Poetry Tips: The Spring Fever Blues

It’s getting warmer and more beautiful by the day, and if you are like me, you’re feeling trapped at your desk wishing you could be outside doing anything else instead. Whether you are a student or an employee stuck inside, a truck driver stuck delivering packages, or any job where you find yourself gazing longingly at the outside world’s beautiful sunny weather I urge you to write a Trapped By The Spring Fever Blues type of poem. You can use a catchy refrain through a repeating line or stanza, you can lament the stuffy wardrobe you’re forced to wear when you’d rather be in your shorts and t-shirt outside, anything you wish for while “trapped” in your position.

May the muse be with you, thanks for dropping in…

Ballard Street Open Submissions

http://www.ballardstreetpoetryjournal.com/Submission_Guidelines.html

I copied and pasted all the details below, but check out their site before submitting your work!
To submit: send 3-6 original, unpublished poems at a time. Send us your best work. No greeting card verse. Be professional: include your name, address, phone number and email address in your cover letter. No simultaneous submissions please. Include a brief bio with your submission. There is no line limit, but shorter poems are preferred. Anything received outside of the reading periods will be returned unopen. Please do not send your work express mail or priority mail in order to meet the deadline- the post office automatically returns your submissions if it is not picked up on time. We check our mailbox every two weeks.
SASE must be enclosed for all postal submissions if you would like your work returned to you.
E-mail Submissions: after much indecision, we will continue accepting e-mail submissions for as long as we can handle the flow of incoming e-subs. E-mail submissions should also include a cover letter and brief bio. Send your poems in the body of the email; no attachments please. Bold face all titles. Include a back slash or forward slash to indicate line breaks.
Response time: approximately three months. The editorial staff meets after the deadline. We read our submissions blind and the editor mails/e-mails responses within 2 weeks after the deadline.

Editorial Address:
Ballard Street Poetry Journal
P.O. Box 3560
Worcester, MA 01613

Email Submissions:
editor@ballardstreetpoetryjournal.com

Good luck on all of your submissions, please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/maria_hummel/letter_to_cain.shtml
Maria Hummel’s “Letter to Cain”

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14002
Jane Shore’s “Shopping Urban”

Thanks for clicking and reading, please stop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Les Murray

I picked up Les Murray’s book of poems titled The Biplane Houses from Farrar Straus Giroux. Les Murray is from Bunyah, New South Wales Australia and was born there October 17th, 1938. He writes novels in addition to collections of poetry and I thoroughly enjoyed reading his collection of poems. You can find out more about him using the link below which also includes links to some of his poems.

Several of his poems that I enjoyed were also quite short and it would be difficult to discuss them without including the entire poem. So I have selected two poems which are longer in his book so that it gives me more “room” for discussion, so to speak.

In his poem “The Kitchen Grammars” he likens the world’s languages to cooking a recipe. It’s a delightful way to create a poem and I was very happy to encounter it. There are clever lines such as “It’s the opening of a Celtic sentence/is a verb. And it was more fire and pot/for us very often than ingredients./” Then it goes on to say “…in Chinese/the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion/with its subjects and qualifiers./Down every slope of the wok they go/to the spitting middle/to be sauced.” I would love to include the poem in its entirety but of course I don’t usually give myself much time to request permission from the author. I hope you get to run across it yourself in the book-store or on the internet.

The next poem is “The Domain of the Octopus” which is several pages long and kept my attention the whole way. The octopus described in the poem sounds akin to a tall tale as it has a very peculiar description and long reach in lines such as “The Octopus can build dams/of tide to suspend the Axe creeks/” and “The Octopus can’t love/but can be loved…” This poem brings to life the sea and its participants, from the animals to the land and the people. I love the lines “Dolphins, like 3D surfboards/born in the ocean, curvet/around fenced oyster gardens.” It seems such an obvious comparison but one I’ve never made, Dolphins shaped like surfboards. Or how about “and the oysters lid themselves/in their gnarled cups, against pressure.” The pressure is from power boats, by the way. The oysters responding to humans who have no clue what lies below the surface seems typical of our every-day lives. I love imagining all the characters of the scene described by Mr. Murray in this poem and how everything connects.

If you ever get a chance I hope you’ll read his poems however and wherever you may encounter them. Like I said before, you can use the link provided to learn more about him and read some of his poems.


http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/226

Thanks again for reading, please stop by tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Shadow Poetry Site

Now here is a useful site! Countless forms and types of poetry are described here for any poet that is looking for a new way or a reminder of how to structure a poem. This site guides you to solid resource books and has many wonderful ways to help any poet out there. I urge you to check them out at:

http://www.shadowpoetry.com/

Thanks for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poet…