Poetry Tips: Poetic Hazards

The idea of superstition crosses my mind with Halloween approaching and the ever-popular black cat winding its way across lawns, over door-steps, and pumpkins smashed without provocation in nearby neighborhoods. This week I dare you to write a superstitious poem or a poem about the hazards in your life to date. Perhaps there’s a construction site in which you fear an I-beam will be dropped on unsuspecting victims, or maybe that a black cat will bring you bad luck. Whatever the case may be, this week’s idea is about the hazards and superstitions a poet or his friends and family may have.
Good luck and have fun to all those who try it.

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The Curdoroy Mountain Open Submissions...

This is a division of Graying Ghost Press which has it’s own journal in which you can submit your prose poetry via e-mail using the link provided below. Check out details on the guidelines and include the world’s shortest bio requirement I’ve ever seen: One sentence. Good luck to all those who submit!

http://www.airforcejoyride.com/journal.html

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Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19624
“Election Year” by Donald Revell


http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/emmy_perez/ysleta_texas.shtml
“Ysleta Texas” by Emmy Perez

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Mary Oliver's Thirst

I picked up Mary Oliver’s book of poems, Thirst, from my local library. I have been coveting this book since it was published in 2006 and when I finally see it at the book-store it is always when I am broke and only browsing. I was thrilled to finally see it on my library’s shelves so that I could finally set down and read this book which is dedicated to the love of her life who passed away in 2005, Molly Malone Cook.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mary Oliver, she is well known for her poems about nature, essays, and prose. She was born September 10th in 1935 and lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has won the Pulitzer Prize (in 1984) and the National Book Award in 1992. She even sold out an entire auditorium for one of her readings yet she is known to be a recluse in that she is very quiet and shy about her private life. Mary Oliver is well respected in the literary community and I hope that if you are not already familiar with her writing that you will pick up any volume of her work you find among the shelves in your own local library or book-store.

For Thirst, this volume focuses on her reflections about her loved one’s absence and how she copes with it. The poems are as beautiful as always in regards to poems from her other volumes. We are greeted by a poem titled “Messenger” in which she writes the line “My work is loving the world.” She goes on to explain her focus in life: “Let me/keep my mind on what matters,/…which is mostly standing still and learning to be/astonished.” She goes on to describe the joys found in nature, and while this may seem typical of her usual volume of poems this collection gives way to grief and her prayers to God as a way to cope with her loss.

In her poem, “Those Days” she describes Ms. Cook simply and lovingly. “When I think of her I think of the long summer days/she lay in the sun,/...how we/spread our blanket, and friends came/” and when Ms. Oliver grew restless she would go for walks in the woods and return to their home where she waited, “my glorious welcoming, tan and hungry and ready to tell/the hurtless gossips of the day…” She describes them as a pair in the ending line which I think is the most beautiful line in the poem: “until our lives they trembled and shimmered/everywhere.” This poem is a glimpse into Oliver’s personal life we rarely see and so this is a poem I treasure in the collection.

Though there are poems that address God directly, I enjoyed her poem titled “Praying” that is a little more generalized simply because it seems to address the collective need of humankind to appeal to a power greater than themselves in times of need. The point of the poem is to say that prayer does not need to be fancy or difficult, “a few words together and don’t try/to make them elaborate, this isn’t/a contest…” She ends with a simple idea that prayer is another way to say “thank you” and allow the greater power a chance to enlighten us. Out of all the poems that reference God this one is my favorite. I hope you will enjoy it, too, when you see it.

Poems on audio also provided along with biographical information at Poetry Foundation link below:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5130

Poets.org also has biographical information and links to her poems at the link below:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/265

Thanks always for dropping by and reading, please stop by tomorrow for more Poems
Found by Poet Hound…

Outlaw Poetry

I don’t exactly know what it is, but it’s wonderful. Poke around, find out about poetry projects and web pages, and there are several languages posted so it’s very accessible as a site to many readers. Check it out at:

http://outlawpoetry.com/

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Poetry Tips: Inspired by the Arts

Often poets are inspired by other artists whether they be musicians, photographers, or painters. Today’s idea is simple, find a piece of art you think is inspiring and write a poem for it. You can also create a poem for a piece of music you enjoy and see if you can use the music as a background when you read it aloud. You could write a poem about a photograph and then pair them together for all to see. Either way, you get to mix up your typical style a little bit.

