Poetry Tips: The Definition of Prose

After reading the guidelines to White Knuckle Press I wondered how to explain to readers the difference between a poem and a prose poem. I often think of prose as poetry presented in paragraph form but that is not a real definition.

Below are definitions I have discovered that explain the definition of Prose:


From the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Prose:
prose poem, a short composition employing the rhythmic cadences and other devices of free verse (such as poetic imagery and figures) but printed wholly or partly in the format of prose, i.e. with a right‐hand margin instead of regular line breaks. This genre emerged in France during the 19th century, notably in Charles Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris (1869) and Arthur Rimbaud's Les Illuminations (1886); a significant English sequence of prose poems is Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns (1971). A prose poem is a self contained work usually similar to a lyric, whereas poetic prose may occur intermittently within a longer prose work.
(I think this is the best definition I found)


My Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Prose:

The ordinary language people use in speaking or writing

(I think this is the worst definition I’ve found)



So there you have it, two definitions, one more helpful than the other.


Good luck to all of you who write prose, please drop by again next week…

White Knuckle Press Open Submissions

If you write prose poems, then this is the place for you! Submit a manuscript of 10-12 previously unpublished prose poems before May 30th to as a word (.doc) or .rtf file using the on-line submission manager on the website. Your manuscript should include a title page, table of contents, a bio, an artist’s statement, and one prose poem per page. You should look at the website and find the previous published prose manuscripts (all available on-line) before submitting to make sure your poems fit the guidelines.

For more details and to use the on-line submission manager go to:

https://sites.google.com/site/whiteknucklepresscom/

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

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3misNs3VCcs
“He-Man You Smarmy Bastard” by Daniel Crocker from Trailer Park Quarterly
*Plenty of foul language but very funny, you’ve been forewarned



http://www.poolpoetry.com/poeteight.html
“Waves” by Ellen Kaufman

Thanks for clicking in, please check in tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Henry Denander's The Loulaki Bar

Henry Denander’s collection of poems about Hydra, Greece is titled The Loulaki Bar and they do a fine job of making me want to vacation there. Published by Miskwabik Press Calumet Michigan USA, this book is also filled with beautiful illustrations by Mr. Denander himself showcasing the people, animals, and buildings of this little island. Below I am happy to share a small sample to entice you to visit this little island as well:

Cipporo

I wanted to pay Barba Yannis for his work
taking out the old lemon tree in our garden
and planting a new mandarin tree.
He took some money to pay for Nikos’ digging
and for the tree but he didn’t want anything for himself.

Yannis is 80 years old and one of the island’s
few experts on trees, he helps us every year.

But I will buy you a beer next time at
Taverna Kristina, I said.
He shook his head. No beer.
Only Cipporo, he said.

When he passed the taverna later that week
we offered him a glass of that clear white spirit.
It was stronger than Ouzo and too foul for me to drink.

Yannis told us how it made his leg better,
how it helped get rid of his kidney stones.
In the winter he had it with honey and never caught a cold.
Barba Yannis seems like a young boy, his eyes are
full of energy and mischief and he moves around like
he was 50 years younger.
He climbs our trees like a squirrel
and he has no trouble jumping up
on the roof from the ladder.

I may have to give the Cipporo
another try.

This poem is a great little story about a local man and I love that it’s a spry older gentleman who can take on stouter activities and drink than the poet is able to take on himself. Yannis reminds me of the people who turn 100 and are asked how they lived so long and the answer always seems to surprising “bacon,” or “raw eggs,” or “100 sit-ups every morning.” For Yannis, it is Cipporo.



The flood

We had a late lunch at Lulus’. They have
a really good new cook now and all
the local people have returned to the taverna.

But now, this rainy Thursday in early
November, we are the only guests and
the owner interrupts his game of Tavli
to serve us lunch.

Suddenly there is lightning and loud
thunder and the drizzling turns
to very heavy rain.

We know where there is a lot of rain,
the narrow streets leading down to the
harbor can turn into small channels,
flooded with water.

Five minutes later the water comes
gushing down the stone paved street
and the owner rushes out
to save his tables and chairs.

The water takes one of the tables and it swivels
down the street in the high stream of water;
fifty meters down we see an arm
coming out of the doorway of Spiros’ tavern
and he grabs the table before it makes it
down to the harbor and the sea.

Ten minutes later a small metal café table
takes off in the strong stream and the same arm
grabs it further down the street.

It looks like Spiros has done this before,
but of course,
he is used to waiting on tables.

This is another vivid story by Mr. Denander of local life. It’s funny and charming, just as I imagine the town of Hydra to be. I am ready to applaud Spiros for saving the day more than once for the tavern owner and I thoroughly enjoy such poems as these.



Basic Philosophy

People funding their children’s marriage, college,
university – living almost poorly themselves,
working five more years after retirement to bring
their children through college. Not allowing themselves
to do the things they always wanted to do…

There is something wrong here.

And their children will do the same,
live poorly, work all their life (or longer),
give money to their kids. Never retiring.

