Poetry Tips: Spin-off Titles

This idea came to me very simply. One of the titles of the poems in my weekly “Poems Found by Poet Hound” grabbed my attention and I spun off a poem as a result. Sometimes a title can do that for you. So I urge you to look at the titles of books, poems, articles, anything that grabs your attention as a headliner and spin off a poem as a result. Have fun and good luck!

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Rattle Open Submissions

I apologize for the delays in posts lately. For some reason when I get up in the morning the internet connection isn't working. Then when I get home my computer acts up in other ways so we'll see how long it takes me to break down and call the Geek Squad. In the meantime, back to our scheduled program:

Yes, they’re open year round and they feature a new poem every day at 5am according to their home page. Isn’t that wonderful? Be sure your contact information is on each page you send. You may send up to 6 poems, but no simultaneous submissions, to: submissionsATrattleDOTcom
or to:
RATTLE12411 Ventura Blvd.Studio City, CA 91604

For further details go to the submissions link below and explore their site to see what kinds of poems they publish and any applicable tributes that are related to your kind of poetry:
http://www.rattle.com/submissions.htm

Good luck to all who submit, please drop in tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20446
“Poetry Is A Destructive Force” by Wallace Stevens

http://juked.com/2008/12/inlandamongstones.asp
“Inland Among Stones” by Sean Patrick Hill

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Lilliput Review Issue 165

I received my new issues #165 and #166 from Lilliput Review. Issue #165’s collection is the regular Lilliput Review issue and #166 is a mini chapbook by M. Kei. So I asked Mr. Wentworth if I could review both featuring several poems from each and he was kind enough to oblige. So today will be issue #165 and next week will be M. Kei’s collection…

Let’s start with #165’s collection of poets. This collection has wonderful poems regarding the five senses and some strange and intriguing descriptions within the lines of the various poems included. Here are some of the poems I enjoyed immensely:

Indelicate clank of the radiator
and the hesitant tapping
of autumn rain. Add one small voice
and you’ve got a symphony.

--Greg Watson of St. Paul, MN

I love this little gem because it involves the senses as I mentioned above and I can easily hear the symphony for myself through the imagination brought out in Mr. Watson’s lines.


Canyon Grass

A rag of wind catches
in January’s grass
where a deer has checked
its slow descent to water
with a mountain the size of a snowflake
reflected in each eye.

--David Chorlton, Phoenix, AZ

I love the words in the first line because I’ve never heard of “A rag of wind” and I think the entire poem is simply beautiful. Can you imagine being so close to a deer as to see the reflection in its eyes and for the reflection to be so beautiful?

alone
all you’ve
brought with you

--John Martone, Charleston, IL

Another simple and beautiful poem that has no need for further explanation that I can see.

There are many more poems just as insightful and beautiful as these so I hope you’ll spring at the chance to buy a copy or a subscription if you have a chance. You can also check out Issa's Untidy Hut which features poems from back issues of Lilliput Review.


Thanks for reading, next week will feature M. Kei’s collection titled Bridge of Bones. Please drop in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

One Thousand Journals

Now this is an awesome project that I hope you will definitely check out. There are 1000 journals in circulation being passed hand to hand and being filled by whoever stumbles across them. Then the entries are posted on the web-site linked below. You can go through the pages and see some rhymes and insightful words and blessings. Wouldn’t this be a great poetry project? Who’s with me?

http://1000journals.com/

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Poetry Tips: Blind Perspective

If you are able to read this then you are not blind, so for this week’s idea for poetry it is to write a poem as though you really are blind. What kind of poem would you dictate if you couldn’t see? How would it change the poems you typically write and could you recreate an existing poem from the “viewpoint” of being blind? I wish you luck to those of you who are up to the challenge.

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Gloom Cupboard Open Submissions

“Our guidelines are deliberately vague because we have nothing worthwhile to say. It’s up to you to take us beyond what has gone before.email: poetry/flashfiction/shortstories/articles to aprilmaymarch777@yahoo.co.ukSubmissions are now required for #70. Our last call of 2008”

Take a look at their site, http://www.gloomcupboard.com/ so you can get a better idea of what kind of work is published and good luck to all who submit!

