Friends, I'll be interviewed by editor Tim Green on Rattlecast #63, the podcast of Rattle Magazine. It will also be broadcast live on YouTube and archived there at https://youtu.be/
The live event is on 10/20 at 9 pm EST.
And you can download it from wherever you get your podcasts later.
So, there's that.
Hey friends, new poem up at Cumberland River Review (out of Trevecca Nazarene University), and they've nominated it for a Pushcart!
I have long thought that writing poetry might have as much, if not more, in common with writing jokes than with other forms of creative writing. There is the need for the right word, for the sense of timing and rhythm, and often there's a desire to stick the landing.
Here's a poem I wrote recently called 'Gmail Critiques My Performance as a Daughter' that seems to me like it might have just as easily and as validly been made into a joke. Thanks, One Sentence Poems, for publishing it today.
Remember when you were in elementary school, and kids would taunt one another by saying things like, "In the dictionary under 'stupid,' there is a picture of you"?
Well, I'm actually in the dictionary now. Or, at least, a line from one of my poems is an example sentence for the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary for the word 'taproot.' Better hurry if you want to see it though, because it seems like the dictionary has an algorithm that plucks these example sentences from recent publications. Who knows how long 'recent' lasts.
How did this happen? Well, I'm not sure but my guess is that Scientific American, the publication the poem appeared in, is on a list of publications that the dictionary's algorithm routinely pulls example sentences from. I bet they'd be surprised to find they've pulled a line of poetry--but then again, this is just my guess of how the process works.
Anyway, it's kind of fun for now. (And I'm in the definition for 'madly' and 'black spruce' too, but it's the same line of poetry.)
