Poem-A-Day Challenge: Day 5
Prompt: Write a poem about a landmark. It can be a famous landmark (like Mount Rushmore or the Sphinx) or a little more subdued (like the town water tower or an interesting sign). SIGNPOSTS On the northside: grass clippings, popsicle sticks, Sunday newspaper circulars. On the southside: crushed soda cans, crumpled lottery tickets, church service
Poem-A-Day Challenge: Day 4
Prompt: Pick an animal; make that animal the title of your poem; then, write a poem. CHICKENS The family pet is a precarious decision, like adopting someone you know will die before you and yours. We could not agree on a dog or a cat; the former too much like a third child, the latter
Poem-A-Day Challenge: Day 3
Prompt: Take the phrase “The problem with (blank)” and replace the “(blank)” with a word or phrase. Make this the title of your poem and then write a poem to fit with or juxtapose against that title. THE PROBLEM WITH ADAM SANDLER Dick and fart jokes aren’t nearly as funny on the fifth telling, and the sadsack
Advertising is Failure
Digital guru Steve Rubel interviews Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?“, who makes an interesting point that I suspect many marketers are going to have in the back of their minds when the economy ultimately turns around and they reassess their marketing strategies and measure the results of their responses to the meltdown.
Poem-A-Day Challenge: Day 2
Prompt: Write an outsider poem. You can be the outsider; someone else can be the outsider; or it can even be an animal or inanimate object that’s the outsider. HEARTBURN She wears it on her sleeve because it does not fit in her chest, too full of life to be contained, much too easy to
Poem-A-Day Challenge: Day 1
Prompt: Write an origin poem. It can be the origin of a word, person, plant, idea, etc. METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING Pen, pencil, paper, notebook, Moleskine, laptop, iPhone, quiet park, café table, noisy bar, bathroom stall, lower back, scarred wrist, broken heart… A poem is not truly alive until it is read out loud for someone else to
2009 Poem-A-Day Challenge
April is National Poetry Month, so it’s a perfect opportunity to live up to my URL and flashback to the late 90s when I worked at The Academy of American Poets and was terrorizing the NYC poetry slam scene! I’ve attempted National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) twice, cranking out 15,000 words on the second try,
Hitting the Reset Button on emedia
Ultimately, publishers’ primary focus should be to curate great content that people are willing to pay for, and to organize and nuture a community around that content and the authors who create it. That community will exist in multiple places and spaces, physical and virtual, and it will flow into whatever container suits it best.
When the Internet Flapped its Wings
While preparing for a series of meetings on emedia strategy over the weekend, one thought kept nagging at me: What the hell is emedia anyway? Online and email advertising, webcasts, virtual trade shows, ebooks, ecommerce…oh, my! In the publishing world, it is the holy grail that will save us all thanks to high profit margins and easy
Building and Curating Your Community, Part I
With all of the negative news of late about the collapse of the publishing industry and the “death of print”, combined with the report that Captain America, Chesley Sullenberger, “scored a $3.2 million two-book deal with HarperCollins’ William Morrow imprint” for a memoir and a book of inspirational poetry, one might understandably think that jumping