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14218
Craig Arnolds’ “from A Place of First Permission”

http://www.versedaily.org/2008/spoke.shtml
Erin Malone’s “Spoke”

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Frank O'Hara's Meditations In An Emergency

I picked up Frank O’Hara’s book, Meditations In An Emergency at my local library and was very happy to read through it. Born June 27th, 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, Frank O’Hara would move to Boston, Massachusetts to study piano and become a sonarman in World War II. Frank O’Hara’s first passion was music, which he majored in Harvard, but also began writing poetry for which he has become well-known, as well as his friendship with John Ashberry. He also became associated with painters such as Jackson Pollack and Jasper Johns to which he worked with collaboratively with his poetry.

In this collection of poems, published originally in 1957, it is obvious that he has a sense of rhythm in his lines without a need for rhyme and the structure of the lines can vary within a poem. There are countless enjoyable poems within the pages and of course I will only select two to mention.

The first one is very simple and almost childlike, but when you read it in context with all of his other poems the very reason I enjoy this one is because it has been stripped down to its childlike wonder. This poem is titled “Les Etiquettes juanes.” The poem is simply Frank O’Hara picking up a leaf and observing it. “Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/color, then just fall!” This stanza sounds exactly like how I thought as a child when playing in the leaves, and he accuses the leaf of being “too relaxed/to answer me.” I love the idea he places on personifying the leaf, another trait children have. He ends his poem with the lines “Leaf! don’t be neurotic/like the small chameleon.” Again, the personification of the leaf and the childlike view of it makes this poem just pure and simple pleasure to read. Also, it is a great poem for this time of year, since leaves are falling in beautiful showers of red, orange, and gold in different parts of the country.

Another poem I quite enjoyed is titled “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday.” This poem showcases his passion for music as well as his admiration of Rachmaninoff, the composer. “Blue windows, blue rooftops/and the blue light of rain,/these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff/pouring into my enormous ears…” I like to think the word “blue” is used to explain O’Hara’s thoughts on the music and how it affects O’Hara’s view of his surroundings. Blue often can be used for seeming sad or somber but in this poem seems to connote more the idea of crisp and cool like water which is often described as blue in color. “…for without him I do not play, especially in the afternoon/on the day of his birthday.” O’Hara’s admiration being so great that he does not attempt to play Rachmaninoff’s music is a glimpse of O’Hara’s sentimental side and of his view of the importance of paying tribute to his favorite composer. “Only my eyes would be blue as I played/and you rapped my knuckles,/dearest father of all the Russias…” Again, O’Hara uses the word blue to explain his feelings toward his favorite composer, the desire to have been his pupil in the mention of rapped knuckles, and how their relationship would have been as well as the love mixed in with the pain of discipline when he says “dearest father,” all succinctly said in just a few lines. This is what I find remarkable about Frank O’Hara because he says so much with so few words and lines, even when it comes to his longer poems. His poetry is an ideal model for all poets.

I hope that you will find Frank O’Hara’s poems as beautiful and amazing as I do, and I hope you will pick up a copy of any of his collections and relish them all.

To find out more and to read poems by Frank O’Hara, visit the links below:
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/164

http://www.frankohara.org/

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

Adirondack Review Book Sale

I received this via e-mail and hope some of you may find it interesting and perhaps useful for next year since it has come and gone already, but definitely check out the link:

“Dear Friends, Celebrate publishing's independent spirit with over 100 indie publishers from around the world, all under one roof, selling books you can't get at your big box bookstore. The Indie and Small Press Book is one of New York City's favorite annual literary events. It's free, open to all, and packed with an exciting line-up of public events. You can find more information here: http://www.nycip.org/bookfair
Where: 20 West 44th Street, New YorkWhen: December 6th and 7th (This weekend!)If you can make it, be sure to visit your friends at Black Lawrence Press and The Adirondack Review. We'll have a table on the third floor. Happy Holidays!Diane Goettel”

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Poetry Tips: The Poetry Journal

Most of us keep poems on our computer nowadays but I used to keep them in a spiral notebook—at least the “final” versions once they were finished. Why not find a beautiful journal or notebook to carefully hand-write your favorites in as they come along so that you can easily find poetic inspiration all in one place when you have your stumbling block moments? My mother-in-law bought me the most beautiful journal last year and I am slowly filling it with my favorite poems and treasure it immensely.

