First drafts of poetry, as well as commentary on poems, poets and poetry-related randomonia.
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 feel.
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, but tomorrow, for the first time ever, I’ll be participating in the Poem-A-Day (PAD) Challenge!
The inimitable Robert Brewer — editor of Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market, and proprietor of the wonderful blog, Poetic Asides — will be posting a daily prompt and I, along with at least 150 others (and counting), are commiting to write a poem inspired by that prompt.
Every. Day.
Doesn’t mean any of them will be good, but every day in the month of April, before the clock strikes midnight, I’ll be posting a new poem here and over at Poetic Asides.
Just in time for our impromptu open mic/party tonight -- Spindle gets a little bit LOUDER -- I've posted another round of great content up on Spindle for your reading pleasure! * New poetry by Celeste Doaks, Don Pomerantz and Jacob Rakovan * New short fiction by Diane Simmons and David Winter With this latest update, I've now published over 100 poems, stories, articles and photos by 62 different contributors! Stop by and check out the latest contributions, and poke around and catch up on any you might have missed. I'll be reading a couple of my favorites at the…
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl95eDA_uR4]
…and do it YOUR way.
ETA: Okay, I hate posts of videos with no real content, especially on a day Seth Godin challenges everyone to blog something interesting.
I woke up this morning with Sinatra’s “My Way” stuck in my head on repeat and it was a good thing. A timely reminder to clearly know what you stand for; know when to compromise, when to hold your ground and when to simply walk away.
It’s an especially timely reminder in light of the economy and the sense that having a job is the new merit raise.
It also reminds me of one of my favorite poems, one of the first “personal narratives” I wrote as I was moving past my initial ranty political phase, and the one that I most often get random emails from teachers or students about, informing me that it’s been used in a school performance.
Breathless
It’s been years since I created a chapbook.
Six, to be exact.
I released Selected Squares of Concrete — a de facto “best of” poetry collection of new, revised, never-before-released and old favorites — back in March of 2003, smack in the middle of the razor-thin slice of time between my return to the NYC poetry scene after living down in Virginia for a year, and my walking away from it again about three months later, more or less permanently.
I’ve wanted to create a new chapbook for a little while now, just for myself, to collect in one place the handful of newer poems I’d written over the past few years, for those random times I end up at a poetry reading and want to get on the mic. Like last night, for example, when I decided to check out my local poetry reading and had to dig through a pile of random poems, several of which were 2-3 edits old, to find something I liked.
It was interesting reading in a totally unfamiliar setting with only one other person I knew in the small audience, and there were a couple of poets there I would have liked to have had something to give, partly to promote Spindle, but also to establish myself in the scene since I’m a terrible self-promoter.
That’s when the idea hit me; an experiment in social networking: offer a free chapbook and see how big my platform, and what my social “reach” is!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY]
RIP: Madelyn Dunham, October 26, 1922 – November 3, 2008
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEFgHskgOFQ]“A quiet hero”, indeed.
May your grandson, and America itself, do you proud.
Montclair Honeybee Fest
Originally uploaded by bloomfieldguy
Last night, we were suprised to hear the sound of jazz music coming through our front window, at first thinking our neighbor might be having a party, then realizing it was LIVE music from a concert going on in Watsessing Park. According to the Essex County website, it was the Carrie Jackson Quartet, performing as part of the 2008 Essex County Free SummerMusic Concert Series, which I only know because I Googled it this morning out of curiosity.
Last month’s Dionne Warwick concert in Brookdale Park, which I first heard about the night of while having dinner at Vinnie’s, was part of the same series and while I wouldn’t have attended that one, it was a little disappointing to find out about last night’s as it was happening because we would have probably shaken the Sandy Hook sand out of our Neat Sheet, grabbed a couple of chairs and walked over to check it out. I don’t recall seeing any promotion for the concert series in The Star-Ledger (which I pick up sporadically), or Bloomfield Life (which I pick up weekly), or Baristanet (which I check daily), or even a flyer stapled to a telephone pole somewhere between the Park and the train station, but maybe I just missed it?