Science of the Sonnet

Yes, sonnets may seem archaic, tired, old, and so on... However, Shakespearean sonnets are pretty much what people think of when it comes to sonnets. Did you know there are other kinds of sonnets? While all of them consist of fourteen lines, there are a few variations and the sonnet, which originated in Italy, means "little song."

Your typical Shakespearean sonnet has an ending rhyme pattern of:
a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g

Petrachan (named after the poet Petrarch) has the fourteen lines divided into an octet (set of eight lines), and sestet (set of six-lines) rhymed like so:
a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a and c-d-e-c-d-e

Finally, we have the Spenserian (named after poet Edmund Spenser) who is a mix of the above:
a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c-d-c-d-e-e

I found this information in a book titled: The Poet's Companion by: Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Lux.

Now here is a sonnet by Shakespeare to ponder upon while you notice the format and rhyme scheme:

16.
But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time,
And fortify yourself in your decay
With means more blesses than my barren rhyme?
Now stand you on the top of happy hours,
And many maiden gardens yet unset
With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers,
Much liker than your painted counterfeit.
So should the lines of life that repair
Which this time's pencil or my pupil pen
Neither in inward worth nor outward fair
Can make you live yourself in eyes of men.
To give away yourself keeps yourself still;
And you must live, drawn by your own sweet
skill.

Thank you Shakespeare, and thank you all for reading. Poet Hound will not be posting on Saturday, so check back on Sunday. Have a wonderful week-end.

Small Presses

The small press is a godsend to many poets and poetry lovers. Without them we wouldn't have nearly the range of poems that we see on bookshelves or in internet stores. Small presses are basically small versions of publishing houses.
Sometimes it is run by just one person who may be stapling chapbooks together and distributing them to independent book-stores, or having chapbooks and regular books "perfect bound" and asking a distribution company to help distribute them. Some are larger and produce more than one book a year. Either way, they are heavily relied upon to spread the diversity of poets' writing throughout the world.
Some small presses are:
Marjie/IntuiT House, Wings Press, Dancing Girl Press, Beard of Bees, and Counterpath Press. The majority of this list came from a Poets & Writers magazine featuring the small press. There are hundreds more to be listed. Part of the reason I run this blog is to show people small presses to help them find poetry they may be missing in the stores, and to help small presses get their name and recognition out there. I am unable to produce the web-links for all of these at this time, I happened to get up early enough to post some of this before work started. I will, however, be able to attach Beard of Bees' press to the web links on the side of the page.
Visit the small presses and send them a wink and a smile, thanks for checking in!

Poem by Poet Hound

Kilbourn Hole

Making love to sand
sifting away in dreams,
the sweaty breath of
salt baking, left over
from oceans
long since receded.

Sweat picks up all grains
grinding against the sunburned
skin- the sun marking its territory
in the deserts of New Mexico.

Sandals slide in dust,
shoes gather grains
in the toes, the desert
spreads itself farther
into homes, houses of
musty memories.

The desert is never
as forsaken as
the romantic writers
would have you believe.

Poetry groups

For those of you brave enough to share your love of poetry whether it be reading or writing then poetry groups may be just the thing for you. You can enter those words in Google or any search engine, along with your town/city and state and see if anything crops up. You can also type in "meet-ups" and unite with other bloggers, or people in your town who share the same interest.
I joined a poetry group this past January, absolutely none of us knew each other beforehand, and it worked out very well. The only reason the group no longer exists is because every single person moved away to another state by May. I learned about new poets, how work-shops work, how long people had been trying to get published, and how to write better poems. It is one of the best chances I've ever taken. I highly recommend going if you want to share your love of poetry with other people, and especially if you enjoy writing poems.
Thanks for reading, maybe I'll see you in another meet-up.

Poetry Society Web-site

The Mother-Of-All-Resources is poetrysociety.org when it comes to listing of journals, publishers, literary organizations, and independent book-stores. They also list conferences, contests, writing programs, and children's poetry. If you can't find what you're looking for there then it may not exist.
Whether you are looking to publish, read, or discover nifty new book-stores, this is the place to go. I did notice that my favorite "indie" (independent) book-store was not listed, so I may have to talk to the people at the check-out counter about adding themselves to this web-site.
You could spend hours navigating the pages and it is well worth it.
This is one gentle giant of a resource, hope you utilize it to its maximum potential. The link is added to the web links side of the blog for you to gain easy access.
Happy Hunting, and thanks for stopping in.

What is a Chapbook?

When I first delved into serious poetry reading, exploring book-stores and web-sites I kept seeing the word "chapbook" having no clue what it was.
So if you are unfamiliar with it, now is your chance to find out. A chapbook is a very short collection of poems by a poet. Usually less than 30 pages long. They are very thin, sometimes flimsy books. They can be professionally bound although some are actually stapled together--and yes, they are sold in book-stores that way.
Chapbooks are also a popular way for beginning poets to get their start in publishing. I highly recommend reading chapbooks first when you encounter one, if you like the poems you can buy them and make a beginning writer's heart soar. If you like it a whole lot, see if you can find a way to write a fan letter.
Poets love to know their hard work has paid off. Hundreds of thousands of poets a year compete against each other trying to get published and usually have only small windows of opportunity to submit their volume of work. The slim little volume of poetry you are reading in a chapbook has beat innumerable odds, the poets deserve a ton of credit and I hope you will spend a little more time gazing among the poetry shelves of any book-store with those odds of publication in mind.
P.S. I will be on vacation this Labor Day Week-end and will not be bringing my computer with me. So there will be a two-day lull here at Poet Hound. Thanks for stopping by and we'll meet again soon.

