Good News For Me!

I recently found out that I'm getting a poem published, in an upcoming anthology of Nebraska women poets, called The Untidy Season. Gonna be released next spring. What's another few months?

This is pretty great news for me. First acceptance in my adult life, and I can't help thinking it'll be ever so slightly easier now that I've got my name in a book. Onward and upward!

My secret? Get on etsy and buy an Oscar Wilde prayer candle, and fucking bribe him with money.

Of course the real secret is supposed to be perseverance, so, I guess we should all really just keep sending out the submissions. If this publication thing is really so important..

I recommend this, hugely

Write or Die by Dr Wicked

so cool; i know many of us have been dreaming of ways to be forced to write. you sure as hell can't take a break to check facebook without this program noticing. and i cannot overstate the helpfulness of that. damn facebook.

I had sort of quit posting here because I wanted to save my best work to submit to the magazines, and at some point I had realized that some of them considered material published on blogs as 'previously published material.'

But in light of certain sentiments expressed on my other blog, it seems appropriate to relax a bit and come back to this. Doing good work is more important than getting published, innit? So since I've found the prompts and stuff helpful in the past, and since, honestly, more people are seeing what I post here than what I post to various editors, well, The Repository is officially re-opened. Besides, I'll totally console myself by putting all these into a book myself.

Though unfortunately it looks like a lot of the blogs I'd been following for prompts have sort of slowed down with the updating. Oh well, soldier on!

I gather a deck
of self-concepts
and choose one
and go up to you.

Have you seen this person?

Your face is hard to read.
I go home to consult
my records, check my thinking.

Who was I?
Who can support this story?

Surely I didn't just
ask you, just like that.


for/from poetry instigator?

The Blue Overalls

In the midst of a tedious day's
cleaning, I get
a defiant sense

of the luxury of ugly things.

I find a pair of overalls,
not even old, just blue--
naive, unvariegated blue--

as fashion statement,
useless,
and irrelevant to my lifestyle.

On no occasion
would I wear these overalls.
This fact gives me unaccountable joy
and I rush to try them on.

These elements, unacceptable,
are therefore mine, all mine.



for Poetry Instigator - Neruda & The Mundane

Let no philosophy be
analogous to clothes shopping.
I don't wear fashions
as feelings, or vice versa. My life
is poorly stitched by hand
from the scraps of those ideas,
not from whole cloth.




prompt from Matthew Zapruder @ Poetry Instigator:
"...pick a sentence from a book at random. Then, figure out the action or principle underlying the sentence, and begin the poem by saying you (or someone) is NOT doing that action or doesn’t believe in that principle, thereby negating the premise."

This particular li'l poem(above) is more of a fragment and I don't even know for sure what it means, but the prompt was dashed intriguing.

My sentence is from What Color Is Your Parachute? which is the only book of prose I had on hand. For a moment I despaired of finding anything I wanted to negate in this book of positiveness, but this was a pretty good prompt and I managed to grab hold of something.

The sentence: "It is exactly analogous to your going to a clothing store and trying on different suits (or dresses)"

Ardipithecus

Scientists still can't see
the evolutionary advantage
in bipedalism

wish they still had
grasping feet

are on the verge of admitting
it really was God.

Nature's mistakes
don't flourish.



for read write poem