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!

Blog: Home of a Cackling Jackal

Reb Livingston, creator of No Tell Motel, has created this blog. She happened to add my blog because I featured one of the poets she published, Laurel Snyder. I started reading her blog before she featured me and I was happy to see the link for Ms. Snyder. Reb is funny and insightful and will clue you in to Poetry sites and poems galore. Not only is the blog fun to read, it can be a great resource. I highly recommend stopping by regularly since she posts often. Check it out at:

http://www.cacklingjackal.blogspot.com/

Please take a moment to answer the poll by scrolling down to the picture at the bottom. Thanks again for stopping by, please come back tomorrow for a living poet…

Poetry Tips: Reading Poems Aloud

This seems simple enough, but how often do you read your poems out loud after writing them? I used to be lazy about it until I joined a poetry group. You will be able to uncover words that don’t sit next to each other well, and you may find that you are adding words that aren’t in your poem so that it flows easier.
Be sure to identify any places that trip up your tongue, any punctuation that disrupts the flow negatively, and any words that sound out of place in your poem. It is amazing what you will discover if you read them aloud to yourself. In addition, try to read them aloud to someone else and get their feedback. This has proved invaluable to me. Your audience (no matter how large or small) will be able to say whether the poem made sense in regards to what you wanted it to say, if there are too many “big words” or changes in subject or too simple or too abstract. Depending on the audience you want for yourself, the feedback can also let you know if you are on the right track to reaching them.

Good luck with crafting the perfect poem, please stop by tomorrow for another featured blog!

ALBATROSS Open for Submissions

I am so happy to feature ALBATROSS for open submissions because while you can easily download and read the magazine at your leisure for free, I was able to find the printed hard copy version at a local indie book-store and it is much easier to curl up in a chair and read with a book rather than a laptop. They consistently feature great collections of poems that flow nicely together. Some journals have poems that differ from each other so much that I have a hard time moving from one poem to the next with ease. ALBATROSS issues always flow and ease you into each successive poem and all of them are superb. I never regret spending time reading each of the issues.

ALBATROSS requests 3 to 5 poems not to exceed 200 lines each, no simultaneous submissions, a biography and a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE). For further information about their press and guidelines go to:
http://www.anabiosispress.org/

Good luck with your submissions, and please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips.

Poem by Poet Hound

October’s Embrace

October girls are not obscured in costume,
they are lit from within
like carved pumpkins
delighted to behold bold colors
of autumn forests,
crackling leaves
under every footstep
when the air is becoming
as crisp as their voice
commanding attention
and a foothold
on your heart.
Do not deny her the pleasure
of shaking your hand
or warming you with an embrace
that melts the surliest of souls.
October girls are confident,
clever, and kind
with a pinky-swearing ability
to never let a friend down.
Preserve such a girl,
keep her close,
for if you are lucky
she will prepare you a toast.



Thanks for reading my poem, please stop in tomorrow for another Open Submissions!

Octavio Paz and the Labyrinth

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City and began writing at an early age. His grandfather had an extensive library and was an active political journalist which passed down to Octavio Paz’s father. Octavio also founded the journal Taller featuring emergent writers. He is well known for his work The Labyrinth of Solitude. This book was his study of the Mexican Identity. He is known as an essayist and poet and while he passed away in 1998, his writing is as important today as it was while he was alive.
The following poem comes from a book of his poems titled: The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957 – 1987.

A Draft of Shadows

in magnetic rotation
link and scatter
on the page.

I am where I was:
I walk behind the murmur,
Footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,
The murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,
I hear the voices that I think,
the voices that think me as I think them.
I am the shadow my words cast.

Thanks for stopping by, please come back tomorrow for more Poetry by Poet Hound.

Open Books Web-Site

This is a Poetry Book-store in Seattle, WA and while I do not live anywhere close and have never personally visited I did read an article months ago about them. Poetry Only book-stores are very rare and this is one of them. Even if you cannot visit in person you can find lists of their books available for order on-line and if you are looking for a particular poem or poet who you can’t quite put your finger on they will help you find the answer! I e-mailed them and asked if I had gotten my facts right that the book-store was part of the owners’ house and they responded to that and much more! Here they are quoted directly:

“The bookstore is not in our house, not yet. The store is street-level on a busy arterial in what was the garage and basement of a 100 year old bungalow. The upstairs part of the building was a restaurant for 7 years and has been vacant for 4 years. We are remodeling it back into a residence and will live there someday.We gain customers and lose customers as the years move along. We started in this neighborhood with a small general bookstore 20 years ago, moved it and turned it into poetry-only 12 1/2 years ago. We have watched the children of some of our customers grow up, and attended the funerals of some of our customers.We enjoy the store a great deal. There are headaches, of course, as with any business. We enjoy the art form and like many of the people who enjoy too.We changed to poetry-only as it became clear that owning a small general bookstore was becoming very difficult, what with Barnes & Noble, Borders,and Amazon (which was just beginning to make waves when we made the change).The mass market approach to literature was not for us. We each had studied poetry on the graduate level, knew and read poetry, and were able to talk about it to customers, something we couldn't do with science fiction, etc.When we closed the first bookstore most of our business there was in poetry and poetry-related books, so the move made sound business sense.Thanks for your interest,John”Open Books: A Poem Emporium2414 N. 45th Street Seattle, WA 98103(206) 633-0811www.openpoetrybooks.com


Please check them out by clicking the links and do feel free to drop them a line or an inquiry about a poet or a poetry book!

http://openpoetrybooks.com/index.html

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Poet that has Passed….

Blog: Avoiding the Muse

This blogger’s name is Dale Young who lives in San Francisco and practices medicine. All of this is in his profile. What I like about Dale is that he does not fit the description of what most people consider to be a poet. Growing up I was always given the impression that all poets were starving artists who lived in Starbucks. Obviously this is not true of pretty much ALL poets, and Mr. Young is refreshing in breaking up that idea for anyone else clinging to that view. After all, he practices medicine, not only that, but he also magically finds time to teach AND carves out time to write AND is an editor of New England Review. Trust me, he has plenty to talk about and plenty of interesting things going on in his life. Check him out at:
http://avoidmuse.blogspot.com/

Thanks again for reading my little blog, and please stop by tomorrow for another living poet…

Poetry Tips: An Outside Perspective

Many poets, myself included, tend to write poems from only one perspective: their own. They write about their lives, their view out the window, their own objects and family and friends. Sometimes it is good to take a look at things from someone else’s perspective, or even something. For example, if you were to write about the view from the window, why not write it from your pet’s perspective? How might an ant crawling across the carpet to your cabinet door view things?
Or, you can write about events outside of your immediate control. You could write about the wars in other countries, marketplaces in other countries, the sights and smells of a safari you’ve never been on. Perhaps you can write from the perspective of a person in office, a person with short term memory loss, someone with paralysis, someone with mental illness such as Schizophrenia. The idea is to literally set yourself in another pair of shoes and walk it for an entire length of a poem.

Good luck and may there be no writer’s block on your paths of writing…

Tampa Review Open Submissions

This journal ends it’s open submission period on December 1st. So you have some time to pick through your choicest poems before sending. Send between 3 to 5 poems, and include a line count for each one. The mailing address is:
Tampa Review
The University of Tampa
401 W. Kennedy Blvd.
Tampa, FL 33606

http://tampareview.ut.edu/guidelines.html

Good luck to those of you submitting! I’ll see you tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…