Sunday, June 23, 2013

Recent publications: The Ghazal Page

The June 2013 issue contains three of my ghazals:
The Cosmos,
Out of context, and
To be light.

Altogether it's a great issue, with contributions that push the boundary of the ghazal in this way and that. I was particularly intrigued by Karla Linn Merrifield's fractal/ghazal hybrids. As always, Gene Doty adds his comments on each poem.

You can find more about The Ghazal page and my contributions to it in the post for May 30, 2010. It contains links to all of my ghazals previously published there. (Published later but never noted here in a post was Change. In that one, I maintained the monorhyme but rung changes on the radif.)

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Recent publications: Disembodied Text, KIN, Danse Macabre

Disembodied Text is a fledgling themed zine which has recently changed from weekly to monthly. The editors see it as a sort of gallery space where literary, visual and auditory works around a given theme can interact. Issue 5, "Disembodied animals and abstraction," includes my poems "Leave thy low-vaulted past" and "Perspective".

KIN, aka Kin Poetry Journal, is a form-friendly zine with an adventurous spirit. Issue VIII includes my rubliw, Dispatch from the Kremlin. The form was invented by Richard Wilbur and named by Lewis Turco ("wilbur" backwards).

Danse Macabre is a quirky zine in more ways than one. Their new server apparently doesn't allow them to link to individual pages within an issue, so I can't post links to individual poems on the sidebar. Issue 68 contains three poems of mine on the theme of unwanted communications: "From the circular file," "From the spam folder," and "The unknown caller." If you're feeling tntrepid enough to seek them out, the above link should take you to the issue home page (Heimat / Cosmos). Clicking on "Poetry" at the pink menu to the left should produce a turquoise menu. Click on the 4th one down, "Tre entro tre". There's a cameo NNW of the picture on the right, at the top of a light-colored vertical bar. That's the scroll bar. If you drag the cameo thing about 3/4 of the way down the picture frame you'll come to my first poem.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Recent publication(s): Chain ghazal: Chickens

I've been in a dry place and haven't been writing much poetry lately. I hang out now and then at the Sunset Beach section of The Waters – where, besides participating in NaPoWriMo, one may write 7 poems in 7 days at any time in the company of a small but nurturing group of people who cheer each other on. In January I tried a 7/7 and lasted three days. One of the three poems was an attempt at a hybrid ghazal/pantoum, though it came out more like a blues. The first draft had 3-line stanzas; the later version has four, with the third unrhymed to give it the feel of a ghazal's first two shers.

Gene Doty published it in the March issue of The Ghazal Page, and notified me a few days later that Carol Rumens, who writes a weekly column in The Guardian, had asked to use it as her "poem of the week." It appeared there on March 18; when last I looked there were over 200 comments, including many imitations and parodies. On March 20 it was posted on 3quarksdaily, which I'd never heard of, but my son says Azra Raza is his friend's wife's friend's cousin, so obviously it was a put-up job.

I'm feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all this. I had intended to give NaPoWriMo a miss this year, but now I am energized and will be participating – for which I am immensely grateful to Gene and Carol.