This is an off-cycle week, but it seemed like a good day for a brief note, as we’ve begun National Poetry Month, which always starts off with April Fool’s Day, and that seems very appropriate.
And just coincidentally the month started off with a bang for me. The online magazine, Salvation South, published two new1 poems. One of them about Easter, published on Easter. Eggcellent. The magazine was new to me until the poetry editor, Andy Fogle, brought it to my attention. Andy and I go back to my brief time at George Mason’s MFA program. He’s a great guy and has curated some excellent poems for the magazine. You’ll find great prose from southern storytellers in the magazine as well, so do give it a look.
And soon, over in the UK, the magazine Bad Lilies is publishing one—“The Day after Easter.” (I’d really hoped it would be up today, but that seems not to be at this point.)
If you’re looking to do some writing of your own this month, here are a few different places to go for some inspiration.
I hear that Trio House Press has a handy selection of 30 prompts available. Looks like they are even running a contest for the best poetry month poem using their prompts.
Elk River Arts, where I attended a great conference in Montana one summer a couple years ago, has a similar fundraiser going on—30 prompts for the month for $30.
And follow Bull City Press on their social media sites to get a prompt a day throughout the month. Great press… just read their new chapbook by Jenny George, Asterisk, and it is a knockout.
Here’s a little recording I did of Seamus Heaney’s “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” from The Spirit Level. It’s one of my favorite of his poems. I still have my copy of that book I picked up in Waterstones of my first trip to the UK not long after it was published in 1996, which had followed his winning the Nobel Prize in ’95.
When I was working at The Writer’s Chronicle, we ran an appreciation of Heaney by Tom Sleigh, and so I sent his widow, Marie, a copy, and was so pleased to receive a postcard from her in return. It’s a treasure.
Lastly, a very grateful thank you to my first two paid supporters, Bob Gray (dad) and Meg Galipault! You are generous souls. The show will go on. Next week with Lisa Ampleman and Mom in Space.
OK, it’s happy hour here. Slainte!
New is, of course, relative. The one about Beau the black lab, a true story, by the way, was written four or five years ago, and the one about the Rabbit God goes back ten years or so, after an invitation to respond to a piece of artwork in Madison, Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art.