Skip to main content

Poem a Day

Poetic Asides, a blog by Robert Lee Brewer, sponsors a poem a day challenge, open to anyone, to craft a poem a day based on a prompt.

I competed in one of his PAD challenges in the fall and enjoyed the mental exercise. Though much of what I wrote did not fit into my overall vision (of my current evolving manuscript) the exercises were helpful in another way entirely. It's important for artists to flex their muscles. I can understand the snide academic attitude many may feel about the quality of much of the entries, and the idea that writing a PAD might be beneath them, but the contest gets back to an essential cornerstone of writing: having fun with words.

And if that isn't why we write, then I'm a table lamp.

The format is easy, and there is a contest, though I believe no prizes are involved, and he's assembled many a fine judge.

So if you be not of the house of Montague come and crush a cup of wine.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Summer Poetry Reading in Rehoboth

If anyone's interested in a mid-summer run to Rehoboth's outlet malls, consider Tuesday, July 27th, and stop by the Rehoboth Beach Librar y for the summer poetry series. Besides moi, Denise Clemmons, poet and food critic for the Cape Gazette, and Sherry Chapplle, poet and professor. Excellent company. Books will be for sale afterwards. It's a quality series, and full of surprises. Garry Hanna has done a bang-up job organizing the summer series. Bring a few quarters to ward off the meter maid. Reading starts at 7:00 PM.

Out this week: Thirty Days: Best of the 30/30 Project. Featuring my poem "Love in Reverse"

Marie Gauthier of Tupelo Press selected one of my poems, "Love in Reverse" for Thirty Days : The best of the 30/30 Project Year One.   It's one of a few anthologies to feature my work (cue haughty accent, spotlight, espresso, and French cigarettes). Hopefully you'll be hearing more from me over the next few months as projects near completion. Thanks for the support.

Vittorio Carli's work is punk rock #poetry

A Passion for Apathy: The Collected and Rejected Poems of Vittorio Carl i, a small press gem of punk rock poetry, carries poetic traditions in its teeth. Punk rock because of the in-your-face-anti-establishment irony and earnestness in Carli's presentation of his verse, traditional in the homage and muse tradition of poetry. He writes to and for those and that which enlarges his voice.  Carli's work reads like a cross between cultural commentary/homage to persons as varied as Lawrence Welk to Woody Allen, to snapshots of socio-political unrest, which are flags of protest. My favorite is the “The Trouble with Librarians (for Andrea)” where Librarians are cast as the progenitors of closed information; they are “all closed books/with a couple of pages missing.” He's a poet, and I imagine him in some stacked room typing madly, or in transit,  to and fro Chicago, scribbling on the back of brown paper bags. He works it. He's out there living poetry.  Proof. My copy of t...