Our electrician here in Greece, Mr. Lameras,
says he has to work so hard because
his two daughters got married last year and
now one of them is at the university and
the other just had a baby.

Isn’t this a bit the same system as at McDonald’s,
when people are reserving seats before
standing in line for the food
and all the people waiting to sit down and eat
can’t find a free table because all is reserved.

I may be wrong but isn’t there
a conclusion to make out of this?

Maybe I will never eat at McDonald’s again.


This poem hits home for me because I already have made mental notes similar to the poets about older people working longer to help their adult children who in turn help their own children in an endless cycle of trying to help others without helping themselves first and all end up living poorly. What’s interesting is the comparison to standing in line at McDonald’s. Mr. Denander takes two groups of behaviors and finds them strikingly similar which I hadn’t thought of before. It’s an interesting poem and an even more interesting commentary on current social norms, don’t you think?



If you enjoyed these poems as I did, you may order a copy of The Loulaki Bar by Henry Denander for yourself for $18.00 (postage included no matter where you are in the world) at:
http://henrydenander.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=364&Itemid=1

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

Karen The Small Press Librarian

How can you not be intrigued by the title alone? Don Wentworth linked the interview which I have linked here, but do take time to peruse the other posts. It’s a wonderful blog by Karen Lillis:

http://karenslibraryblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/interview-with-pop-up-bookseller.html

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

Poet Hound has been interviewed at My Literary Quest

This is no April Fool’s joke, there are not Poetry Tips today. Instead, Jodi Milner of My Literary Quest has interviewed me for her site and I am happy experience the other side of an interview. Please check it out for yourself after 9AM at:

http://myliteraryquest.wordpress.com/

Thanks for dropping in, please drop in again next week…

Nerve Cowboy Open Submissions

While you do have to send a snail-mail submission with a return envelope, these editors welcome poetry all year-round. You may send up to five pages worth of poetry via snail mail (be sure to include your contact information in the top left corner of each page) to:

Joseph Shields and Jerry Hagins, Editors
Nerve Cowboy
PO Box 4973
Austin, Texas 78765

For further details check out their website submission guidelines at:
http://www.jwhagins.com/submission.html
Good luck to all who submit, please stop in again tomorrow…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

https://sites.google.com/site/rhpissue40/bill-christophersen
“West Side Story” by Bill Christopherson

http://foreverwillendonthursday.wordpress.com/poems-ii/#our mother
“our mother” by Nic Sebastian


Thanks for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Sky Burial by Dana Levin

When I first read this book, Sky Burial, by Dana Levin, I put it down in frustration. I wasn’t ready to read deeply into the concept of death, burial, rituals… My life was filled with the mundane every day trials and tribulations of quickly fixing dinner before one of us ran off to our hobby group or game practice. Then came the day I found out a former co-worker was in the hospital. The next day I was told life support had been removed, the following morning I learned my former co-worker had passed away.

If and when you are faced with mortality you often try to find a way to put the concept of death into imagery or words and this brought me back to Dana Levin’s book, Sky Burial, with renewed interest and a need to find comfort or reason through words.

Dana Levin places the concept of mortality and death at the feet of religious rituals and humanity’s desire to commemorate or make sense of mortality.

While I am allowed to feature only one poem I find that I am equally torn between two: One is a prose poem about a “crazy woman” encountered in a restaurant in which the patrons and the poet do their best to appear to ignore her antics and yet their heads all tilt in her direction and the other poem is about the struggle of a woman who ultimately collapses and dies. The one about the crazy woman tugs at me personally given my background in advocating for people with mental health issues and how our society has a very long way to go in the treatment of those with mental health illness. However, given the title of the book and the recent death of a former co-worker I will, of course, feature the poem about the struggle with death:



Bardo

You don’t have to break it. Just give it a little
tap.


tap tap. See,

there’s the crack. And you pry it a little
with the flat end of that spoon,

you’ll be able to slip yourself through.


--


To the woods where you’re walking. Crushed ice above you
like a layer of sky—

Some sun under it making it gleam.

Some snow under it bloodless and bright

in the fissured heart, the winter morgue of its imagined
land.

Where you can find her—

Sprawled, facedown, in the snow—

Bracing herself up, a puff of ice at her chin, then seizing
and dying all over again—


Automaton. You prop her up.

And it’s like shaking a doll, How dare it, How dare it—

What



--



good is she for, there in her dying machine?

You push her shoulders back against the trunk of the tree,
her chest’s so cold it cracks—

so you can slip yourself through.
To the woods she’s been walking,

wondering where the living has gone.


This poem struck me because I realized that once life support is taken away it then becomes a struggle to breathe on one’s own. For my co-worker, that struggle quickly came and was gone. That sort of struggle is detailed here along with how fragile life is. The beginning of the poem details the tapping and cracking of an egg and then the words “slip through” detail not only how easy it is to slip into a fragile egg but how a soul is just as fragile and slip from its human vessel and into something else—the unknown. There are so many layers that make up the poem, the main character watching the woman dying, the bloodless snow a clue that the blood has drained from the woman’s face as she struggles again for breath, the cracking of the egg and then the cracking of the woman’s chest. There are so many layers in this relatively short poem which shows the depth and careful construction wrought by Ms. Levin. I feel this poem encapsulates Ms. Levin’s talents throughout the whole collection and also speaks to me personally which is what most poets aim for—connection.