A Poem by Poet Hound

Coffee at the Gas Station

Every morning they gather
like crows on abandoned picnics:
Old men at the gas station
on highway 19, Old Town,
all lined up along a concrete
low-wall “telling lies”
as my grandpa always says.
It seems as if they appear on the cusp
of dawn, delighted to be awake
at an hour that would leave
bushy-tailed squirrels astounded.
They sit together with steaming
hot coffee and fellows older
than Plato describing their lives
in the past and updating them
with taller and taller tales.
Small town Florida presented
in a bright sunny postcard
cannot capture the sunny
and silver-haired men populating
gas stations across the sunshine state.

How to submit poetry, basics

Hello, sorry about the technical difficulties that resulted in "Musings" being published twice!
Today we are talking about very basic poetry submission guidelines. Your best bet is the internet since you are already reading this.

Keep in mind you should search for tabs/key words in the journal or publishing web-sites that say "guidelines" or "submissions" and read their criteria.

Next, see if you can find out the name of the Poetry Editor. If not, by all means when you write a cover sheet you can address it to Poetry Editor so that there is some semblance of trying hard.
Unless they have the capability to accept poems through e-mail, you should always type and print your poetry on clean paper, one poem per page, with your name, address, and phone number on each poem. In e-mails, be sure all your contact information is IN the e-mail.

Postage is important, too. Be sure you have enough postage on the envelope to handle the amount of poems you are sending. Also, when including a Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope (SASE) be sure there's enough postage for your poems to RETURN if that is what you'd like.
Biographical notes are sometimes wanted by journals and what that really means is they want to know where else you've been published, what poems they were, and your general information such as town and state you're living in.

*Cover letters are not a necessity unless specified by the journal/publisher, so you can always send your poems without one.

*If you want an incredibly detailed description of how to send out poems you should click on the Comstock Review link on the side of this web-page, they have an EXCELLENT guide for you to read, print, and refer to over and over. I re-read their guide and their submission guidelines frequently. Let's face it, if you had to edit thousands of poems you would want them to be easy to read, clean, and delivered with enough postage that you wouldn't have to pay for the poets who didn't add enough postage. Try to be the most gracious poet you can when submitting your work.

Musings

Strive to find poets who are living, breathing writers. After all, they are able to answer your questions about particular poems and inspiration. Also, poets never get rich writing poetry and seek only to share their vision and artistry through words. Definitely find a way to write to your favorite living poets, after all, they can respond to questions you may have about a poem, their lives, and their inspiration.
The list of living poets could go on for pages, but here are a few of my favorites: Lucille Clifton, Tony Hoagland, Li Young Li, and Lola Haskins.

Musings

Strive to find poets who are living, breathing writers. After all, they are able to answer your questions about particular poems and inspiration. Also, poets never get rich writing poetry and seek only to share their vision and artistry through words. Definitely find a way to write to your favorite living poets, after all, they can respond to questions you may have about a poem, their lives, and their inspiration.
The list of living poets could go on for pages, but here are a few of my favorites: Lucille Clifton, Tony Hoagland, Li Young Li, and Lola Haskins.

Nerve Cowboy, the Web-site and Magazine

If you like things that are "off the beaten path" then this place is for you! Whether you like to read or write poetry, or have a fondness for the state of Texas, it behooves you to check them out.

Nerve Cowboy's website is http://www.onr.com/user/jwhagins/nervecowboy.html

Do check them out, they do not publish "Cowboy Poetry" they publish items that are a little off the wall, and off the beaten path.

And in true cowboy fashion, I would venture to say this place isn't for "sissies", this is a strong kick in the teeth in the best way possible.
Drink some strong, black coffee, read, and enjoy.

Lucille Clifton, Poet Extraordinaire

Hello and welcome to Poet Hound! Today we are talking about Lucille Clifton. She has recently won the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is a living example of all that is excellent in poetry. Her works depict human nature in all its forms. Even her shortest poems cause vibrations, as though a giant were walking the countryside and everyone could feel the tremors. She is well respected and admired by all who come across her poems. PoetryFoundation.org has a collection of her poems for you to look at, but I will also type in one of my own favorites here:

here yet be dragons

so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon's mouth. some

where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost
.....who

among us can speak with so fragile
tongue and remain proud?

Lucille Clifton

Isn't she wonderful? She was born in Depew, New York, the first in her family to finish high school and go to college. Lucille is a powerful writer and I highly recommend any of her books. I will admit that it can be difficult to find her in book-stores in the Poetry section so you may want to try your local library. She is fabulous! That's all for now, thanks for your interest in poetry.

Haiku by Anonymous

Someone left this haiku for me to find this morning:



Sara is fair child

cold and bright in the stillness

rosy cheeks in frost



Thank you! Very good haiku. :-)

How to Haiku

How to haiku, you ask? It's like this:
5 syllables
7 syllables
5 syllables

For example:

what ever you do
write only what you know is
too good to be true

You try one! Post yours in the comments and I'll pick my favorite to post tomorrow :-)

Small town poets vs. big city poets

I often wonder how many advantages big city poets have over small town poets, and vice versa. For example, big city poets may have more chances to perform at poetry readings, find fellow poets and meet, go to poet-related events, and so on... But what about small town poets? Well, some local newspapers will publish local folks' poetry and recipes, and I lived in such a town not too long ago. In fact, I published a poem about my Grandpa and his friends in a local small town newspaper and some of the people went out of their way to tell my Grandpa and his friends that they were now famous. Isn't that cute? Literally tens of people saw that poem and they tell my Grandpa that he's "famous", isn't that great?? So is it like that for big city poets? Do they get a chance at publishing in their city's paper and have people coming up to them or their loved ones saying they're famous? I've yet to find out. I've moved about an hour away and I'm still not in a big city, but at least it's fairly large compared to where I was. Any musings on the advantages/disadvantages for the lives of either small or large city poets?