Disorderly Poems

One for the poetry fiends...The summer 2015 issue of The Writing Disorder went live today and features three new poems of mine. You can check out the whole issue here and my poems here. The issue offers visual art as well as written works, and I recommend checking out this month's art features by James Lipnickas and Daniele Serra--they are both really great.

My poems in this issue are titled "Bioluminescent Bay," "Aisling," and "Coconut." I have to thank The Writing Disorder's ed-in-chief, C.E. Lukather, and poetry editor, Juliana Woodhead, for accepting and publishing these poems and Woodhead in particular for her kind comments upon acceptance. I'm not sure if it's gauche for me to share her comments here, but since no editor has ever bothered to add such nice things at length about my work before--and for all I know no editor ever will again--I decided to include Woodhead's comments in this post. Take your validation whenever and wherever you can get it--that's my motto. Woodhead said my poems "have a wonderful air of surrealism (or perhaps magic realism is more accurate) imparting a sense of the extraordinary strangeness of the ordinary - each of the poems like a meditation on the small wonders of the world."

So what are you waiting for? Go read 'em!

For the curious, these poems were inspired by a blend of the real and the imaginary, in the world and in my personal experience. "Bioluminescent Bay" was written about a real place, a real series of glowing bays, in Puerto Rico, one of which I visited earlier this year. But I actually wrote the poem before visiting one of the bays, as an experiment to see how accurately and imaginatively I could describe a real place before setting eyes on it. After visiting one of the bioluminescent bays (I hit the one in Fajardo, on a nighttime kayaking trip), I revisited the poem to see whether what I imagined had any basis in reality--or maybe whether what I experienced in real life had any basis in the imagination. All I can say is, kayaking the real bioluminescent bay at night with a bunch of strangers is as surreal and lovely and absurd an experience as you're likely to get outside of a dream or a poem.

That's me on the lower left, looking a bit wired, while kayaking in the bioluminescent lagoon at Fajardo in Puerto Rico. The other ladies in this pic were all from the U.S. as well, but I can't remember which states and I never even got any of their names.

"Aisling," however, is pure dream. The poem is based on a very vivid dream I had not long ago that seemed straight out of an old Irish epic like The Cattle Raid of Cooley but with a setting in the dunelands along Lake Michigan close to where I'm from. So there's the imaginative and the real coming together again, I guess. I remember waking up feeling like everything about the dream had been both very foreign and very familiar to me. Aisling is an Irish word that means vision or dream, and is also the name of an old poetic form in Irish literature that usually featured the poet/speaker recounting a visionary encounter with a very old or a very beautiful and young woman who was understood to represent Ireland. For my poem, the title refers to the simple "dream" definition of the word.

"Coconut" is an attempt to marry emotion with a scent. Maybe all I got out of that coupling was another dream of a scene.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy the latest poems.

Wow

Another update post. Got word a couple days ago that three of my poems will be published at The Writing Disorder this summer. This acceptance was a real surprise to me, especially coming so soon after another accepted piece at Drunk Monkeys. It's rare to get two acceptances so close to each other--instead it's usually one acceptance for 80 rejections or some discouraging math like that. The poetry editor at The Writing Disorder even added some really nice comments along with the acceptance note. Maybe I'll share them next time.

I will post another update when The Writing Disorder's summer issue is up.

Apple Heart Monkeys Story

Hooray!! A new story of mine was published today at Drunk Monkeys lit journal and film blog. My story is called "The Guide to Good Apple Self-Care." It's fiction, rather short, and something of a fairy tale. You can read it here.

This is my first ever published piece of fiction (not counting some stuff when I was back in high school over 20 years ago). I'm really happy it found a home at Drunk Monkeys, and I'm thankful to Matthew Guerruckey and Tegan Elizabeth, the ed-in-chief and fiction editor, for accepting it. I also love the art chosen to go with my story, so whomever at DM picked that out, thank you too!

If you've never read any of the pieces at Drunk Monkeys, treat yourself and check out the stories, poems, and reviews there. There's a lot of good work on the site, and I'm glad to be a part of it now.

Since my story has an apple theme to it, I'm sharing the pic below to go with this post. It's my mom, me, and my sister Arla at an apple orchard in the early 70s. I'm the bald one in the middle. Some things never change. ;-)