Poetry Tips I Ask You: Burn-Out

I was hoping to wait a little longer to do another round of “Ask the Audience” but I figure this is a good subject to discuss, especially since I have overwhelmed myself these days. Here’s where I’m coming from: I am involved in lots of hobbies. My dance troupe becomes intense in Spring and Summer with costume classes, shows, and The Big Show that takes place at the end of July. Then there is this blog which I had hoped would continue at 7 days a week but I dropped down to 5 and it is still a stretch. Then, there is scuba diving with my family which also happens more often in warmer weather. Not only that, but there are weddings to attend, anniversaries and birthdays to celebrate and this all overwhelms to create a general sense of burn-out.

My tactic so far is to just keep plodding through it but I feel that my blog and my own writing are suffering as a result.

So, now that I’ve shared my burn-out conundrums with you, let’s bring it up for discussion by asking you all to share your thoughts/advice on the occasional feelings of Burn-Out that you have surely experienced:


1. When/how do you know you are starting to feel burnt-out?


2. How do you navigate around obstacles which crowd out your abilities to focus on poetry in the day-to day?


3. How do you combat poetic burn-out specifically?



4. Finally, how do you know when you’ve conquered burn-out?


I will feature these questions one at a time each Friday once I get a satisfactory number of responses (at least five people) so I hope you will all take the time to e-mail me your answers at poethoundblogspot@yahoo.com and please type the words Burn Out in your subject line so that I know you aren’t Spam. Thank you!

Thanks always for dropping in and participating, I look forward to meeting again Monday…

Parcel Open Submissions

Thanks to the Press Press Press blog I went to Parcel’s site and found out their submissions period is year-round. Please use the link below to check them out and I have included the submissions guidelines direct from their site.

http://www.parceljournal.org/

To be considered send up to 10 pages of poetry or prose to:
Parcelc/o Andrea Rexilius2174 S. Grant St.Denver, Co 80210
or submit by email at editor@parceljournal.org. Please include SUBMISSION in the subject line.
Submissions are read year-round. New parcels will appear every 4 months.

Thanks for checking in, good luck on all of your submissions.
Please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found By Poet Hound

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3886602.ece
Paul Muldoon’s “When The Pie Was Opened”

http://www.versedaily.org/2008/skyharbor.shtml
Norman Dubie’s “Sky Harbor”

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions

Ooops...

Sorry everyone, some volunteer work called out to me and I wasn’t able to create a post for today. There are poems for tomorrow so please stop by tomorrow…

Poet Hounds' Top Five

My favorite Poetry Sites are narrowed down to a Top Five:


Poetryfoundation.org
The Poetry Foundation just has so many positives because there are articles, there is the magazine, the contest announcements, best-seller lists, audio, visual, you name it, they’ve got it. Simply wonderful!

Poets.org
I love this site because it always has information on poets. I can almost always find out more about a poet’s background here than the Poetry Foundation. I also thoroughly enjoyed signing up for Poem-A-Day, even if I didn’t always take the time to read it every day. Again, can’t say enough about how appreciative I am at being able to find out more about individual poets and being able to pass that information on to you.

Poetry Daily
As you may have noticed, most of the Poems Found by Poet Hound features poems from this site. It is a great place to find poems of all subjects, plus I feel like they keep it simple. Just the poem, the book/journal and the blurb about the poet. No fancy blinking distractions which I always appreciate. Just poems for reading’s sake. Thank you Poetry Daily!

Read Write Poem
It took me a long time to stumble onto these guys and boy do I wish I had done so sooner. Writing prompts, discussions, polls, they are everything I wish my little blog could be. They are always keeping things fresh and fun, which can be hard to do every day.

Guerilla Poetics Project
The idea behind this site is just phenomenal. Many people complain about the demise of poetry, the elitist views of poetry publishers, how particular poems never get accepted… The Guerilla Poetics Project strives to get poems of various subjects from various small-press poets into the hands of the unsuspecting public for free. Each broadside that is slipped into a book is beautiful and they all have a code number that you can register on their site on the back of the poem. That’s how I stumbled onto them and I hope you stumble onto their broadsides, too.

These are, by no means, the ONLY poetry sites I consider great but I figure these top five will always bring you some kind of inspiration or vital information in your poetic endeavors. All of these sites’ links are available on the side bar of this page. Please feel free to add your own favorite sites in the comments section for other readers to find.

Thanks for reading, please stop in tomorrow for another featured poet…