lame. This blog doesn’t post about themselves much, in fact, it is geared to selling poetry books that are rather obscure in nature. This is a great place to find the needle in your haystack in regards to poetry. You can buy right on site by clicking the “buy now” button under each book and doesn’t that make life so much easier than following a link to a book or several links to get to a book you might want to look at and buy? Please check this place out at:

http://lamehouse.blogspot.com/

Happy hunting and please come by tomorrow for more living, breathing poets…

Poetry Tips: How do your poems rate?

One of the hardest things to do is to grade your own poems after you’ve finished. You don’t have to be in school to realize the value of your work.
The way I often grade myself is by using the following:
1 = Poor, 2 = Fair 3= Average 4= Good 5= Excellent

These are the questions I use to grade my own poetry on the 1 – 5 scale:
Does the poem make sense to the intended audience?
Does the title make sense in relation to the poem?
Is the poem the appropriate length for the content?
Is this poem unique to your voice/style?
Is the subject matter presented in a unique way?
Is the subject trite?
Would you publish this if it were your journal/book to edit?

I don’t use this scale on every poem. Sometimes poems are written just to be written. But I highly recommend grading yourself on poems you wish to submit for publication and you can always create your own grading criteria, after all, you know you best.

Good luck with writing, please stop by tomorrow for another poetry blog…

No Tell Motel Open Submissions

No Tell Motel is an awesome web-site that is open to submissions year round. Send between 5 to 8 poems to submit(at)notellmotel.org with the heading: “(Your Last Name)_Submission and be sure not to submit too often, once every four months is acceptable. Don’t forget your bio, and for more details, check them out at:

http://www.notellmotel.org/index.php

Thanks for stopping in, best of luck with your submissions!

Poem by Poet Hound

This Evening at Home (for Kathryn)

Mauled fur-kitten
mess on the floor,
animal sacrifice of
the dogs of chaos.
Now, two souls led
to death-row sentence
kennel unless adopted
by kinder-hearted souls
unaware of the guilty
verdict: Cold-blooded murder.

Thanks for reading, please come by tomorrow for Open Submissions. Also, don't forget to take the poll by scrolling to the bottom picture...

The Page Site

This site features poetry, essays, and more. Lots of information to search at your leisure and if you ever wanted to create a list of poets to check out at the library, quickly, this is the place to go. Poets both obscure and well-known are featured, lots of news items done on poets, this site is “manna from heaven” for poetry lovers. You can look at individual poems featured in all kinds of literary journals, which is great because you can sample poems from journals you may want to submit to, and you can get a sense of certain contemporary styles that are popular here and now. Please check this site out at:

http://thepage.name/

Also, please take a moment to fill out the poll by scrolling to the bottom picture

Thanks for checking in, please come back tomorrow for a poet missed but not forgotten…

Traveling Without A Map by Margaret J. Hoehn

I picked up a poetry chapbook at a local indie book-store by Anabiosis Press and felt I should share it with you. It is titled Traveling Without A Map by Margaret J. Hoehn and it is delightful. I was hoping to find a way to contact her but ran out of time. She is from Sacramento, California and while this chapbook was the winner of the 2004 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest she has won other prizes before and since then. If you are able to find any work by her, please take a look and see for yourself how clean and refreshing her poems are, particularly in this chapbook if you happen to come across it. I also bet you can ask Anabiosis Press if they have any more copies or could produce a copy for you. Chapbooks are typically very inexpensive.
Here is one of her refreshing poems:

Georgia O’Keefe Writes Her Friends:
“I Won’t Return To New York”

At Ghost Ranch,
I chip turquoise from sky,
gather bits of summer
into my pockets,
watch the skull of a horse
rise, luminous and white:
morning star above the ridges,
lit bone spilling
back to the land,
memory of scrub
and stone,
of a colt that grazed
wild with its herd.
Here, I savor the lavish
Desire of light,
walk unfettered
toward four horizons,
forget how to sleep,
stack longing
in the shade of a cliff.
Between angular hours,
I study the syntax
of wind, of cliffs,
of my lover’s
blue veins.
Here, I am a grain
of warm sand, I am
the desert’s bright door,
shaped
like a slender green leaf.

This poem is the very first poem in Margaret Hoehn’s chapbook and I was hooked right then and there to read the rest of them. Excellent arrangement of poems,too, all of them connected to each other so the book flows very well.
Thanks for reading Margaret J. Hoehn’s work, please stop by tomorrow for another great poetry web-site!