Tag: Poetry

30/30 Project Tupelo Press July 2013

I am thrilled to be a member of the poets picked for the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project this July. In just five days (or four, not including today) I will post a poem a day here.

A little about the press I am helping to support:

“Tupelo Press, which released its first five books in fall 2001, is an independent, literary press devoted to discovering and publishing works of poetry and literary fiction by emerging and established writers. Tupelo Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit company.”

In order to donate, please visit this page.

If you support this endeavor, there are goodies to be shared:

Donate $1 to $9.99 and I will send you a postcard signed by yours truly with a poem and some of my original artwork. Here’s an example:

Postcardexample

Donate $10 to $98.99 and I will supply you with three post cards including original artwork by yours truly.

Buy a subscription from Tupelo Press for $99 that entitles you to nine books of poetry, and I will mail three poetry postcards along with an original piece of artwork on paper to the first ten people who do so. (Note: After the first ten people who buy a subscription to Tupelo Press there will be no more artwork on paper to give away.)

Lastly, the first three people or groups to donate $250 or more will receive one of these three paintings (acrylic on canvas) by me along with three poetry postcards each:

250prize

Please visit Tupelo Press and look for my work at the 30/30 Project beginning July 1. And thank you for your support in this endeavor. Remember: Poetry allows us to share moments of self-discovery and it provides the lens by which we see ourselves more fully. Read poetry. Support small presses. More to follow…

Pulling Books: A Reader’s Prompt

I’ve been thinking about some writing prompts I’ve come across lately and they have all been quite good. What I never see posted are reading prompts as a way to entice people to read something that they generally would not think to. 

So, what would be a good formula? If you engage in social media then you may be familiar with the way it works. “Pick a book from your shelf, turn to page 105, the second paragraph, and the fourth sentence. Copy it down and post it as your status.” Or something to that effect. This time out we’ll make it simple. I’ll pick five books in my possession and copy down a sentence from somewhere in the middle.

Ready? Here we go:

1.I would say that a poem worth defending needs no defense and a poem needing defense is not worth defending.

~Robert Francis, from his essay ‘Four Pot Shots at Poetry’ in Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry

2. It is our ignorance which makes us think that our self, as self, is real, that it has its complete meaning in itself.

~Rabindranath Tagore, from Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

3.Some types one comes across can’t seem to cut their way through any problem, and that does make things difficult.

~Natalie Babbitt, from Tuck Everlasting

4. He had the deep-rooted fear of going barefoot that all Sinaloan gentlemen harbored: if you were barefoot, you were a pauper or an Indian.

~Luis Alberto Urrea, from Queen of America

5. When the voices rose to a din, Josiah had to flee the house and wander into the forest, or tramp along back roads; his nerves were so tightly strung, he could not bear the company of other people; he had ceased seeing, or even speaking with, his male friends at Princeton, who had ceased trying to contact him after numerous rebuffs.

~Joyce Carol Oates, from The Accursed

Not so bad, huh?

Leave me a reading prompt. Maybe you can entice me to read something that I would have never thought to read. 

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If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.

Anais Nin

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