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Blossombones Open Submissions

You have until November 1st to submit up to five poems with “Last Name/Poetry Submission” in the e-mail heading to susan.blossombones (AT) mail (DOT)com and be sure to attach a cover letter that includes the titles of your submitted poems. For in-depth detail and to explore their site to see if your work fits with their style, click on the link below:

http://www.blossombones.com/submit.html

Good luck to all those who submit, please stop by tomorrow for more poetry tips!

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://arseniclobster.magere.com/170701.html
“The Dance of Curb Chickens” by Jacob Olschner

http://www.poolpoetry.com/Athena%20Nilssen%202007.html
“Girl in Porn” Athena Nillsen

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Justin Barrett's [Untitled]

Justin Barrett’s new chapbook [Untitled] from Alternating Current through their Propaganda Press is quite an interesting mix with poems that range from mournful to funny, witty to sentimental, and you can expect that Justin has maintained the not-for-the-faint-of-heart spirit that I and many of his regular readers enjoy.

A quick note for those of you who purchase books from Alternating Current in the future: Authors receive royalties. As many of you know, I am a huge advocate of poets being paid for their work. In addition, Alternating Current also throws in free chapbooks from their back catalog with every purchase of a new chapbook. Think of it as the ultimate prize in your proverbial cereal box.

Now back to [Untitled]:

With permission from the editors and the poet, I am able to post and discuss several poems from this collection, the first of which is titled:

broken spoon

there’s also the
time when i was six
and i was digging
in the dirt in
front of our apartment
building
with a broken
spoon
and i found one
of the
red horns of
satan.

i believe it was
his left horn.

i ran into the building
fast, and
knocked on
my friend’s door.

his mother
answered, her hair
tangled and her
eyes three
shades of bloodshot.

she yelled at me
for waking her up.
i ran back outside,
faster.

even then i knew
you stood a
better chance
with the devil
than with
most people.


I think of this as a tongue-in-cheek poem. We can relate to digging in the dirt as kids and making a discovery of something we aren’t sure of, but our imaginations lead us to a fantastical idea and when we run off to report this it often is not met with the same excitement by the adults in our lives. Not only that, but this poem exposes the dysfunctions of adulthood and how a child interprets it which in the last stanza is a rather alarming and funny insight: “you stood a/better chance/with the devil/than with/most people.” The ending stanza slams the door on the whole experience for the reader in the way Justin Barrett words it, just as the child’s discovery is slammed to his face by his friend’s mother. The poem’s trajectory is unexpected yet comical the more you think about it because you can immediately think of so many times something similar happened to yourself as a child.

The second poem is:

double helix

two scientists recently decoded
the entire Human Genome
and have made bold
predictions
that this breakthrough
will revolutionize
the way humans are diagnosed
with, and treated for,
diseases.

it appears it will be theoretically
possible for doctors
to take a sample of your
DNA, genotype it
and figure out the probabilities
of you acquiring certain
deadly diseases and other genetic disorders.

this is, allegedly, a good thing
as it will equip all of us
with the knowledge
of our potential deaths,
which we can then,
supposedly, prevent
through diet, exercise and,
in drastic cases,
gene-manipulation therapy.

the one prediction i will make is
this foreknowledge of
every disease that
has the potential of
ravaging our bodies and,
eventually, killing
us will only spawn an
especially virulent,
more-concerned,
more-educated
and vastly more
paranoid
strain of

hypochondriac.

At then end of this poem the first word to come to mind was “Amen!” This poem reads as though a friend were going on a rant and as you are listening, engaged, the conclusion becomes inevitable and agreeable. This poem distracts the reader from the fact that it’s a poem, at least it does for me, because it sounds like any day’s conversation which I think makes this poem all the more interesting. Sometimes you want a poem to say what it means to say without inflating it with fanciful language and this poem does just that.

I think this third poem is hilarious:

heredity

my mother used to tell
me that i could
be anything i wanted
to be when i grew up,
yet here i am
working a menial job
for minimum wage,
thousands of dollars in
debt with the drink
as my only escape.

i don’t ever recall
wanting to be
my Uncle Jimmy.

