"... but I lacked the time to make it shorter." (apologies to Blaise Pascal)
Thanks to all who sent good wishes on my manuscript submission. I'll talk more about that process and what it made me confront about my writing as soon as I start to feel objectivity returning. In the meantime, lots of good stuff worth calling attention to:
If you like assignments or writing prompts, Maureen Berzok is someone you should know. Today's is one I found very interesting: "Pick a month and personify it in a poem. other months broken up with May because it is unwilling to commit? Is October fun on a date or just a little bit scary?" It goes on from there, check out NJ Writers for more.
In case you haven't already heard this elsewhere, Poetry now has online features. The first of these, by Daisy Fried, is about... poetry online. It covers resources, online journals, blogs (including part of a rant by C. Dale Young), and poetry forums (with a disassembling of the commentary at Slate's poetry Fray that would make an 11th grade English teacher proud).
Peter Pereira and Kelli Agodon (and, I'm sure by now, others) have dusted off their first published poems for the world to see. I thought hard about joining them, because I started off so far behind them on the poetry learning curve (go read their first poems and you'll see what I mean), but I ultimately decided that if I'm comfortable where I am today as writer, then there's no harm in admitting that this is where I started:
Dandelion
A light rain falls
refreshing the daffodils
feeding the dandelions.
The garden has its weeds
and the day its clouds
but the children still smile
at the pretty colors
and I am amazed
by the pretty colors.
The mist kisses my face
and I am a dandelion
growing yellow and straight
in a garden of my own.
I couldn't stand to post this without updating the punctuation and eliminating the initial caps, so if you happen to be one of the twelve people who saw this in the little upstate NY newspaper in which it first appeared, please accept my apologies. Actually, this poem's proven quite useful in my 4th-6th grade workshops, both on its own and in comparison to other dandelion poems.
For the first of my published works that doesn't make me itch to apply the red pen even more vigorously, go here and read "History".
2 comments:
Oh David: it's sweet!
I think my first publication was in the Alameda Times-Star. I've been cleaning out my mother's house and I may yet find a clipping. We didn't live in Alameda (60 miles away); rather a friend of my mother lived there and thought, since the paper pub'd poems by readers, I'd get jazz from seeing my poems in print. Indeed, it was a little thrill. But Alameda seemed so far away and this was before I'd written more than a handful of poems so I quickly ran short of ones I liked. How old was I? I don't remember. Preteen?
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