Confession Tuesday

Happy first Tuesday of December! Share a bit of yourself with us and we promise to do the same.

Photo courtesy of Scott Booth






Look at that, my two babies. Well, my other two babies. Misery Islands and Underlife make great stocking stuffers this holiday season. Go out and purchase your copies today!

My poem, "A Mother's Tale," is up on CavanKerry Press' Web site.

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The November PAD challenge has come to an end, and I managed to write 30 poems! Fifteen of those poems were sonnets (terrible sonnets) for my Juno series. Woo hoo! I'll revise those in January before the spring semester. Of the remaining 15, I may hold onto 12 of them. There's nothing more satisfying that completing the challenge knowing that even on the days I felt I was mailing it in, I wrote a few decent drafts.

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I needed this November to balance out my hectic schedule. I used to think that writing a poem a day was about quantity--but it's about quantity. I don't feel the need to write a good poem each time I sit down with my journal. Some days, good enough is OK. And during these challenges, I don't write a poem every day. I try to, but if I don't then I let the poems back up and write two or three in a day. By month's end I have  30 poems to show for my efforts.

I. did. it.

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We have lost many great poets this year. A whole generation of them, including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Galway Kinnell, and now Mark Strand--and many more I know I'm forgetting. Just an incredible year of loss. And I hate rediscovering a poet when they leave us. I feel as if I should have been reading them all along.



Comments

Thomas D said…
Congratulations on your sonnets, and on all of your 47 poems this calendar year!

Eagerly awaiting Misery Islands, which I pre-ordered from my favourite small bookstore here in suburbia, but which I have not yet received!

I must hasten to the CavanKerry website!

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Sagely observed, that sentiment about poets who have departed. One does feel a twinge of regret if one hasn't been reading them all along.

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