I find it hilarious because the first stanza seems logical enough, the second one seems hopeless, then the third stanza sounds like a punch-line. You can almost picture this poem becoming a commercial if used in the right vein. Also, coming from family stock that reminds me of “Uncle Jimmy” makes it all the more humorous for me. Perhaps you can relate as well.

This final poem featured is also funny:

at the Sunshine Laundromat

while staring
at the swirl of colors
spilling around and around
one of the industrial-
sized dryers
i noticed a placard
riveted to
the dryer with a list
of instructions on
how to use
the machine.

#1 is:
Check inside of machine for children, pets and foreign objects before loading or starting cycle.

i paused for a second
and opened the dryer
door to quickly
look into the mess
because i didn’t check
before i loaded or started the dryer
and i wanted to
be sure there wasn’t
a Doberman or a
small child trapped in
my underwear

or a foreign object
lodged in one of
my socks.

Really, this poem is just plain entertaining and funny to me. In the words of Forest Gump “That’s all I have to say about that.”

I hope you enjoyed these poems and that you will visit Alternating Current and check out their site and perhaps buy a copy of Mr. Barrett’s collection. There is a wide range of poems and I selected the ones I thought of as funny since it is hard to write poems that make people smile, grin, and/or laugh.

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

One Night Stanzas Site

Thanks to Jim Murdoch who alerted me to this site a couple weeks ago, I wanted to check it out and then share it with all of you as well. It’s a great resource for poetry with helpful tips of all kinds and please visit by clicking on the link below:

http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/

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Poetry Tips: Think Outside the Box for the Holidays

Now that it is officially October, people are gathering decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving because some of those items coincide such as pumpkins. After that is December in which there are multiple holidays for various religions, and then we have New Year’s. So what about poetry amidst the shopping, baking, and decorating?

This year why not think outside the box with your poems? You could cut out construction paper in the shapes of your holiday sugar cookies and write poems that are yours or another poet’s on there and use them as decorations. Another idea is to use your piped frosting to make short one to three line poems on your cakes, brownies, or line up sugar cookies on a tray. (That would be a great way to eat your words, wouldn’t it?)
You could even embroider a poem into a blanket.

If you think of any other ideas please share with all of us by typing it in the comments section. In the meantime, have fun thinking outside the box this Holiday Season!

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Propaganda Press Open Submissions

Thanks to leah angstman and Mike Litos for e-mailing me about their Open Submissions:
”Propaganda Press currently has open submissions for consideration for the poetry journal "Poiesis." Issue number 2 will be out in January 2009, and we are accepting submissions currently. Send your one favorite or two favorite pieces, no more. Poetry only. Any length, any subject, any genre, any format. No blatant unnecessary hate speech, otherwise not censored. Only one poem per person per issue will be accepted, but you are welcome to send two. Please do not inundate us with tons of poems, just one or two. Save some trees: no cover letter required, no resumes, no bios, no photos. Just poems with your name and full contact info on them [please include an email address, if you have one], legible, with titles clearly marked. Please proofread; it saves everyone some time. Free submission; you will receive one free copy if your work appears in the issue. Mail to: Alternating Current, PO Box 398058, Cambridge MA 02139 USA or email to alt.current@gmail.com.and here is a link to our last issue, if you would like something to link to: http://alt-current.blogspot.com/2008/07/poiesis-1.html”-- leah angstman & Mike Litos, coordinatorsAlternating CurrentPO Box 398058Cambridge MA 02139 USAalt.current@gmail.comalt-current.comalt-current.blogspot.com

PS Deadline for the 2009 issue is December 1st, 2008.
Good luck to all who submit, and thanks for dropping in! Please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found By Poet Hound

http://www.knockoutlit.org/Larissa%20Szporluk,%20Accordion.pdf
“Accordian” by Larissa Szporluk

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14150
Kevin Young’s “I shall be released”

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Lost Data

Sorry everyone, looks like my computer turned off and I lost unsaved data for today's post. Everything will be back up tomorrow.

Thanks for dropping in! Please stop by tomorrow when I figure out what happened...

Swink Site

Swink magazine has a site worth exploring for poetry and fiction with an on-line edition and print edition along with contests for publication. There are various links to check out and they all offer something interesting. Check it out at:

http://www.swinkmag.com/index.html

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