Tuesday | June 17, 2008

Ocean of Flames

If you like to read good writing in progress, stop in at Ocean of Flames and watch the story unfold.  It is a fantasy piece, and looks like it is off to a good start.

Enjoy!
Posted by poetically challenged at 17:28:50 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Saturday | June 14, 2008

Sloth Jockey

When I first started blogging, I ran into a number of good writers at the community-oriented site I blogged at.  One stood out from the crowd as one of the best writers I've encountered on a personal level.  He went by the name Son of King Pharmacist at the site where we blogged, though his real-life (if there is such a thing) name is Jason Gantenberg.  

Since that time, the site has closed down and we've all moved on to other things.   Jason has come up with something that is very exciting.  He is one of the founders of a new online lit magazine, Sloth Jockey.  I am excited about the site, and expect to see some edgy, solid content there.

Stop by to submit, or at least read the work that will be appearing there soon.
Posted by poetically challenged at 16:59:27 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Thursday | June 12, 2008

A funny thing happened while I was reading some poetry

A funny thing happened while I was reading a poetry collection today.  Some of the pages had gotten reversed when the book was put together, and so the end of one poem was attached to the beginning of another.  I read the first, and just thought the poem was either badly written or else that I missed something.  Then I started reading the next one, and realized the ending I'd just read fit better with this beginning.  Suddenly I noticed that the pages weren't put together properly.

I managed to remove the wrongly inserted pages and turn them the correct way, but the experience made me smile.  It kind of made the poem I first read, when it was oddly put together, seem like a surreal piece, with oddly pasted together images that hinted at something more than what you could quite put together logically.  

At the end of the day, even the oddly put together poem wasn't the worst piece I'd ever read.  Just goes to show how a well constructed piece of verse can make the reader think twice before assuming that there is something wrong with the poem.
Posted by poetically challenged at 00:16:46 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday | June 09, 2008

Looking at Old Journal Entries

I've just taken out an old writing journal spanning from the end of 2005 to the middle of 2006.  I wanted to look back over some of the things I've been working on in the past 2 years and see what progress I might have made, and how I might have met or failed to meet certain goals.

The first entry in the journal is from 21 December 2005.  I talked in that entry about wanting the concepts in my poetry to grow out of language, instead of trying to force language to fit what I already had in mind.  I hoped that this would generate more creativity in the themes of my poems, instead of rehashing the same ideas in different forms.  

I have to say that this is an area that has really improved in my poems since that entry 2 and a half years ago.  It began with a conscious effort, and has become something more or less natural to me now.  It is very common in my reading that I come across a word that hits me differently than it ever had before, or perhaps a group of words that I had not formerly seen as connected, but now see some new connection between them.  This often grows into some poem or another, and the results are usually much better than when I have an idea and somehow try to find (or force) words to fit it.

One of the things I started doing at that time was the dictionary game.  The first poem that came out of that game, "Temenos," is one of my favorites.  It is a complex piece, rather intricate in how it fits together.  But what is interesting about it is that it grew out of the connections between the three words chosen at random from a dictionary, rather than me first having an idea in mind that  I wanted to explore.

It is fun revisiting this journal, and I will probably spend some time doing so over the next few months.  I'll post interesting ideas I find here, from time to time.

One thing I hope to find is a record of a poet's growth.  It will be rewarding if I see that.
Posted by poetically challenged at 11:33:00 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday | June 02, 2008

One Summer a Thousand Days

I recently finished reading the haiku collection One Summer a Thousand Days by Charles Albano.  It was a very good read, and had a great chapter of scifaiku that I especially enjoyed.

I've reviewed it on my main blog.  Take a peek over there if you are a fan of minimalist poetry.  I think you'll find the collection enjoyable.  Albano really understands what makes a haiku work, and that makes for a good collection.


Posted by poetically challenged at 09:36:16 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |