Instead of using our regular link for Saturday Celebration, make sure you register for this event using the button below. It will send you a link that is good for today only. Use THAT link!
Saturday, August 22 - FREE EVENT: Get More Published and Have More Fun with The Poetry Salon and Chill Subs! Learn how to use Chill Subs to make your writing and publishing life easier, breezier and more fulfilling. Then submit work with friends and celebrate your accomplishments.
PLUS: Want some specific feedback on your work and what to submit, where?
Get a year long subscription to The Poetry Salon or Upgrade to a Founding Member on Substack ($80) and you will get feedback on a packet of 5 poems from me, plus a year long subscription to Chill Subs (a bonus value of $100).
Only applies to the first 9 members who join or upgrade before midnight tonight, PST.
Dear Friends,
Is it worth all the effort? All the research and rejections that come along with it? A while ago I wrote about the dangers and blessings of the publishing “dance” in an essay that Trish Hopkinson Published on her blog. You can read it here.
Why You Should Submit Even if You're Not 100% Sure You're Done
I still stand by what I said in the article. In hindsight, I do have new and additional thoughts. When I was younger, I thought the point of getting published was to make a name for myself as a poet and build a career. That wasn’t wrong exactly, but over the years I’ve found other reasons that are more meaningful. What has proven to be a lot more real and fun about getting published, is finding my tribe.
What do I mean by that? Every time I get something published, I read the work of the poets who were published alongside me. I make note of the poems I particularly enjoy. I earmark those as poems to use in my workshops. Then I social-media stalk them - add them as friends, tell them how much I like their work, invite them to be on The Poetry Saloncast, ask if they’re doing readings in my area.
Over the years these shared poems have led to some seriously meaningful friendships, collaborations, and ongoing artistic support systems. One of the friends I met through mutual publication hosted me at a poetry reading in Colorado when I came out on book tour. Another invited me to the beach in North Carolina to do a reading for her venue. Some have been on retreat with me in Costa Rica. Many have invited me to speak to their classes, submit to their journals, or just stay in touch.
Before I used to want QUANTITY. Now I want QUALITY. I want to know who else shares my obsession with butterflies (turns out a lot of poets do). I want to know who else suffers from self-doubt (turns out all of them do.) I don’t know if everyone reads my work, but I do know that a few dozen people I actually know are continuously engaging in quality ways with what I write.
It’s rewarding, stimulating and motivating in ways that keep me going as an artist. Sometimes just one sincere like or comment from a friend will help push me past self-doubt into artistic flurry. Sometimes one insightful reflection will help me break through a bout of writer’s block. Once I shared a piece of writing about the pet chicken I accidentally adopted while living in Costa Rica and one fellow writer said she loved the piece so much that it spurred me on to keep writing my whole memoir about living in the tropics.
To me, that’s the real reason I keep publishing, and it’s the reason I keep encouraging others to publish. It’s not about what you GET (the accolades), it’s about what you can contribute and who you can find to collaborate with.
Now that I am the editor of Odd Pocket Press, I am so deeply grateful to everyone who submits to our journal. Even the folks whose writing we don’t take mean a lot to us. We know there are others out there writing about the issues that we struggle with ourselves. We know there are others who care about poetry and those issues that drive us to write it. We know we are not alone. When we do take a piece of writing it’s because the editors/readers feel it is ready for publication, AND they feel it is the kind of writing that speaks to them. In other words, they believe they’ve found a voice that resonates with them. What the kids these days are calling a compatible “vibe.”
If you want to learn tools for cutting through the chaos to find the journals, poets and friends who will match your “vibe” join us for a free workshop, “Get More Published and Have More Fun with The Poetry Salon and Chill Subs” this Saturday. If you can’t make it this time, join us when we host it again in September.
Saturday, August 22 - FREE EVENT: Get More Published and Have More Fun with The Poetry Salon and Chill Subs! Learn how to use Chill Subs to make your writing and publishing life easier, breezier and more fulfilling. Then submit work with friends and celebrate your accomplishments.
September 5, 9 - 11 am, PST : Get More Published (And Have More Fun) with The Poetry Salon and Chill Subs!
Saturday, August 29 - Sarah Browning reads from her new book, Call Me Yes, from The Word Works.
Paid Subscribers will get the link to Saturday Celebrations sent to them as a reminder every Saturday.
Monday, September 7, 2pm, PST/ 5 pm, EST. Less is More: What to Cut, What to Keep with Tresha Faye Haefner, a FREE workshop.
Stay Weird
Make this corner of your world
as weird as you want it
geek out in every way
your quirky heart desires
be a fan
be a stan
value expression
embrace obsession
remember that a doctor
is just a body nerd
and a rock star
is just a music dork
there is no point hiding
all the ways you are unique
because every single one of us
is a gorgeous little freak
-David Gate
Childless
A stranger’s pregnant belly
plops over elastic-waisted jeans,
and a wish kicks its legs
inside me. I wish it
would sit still.
Forest fires blaze
through Quebec, orange
smoke obscuring the sky
of the mid-Atlantic,
ushering in the new
normal: Tyger Tyger,
burning bright,
burning brush
and rushing through
subdivisions, making
ash out of loved lives.
Is delivering a child
into the smoldering of
the Anthropocene
an act of selfishness
or hope? Still, I want
to feel my breasts
milk-heavy,
like little wine bags.
When I hold
my friend’s tender
newborn, I pretend
she is my own—
journey out of her nursery
into the secret life
where I am a mother,
where the little spittle
on my shoulder
is my daughter’s
spittle, and therefore
made lovely. Her tiny fists
yank my loose hair
and pull me back
into the room
where I coo
and cuddle her
as her big eyes search
my face, saying nothing
of the coming dark.
- Stevie Edwards, originally published in Raising the Fifth
What the Salt Meant
“That night when the angels came to Lot [his wife was] going to all her neighbors and saying to them, give me salt, because we have guests…Therefore ‘she became a pillar of salt.’” —Bereshit Rabbah 51:5
Her sin, after all, was not
that her rheumy eyes traveled back,
swollen with hope that her daughters’
singed shadows might rise from the blaze
of collapsing skyline. It was that Lot’s wife
warned her neighbors. She would become
the woman who watched the whip burn
across another’s back, then spread
the word one dark night to slip
inside the barn, hide breathless
beneath the hay while the slave catchers
followed a false scent. The woman
who witnessed yellow stars
sewn on neighbors’ jackets,
and went to borrow a cup of sugar,
perhaps a bit of salt, whispering
what she had heard in town about
the coming cattle cars. The woman
who type government reports
no one imagined
she understood, then waited
near the factory gate at closing time,
la migra viene, don’t go
to work tomorrow. It wasn’t
what she chose to face
that raised the angel’s outrage,
fearing the flames would heat
her mind and melt
her heart. What the salt meant
to silence was her voice.
Joanne Durham
Songs rise easily in me now
there’s nothing to temper me:
down the highway, road songs
there and back, love songs,
song a hurting with past lovers,
an old ache for us both.
But song wants to be glory –
you and I, we deserve its joyous
clamor – everyone does.
The world begs for it. Love,
you sing to me at bedtime,
you sing to me when I wake.
Hurt flies from my closed
throat, the clench loosens,
and we are singing, you and I,
the past past at last. Love,
bring me your astonished
self, your song-full always.
I think of a song for you even
now, sitting on the stoop
of my new home, you still
sleeping in my bed, summer
bounty you brought me warm
on the counter just inside the door:
Oh squash, oh corn. Red, red tomatoes.
**
Light over the church’s peaked roof:
I think of you.
Waking for the first time in five days
without your hands on me
and it’s a headache morning: you.
Telling myself it’s been less than a week:
you. Sitting in a packed poetry reading
in my new city and I’m the only person
making noise, snapping, I think of:
you, calling out at the Blues jam, clapping
hard. We are noisy. We are large.
Headache praise. Hands praise.
We are gratitude, all over
our magnificent, ruined bodies.
**
Sunday morning and the drums begin
at the church across the way. Cool air
pours into my new home. You are
asleep across town. I rose early, have
been up already for hours. My talents
I’ve turned toward love. Unfamiliar
heart, long tucked away, I’ve taken
out of its tissue paper wrapping. I’ve
taken everything – your body as a token
for the future. Even as the traffic
picks up on my cross-town street
and the church drums quiet for now,
finished with practice,
pausing before praise.
**
We’ve turned to the practical –
before the long drive you take
my car to your mechanics who
give it a once over. You buy me screws,
even down to brass tacks for the hook
in the shape of a stag where I want
to hang the extra set of keys. Keys
we seem to have found to each other’s
locked door of ache.
Wanting. Eyes’ desire, eyes’ please.
I am heart-ened now I please you,
now I take you in my teeth and gnaw,
take you hard against my waiting.
I have been waiting. I have been at once
alive to maybe and thick-skinned to no.
No ate at me, threatened the possible sky.
But now, call me yes. Call me a stone,
turning in the polishing tide.
- Sarah Browning, originally published in Elysium Review
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.