Poetically Speaking

It was another slow week, writing wise. I’m still distracted and still thinking too much, but I also gave a poetry reading Thursday night, so I was a little preoccupied.

One of the emails I got from my poetry group said something about the reading being a bright spot in an otherwise dull month, so I thought, “Hey, why don’t I read all funny poems?” Well, it sounded good in theory, but the problem with that is that I don’t have a lot of funny poems. Certainly not enough to fill in my twenty minutes worth of reading.

So I decided to do what I do best – forms. Dutifully I gathered together some of the more interesting forms I’ve explored until I was sure I had enough to fill in my time slot. And just to make sure of the timing I read them out loud, which brought me to the second problem with my reading.

A lot of poetry forms look good on paper, but don’t sound so great when you read them out loud. The rhythm’s a little off, or this syllable count makes them seem choppy – I ended up rejecting about half the poems I’d selected. But in the end I came up with a respectable number of poems, and ended with three parodies to leave the audience laughing. They went over very well and I received many compliments afterwards.

But seriously, I have a LOT of poetry. And that fact is never brought home so much as when I have to go through them and select poems for a reading. More to the point, I have a LOT of poetry and I’ve never done anything with it. As in, I’ve never tried to sell any of it. And I don’t know why that is.

For a while I was doing a new form every week (on a different blog). I’ve done many poems from prompts (from a variety of sources). I’ve explored over 150 different forms and have a list of more than 100 I haven’t tried yet – even invented my own form. And I’ve written a whole lot of poetry just for the heck of it. But I haven’t tried to market any of it. What’s the point of writing all this poetry and keeping it all to myself? Some of my poetry isn’t all that bad, which begs the question, why haven’t I submitted it anywhere?

Good question. Wish I had an answer. Maybe that’s something I could start working on.

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Wordage Report

Wandering Wizards – ???
I dabbled around a bit and expanded on the scenes I wrote last week, but I didn’t really keep track.

Weekly Prompt – 0 words
Never actually looked at the prompt from last week, so I guess I’ll keep it for this week too. It was:

Use this as your first line:
Cruelty is a sleeping boy but art was a bleeding man.

Happy Writing!