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Arsenic Lobster Open Submissions

The editors read year round so please make a note of that for future reference when most other publishers close their reading periods. You may e-mail 3 to 5 previously unpublished poems to lobster(at)magere(dot)com. In the subject heading of the e-mail be sure to title it using your “first initial, last name, date, and what you are submitting” for example: P. Hound 12/04/08 Poetry. Also note that they will take simultaneous submissions but be sure to notify them if your work is accepted elsewhere. Take a look at the link below to find out more:

http://arseniclobster.magere.com/1submission.html

Good luck to all of you who submit, thanks for dropping in and please stop by tomorrow…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.jwhagins.com/benca.html
“White Christmas” by Nick Benca

http://www.blossombones.com/summer08/cook_s08.html
“Stop Motion Lamb Figurine” by Juliet Cook

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Lynda Hull's Collected Poems

Lynda Hull was born December 5th, in 1954 in Newark, New Jersey. Although she passed away early in 1994 in a car accident, she has quite a collection of published poems that you can find in her collected volume, Lynda Hull Collected Poems as I have or in her smaller collections still available today. She has won several prizes for her poetry which were often influenced by her love of Jazz. You can learn more about her using the poets.org link below, there are many featured poems for you to peruse there as well.

One of the poems I enjoyed is titled “Night Waitress.” It is, quite simply, about a waitress taking in the scene before her while reminiscing about her own personal life and I am often fond of the simpler poems with clear meanings. As Lynda thinks of her mother, she writes “She washed the floor on hands and knees/below the Black Madonna, praying/…who’s not here tonight when I lay out the plates,/small planets, the cups and moons of saucers.” What I like about these lines is the imagery, you can picture a woman scrubbing the floor of a church under a Black Madonna, or a world of plates and cups. I love the insert of the words “small planets” because you could almost overlook them within the poem but instead they bring out so much more interest in an otherwise mundane idea or task. As Ms. Hull moves onto the description of the customers she admits she is invisible to them although “There’s the man/who leans over the jukebox nightly/pressing the combinations/of numbers. I would not stop him/if he touched me,…” The customers are factory workers who “grip lunch box handles,/belt buckles gleam,” while she prepares to go home after another night of work. “I think of my room as a calm arrival/each book and lamp in its place.” The poem is very simple, describing a single typical night of waitressing but the lines make it enjoyable to read and easy to take in and picture as is. Lynda Hull does write more complex poems and ideas but there are times I’m in the mood for simplicity and ease which is perfectly executed in this poem.

Another poem I enjoy is “The Floating Wedding” where the bride is awake on her wedding night next to her exhausted new husband while looking about the cabin on the lake and out the window at the nightlife. For the aftermath of the party, “artifacts of marriage remain, heavy knives,/ the wedding cake sodden and littered/with the confetti of good cheer./She watches on shore a single headlamp./It’s the drunk. She knows him, has seen him…” The bride contemplates this man who “Nightly/he struggles with the bicycle through the sand/past floating piers and houses with their freight/of sleep.” I love the words “freight of sleep.” She finds another way of saying heavy eyelids, which is a wonderful way to change up the wording of a typical analogy. As the husband sleeps through all of this, “she lowers her veil to the sea,/its crown of flowers floating/like a doll’s small funeral barge.” This is an unexpected comparison to me, flowers from a wedding and then the mention of a funeral barge. It takes a joyous occasion and turns it to a somber event. Juxtaposition is another favorite idea of mine. “When she wraps her arms around herself/she is wrapped in blue fire. She touches/her husband’s whitening shoulder.” To me, these lines indicate that she is alive with passion in her wakeful state while her husband is sleeping, pale through the chill night air during the events taking place in their surroundings. I think this poem is beautiful and I cannot do it justice by presenting some lines in this paragraph. You will have to read it yourself if you can find a copy of her collected poems.


In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Lynda Hull, please click the link below and be sure to read some of her poems that are linked:
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/726

Thanks for reading, please drop by tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound...

Songs To A Midnight Sky Blog

This blog is by a woman living in Florida, much like myself, who blogs about her poetic finds and endeavors along with many other interesting tidbits and information. I find her blog very interesting and hope you will too, please check out the link below:

http://poeticinspire.blogspot.com/

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