9 days and counting!

Happy spring, everybody. April is almost here, and the new season of refrigerator poetry. Time to clean off the fridge, dig out the poetry magnets, and start poetry-ing.

Have you read anything good this past year? Written anything exciting? Discovered new realms? Exotic plans for the forthcoming months? Tell me about it!

Blogosphere Poetry Slam

Today is the fourth annual
Brigid in the Blogosphere Poetry Slam, to celebrate the Feast of Brigid. Welcome! For your reading delight, I'm posting a poem by the Welsh writer Sheenagh Pugh, who perhaps has the best name ever, although that's not why I've chosen her.

One thing I've noticed about British poets is that they seem to use form -- rhyme, meter, and so forth -- much more readily than US poets do. Yes, I can think of some American poets who are comfortable using form to address the contemporary world (Kim Addonizio leaps to mind), but it seems much more prevalent in British poetry. Sheenagh Pugh has written a series of four "webcam sonnets," one of which I'm posting below (with the poet's permission). Who doesn't love a good webcam? (I'm hooked on this one, showing the pyramids at Gaza. How cool is that?) And using the sonnet structure, which is such a strict, traditional structure, to write about something so quintessentially modern really proves that structure is not hide-bound in and of itself -- it's what you do with it.

I would love to post all four webcam sonnets, but you'll just have to pick up a copy of Pugh's book
Long-Haul Travellers (I bought mine directly from her Welsh publisher, but I see it's about to be released in the US in April). Her poems are great, and well worth reading.

And without further ado:


2. Voyeur

When the cam refreshes, a warehouse window
has turned into a point of white light;

by the next thirty-second update
it's a blinding disc. You think explosion

and what can I do and nothing. Watch it happen.
The seconds count down; your gut tenses.

You breathe in at the change, see radiance
welling out over half the screen. Beautiful.

Not beautiful. There might be people:
if you keep looking, you might see them die.

But you keep looking. And when, blessedly,
the update shows, after all, sun dazzling

off glass, no worse, it doesn't leave you feeling
much better. You know what you would do.

welcome, 2009

So at the end of each year, I write down what I've done during the past year and ideas of things for the upcoming year. In 2008, I did this blog -- and RePoWriMo itself, of course -- got some poems published, got some rejected, and wrote the first draft of a historical novel during NaNoWriMo. Not too bad.

I also got some poems rejected that I'd sent out TWO YEARS AGO and had pretty much written off anyway. And I got a poem rejected from an online journal that had already published it about six months previously. I wrote back, pointing this out, and got a muttered e-mail about "different editors." Which is very true, and important to keep in mind if you're sending your work out -- rejection doesn't necessarily mean your poem is bad, sometimes it just means it's not what the editor wants just then, or they're in a rotten mood and don't like anything. A poet I took a workshop with said that he doesn't send his poems out until he's confident enough in them that a rejection won't have him second-guessing his work.

So, happy and productive writing in 2009! Hope to see you in April for a new year of refrigerator poetry madness.

final thoughts

It's May! The end of RePoWriMo, for this year at least. I loved reading the poems people posted and everyone's comments. Right now I'm debating doing this again next year -- it would be even more fun if more people posted refrigerator poems. Maybe with advance notice this time . . .

What did I learn? Well, the following:

• I can write a poem about flatulence. Not sure if that's a good thing, though.


• I have just today figured out there's a "sharpness" editor for my digital camera, so all those fuzzy words actually could have been more readable. Oops.


• It's by far much easier/faster to go with the poem the words want to make than to try to make a specific poem about a particular topic. And changing words to what is available can turn the poem in unexpected directions, which is always fun.


• "Your" really needs to be included in one of these kits.

At the beginning of the month, I thought about listing all the words alphabetically on my fridge, but that seemed a little overly obsessive, so I didn't. But next year, this would be a good thing. With about 1,000 words (from 3 kits) randomly scattered about, searching for one, muttering, "I know I've seen this somewhere" gets old fast. I did put all the small words together (me, he, is, and...), which helped to some extent, but alphabetical is really the way to go for everything else.

Thank you so much for reading and/or participating! Overall, this has been fun and a great exercise. This blog will mostly be going dark for now, but I may post interesting poetry things over the year as they come up.

For now, I leave you with one last poem:

one last poem

the aftermath

magnum opus

Both photos are one poem -- part 1 and part 2. I took a photo of the whole thing, but I'm not sure if it would be readable. Enjoy!