Ms. Levin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and has graduated from both Pitzer College and NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. She has received honors and awards from Rona Jaffe’s Writer’s Award, a Writer Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and has received the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Her work in this collection has previously appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Memorious, and many others.

If you enjoyed this review of Sky Burial by Dana Levin and the small sample from this book, you may purchase a copy for yourself for $15.00 (not including Shipping and Handling) at Copper Canyon Press by using the link below:
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/book.asp?bg={BA2C9C20-D694-40FC-9A47-86BD96872BCC}


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

Forever Will End on Thursday Web-Site

Nic Sebastian’s poems and notes on the trials and tribulations of publishing poems are gathered smartly at her web-site, be sure to check it out at:

http://foreverwillendonthursday.wordpress.com/

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

Poetry TIps: You've Lost That Loving Feeling

There are days when you fall out of love with someone or something. Poetry is filled with lost loves, lost objects, but what about the simplicity of the absence of feeling? This week write about the emptiness left behind from an old flame or an old hobby you’ve lost interest in. The former kindergarten crush, high school love, first spouse, whoever you have no feelings toward—good or bad, just absent. How about old hobbies? Did you used to make things with your hands? Write about certain subjects? Sports you played or watched but no longer have excitement for? This week, we’ve lost that loving feeling and we’re writing about it.

Good luck to all who try, please click in again next week…

Anderbo Open Submissions

Anderbo reads year-round and accepts poetry submissions via e-mail, and they accept simultaneous submissions so long as you notify them if someone else accepts your poems before they do, three wonderful things, yes? You may submit up to six poems in the body of the e-mail and please provide your contact information. I suggest writing in your subject line “Poetry submission/Your Last Name” when sending to:
editorsATanderboDOTcom

Learn more by visiting their site at:
http://www.anderbo.com/

http://www.anderbo.com/guidelines.html


Good luck to all of you who submit, please drop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

Did you know you can find full-length collections on-line? This week, take a look at the following:


http://www.beardofbees.com/pubs/Earth_Day_Suite.pdf
“Earth Day Suite”, a collection by Joseph Harrington, published by Beard of Bees Press


https://sites.google.com/site/rhpbirthday2011/
“A Very Special Issue” poems by Allan Peterson and Howie Good


Thanks for clicking in, please drop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

t. kilgor spake's The Poet Tree

t. kilgore splake hails from Three Rivers Michigan, he was born Thomas Hugh Smith in 1936 and while teaching at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan he took to writing poetry. He chose early retirement in 1989 to live in creative poverty and is now living in Calumet in the Keweenaw peninsula. His collection of poems, The Poet Tree, from Kamini Press features the riches of nature and family life. I’m happy to share several poems with you:


poet tree

denander drawings
lilliput poems
tibetan prayer flag colors
suffering autumn storms
vanishing in winter blizzards
buried until spring
to be born again

This poem is a guilty pleasure for me, Mr. Splake features the small press editors Henry Denander and Don Wentworth with the first two lines, then the way they persevere year after year through the seasons always renewing themselves through poetry. At least, that’s how I think of this poem, how about you?



dad

unable to remember
last time dad
hugged or kissed me
let me hold his hand
he had his job
basement and garage
massive collection of tools
my becoming a poet
would have disappointed emery
who wanted a son
with college diploma
happily married
giving him grandchild or three
with boring bland work
wearing dead pecker suit
selling life insurance
not chasing creative itch
writing new
another poem

Another guilty pleasure poem for me but I think you all will like it, too. So many of us pursue things our parents didn’t anticipate for our lives and this poem captures Mr. Splake’s life perfectly and can still be relateable to our own lives. Our creative pursuits may not be lucrative or filled with fame, they may not be understood by family but we pursue them anyway. Thank you Mr. Splake for this peak into your life and your passion for poetry.



waking from darkness

tortured eternity
writer’s black brain death
skull cavity empty
first dawn
streaking far horizon
steady light snow
turning paris white
rue Montparnasse
lover’s footsteps
vanishing in
early morning light

I think this is a great poem for writers, it captures the “tortured soul” often attributed to writers and yet the morning light floods in after a lover leaves us behind providing that beam of hope. Lovely poem, yes?


For a copy of The Poet Tree by t. kilgore splake, you may purchase the signed edition for $9.00 or the limited edition with signed artwork for $18.00, prices include shipping/handling anywhere in the world at Kamini Press:

http://kaminipress.com/2010/02/18/t-kilgore-splake-the-poet-tree/


For beautiful books with equally beautiful poetry, visit:
http://kaminipress.com/

Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound...

Beach Combing for the Landlocked Blog

Mark Holloway’s haiku and musings appear on this delightful blog, please check it out using the link below:

http://thefragmentworks.blogspot.com/

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