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Category: Announcements

Poems in Other Places and Some Sneak Peeks

August 10, 2015 • • 1 Comment

Oh, hi there. Thanks for coming round this old blog. Here’s some links to a couple of my poems that appeared recently in other places:

a hundred miles out… in Issue 15.1 of tinywords back in April

Sonnet Found in a Road Atlas at Verbatim Found Poetry back in June

My poetry-ing has been behind the scenes of late, editing and publishing Gnarled Oak (which if you’ve not checked out you should) and putting the finishing touches on two books, a collection of road poems called Highway Sky (which includes both of the poems linked above) and a short collection of short stories titled The Corner of Ghost & Hope. Stay tuned for more about each one, but for now, here’re the covers…

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Also, I’d love to have some reviews online (Amazon, Goodreads, blogs, wherever and etc.) so please contact me if you’d like to review either book. I can send a free advance .pdf or Kindle copy if you’re interested.

Poems in Other Places

March 10, 2015 • • 2 Comments

I’m happy to share the following links to some of my poems recently appearing in other places…

“The Wanderer” and “Arctic Front” at One Sentence Poems

“Three Scenes from the Road” at The Lake

“All the Way” at Synchronized Chaos

Five poems (“Visions of a Healthy Planet,” “The Rope Swing,” “Flags of Convenience,” “Angels” and “Origin Story”) now available for creative remix at The Poetry Storehouse. These include readings by me and a lovely reading of “Origin Story” by Storehouse founder & editor NS.

Thank you to the editors of these wonderful venues for featuring my work.

Poems in Other Places

February 4, 2015 • • Leave a comment

I’m pleased to share the following links to some of my poems in other places:

“The Gear Turner’s Work” at Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, a new journal grown from an older one, with the most user-friendly submissions process I’ve ever seen.

Four poems: “Lazarus Jewelbox,” “To Call the Goddess,” “I’ll Race the Fiercest Gulls,” and “Ghazal for a Nearly a Forgotten Rain Goddess” in the February issue of Synchronized Chaos.

Thank you to Christine Klocek-Lim and Cristina Deptula the editors of the respective journals for publishing these poems.

Two Videopoems and Two Poems Published

January 21, 2015 • • 6 Comments

I’ve been remiss in updating this here blog, so, here’s some cool stuff…

Below (videopoem)

This is a video Marie Craven made for my poem “Below” found at The Poetry Storehouse. Needless to say, I was blown away by this and am very grateful for the time and effort she put into remixing my poem.

This is the second of my poems to be remixed into video lately (the first was a remix by NS of “A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea”) and the experience is fascinating. I don’t always feel like I know where my poems come from and sometimes I’m surprised to see what I’m thinking. It’s interesting, then, to find out what another artist sees in my work.

I’m filled enough with gratitude when someone takes the time to read what I’ve written, but it’s a humbling thing to know that someone has taken the time with it not just to read it but to try to know it and then bring it to life in a whole new way. So, thank you Marie for “Below” and also to NS for “Empty Sea” and for creating the soon-to-be-phased-out Poetry Storehouse. These are truly gifts that left me speechless.

Marie wrote up some process notes about the video on her blog, along with notes for two other videos she’s recently done. Three of Marie’s videos have appeared at Gnarled Oak, and you can see even more on her Vimeo page. Or explore her website, pixieguts.com, where you can check out her musical work too.

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flower (videohaiku)

A few weeks ago, Dave Bonta put out a call for haiku based on a video clip with which he intended to experiment in an effort to develop a new approach to videohaiku. He wound up using lines that I supplied and we worked on editing and revising them to come up with the above video.

Dave wrote extensive process notes at Moving Poems, and I don’t have much to add other than that the collaboration was fun and produced an interesting result. Here’s Dave:

This collaboratively produced videopoem with text by James Brush represents a new approach to videohaiku for me: one in which the first part of the haiku is represented by film footage, which freezes and transitions to text roughly where a mid-poem kireji or cutting word would occur in a Japanese haiku.

[…]

James had started with a rather high-concept idea and pared it down in the course of three drafts. I suggested two further edits. What finally emerged was this:

…
how your hands burn
for the sun

with the ellipsis standing in for the footage of the baby in a meadow waving a daisy around. (One could even make it fit into a line: babe with a flower, say, or toddler in the yard.)

As I mentioned above, it’s a kick to have one’s words envideoed, and I’m grateful to Dave for taking the time to play with a few of mine. I’ll have to try this technique for myself sometime.

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Two Poems Published

As mentioned yesterday, my poem “Sorrow” is in Right Hand Pointing Issue 82: an absence at the center. This is the second time I’ve had a poem appear at RHP and it is quite an honor to be there.

And finally, my poem “Trigger” was included in the anthology/prompt book/workbook Poem Your Heart Out (Words Dance Publishing anthology, Dec 2014). “Trigger” was the winner for April 29 in the Poetic Asides Poem-a-Day Challenge back in April. The book contains the 30 winning poems for the month. My Poems “Sticky Note” (April 3) and  “The Summer Forecast” (Apr 18) were finalists on their respective days.

Ok. Enough about me… go read Gnarled Oak.

Gnarled Oak: A New Start

October 3, 2014 • • Leave a comment

I used to have two blogs, but a few years ago that stopped making sense. At the time, I could barely keep this one going so I closed up a gnarled oak and started publishing my micropoems here. After two years, I’ve decided to do something new with the site so I relaunched it as Gnarled Oak, an online literary journal:

The idea developed as I was putting together a new poetry collection, and while proofing the acknowledgments page, I realized that most of the journals that had published some of the poems in that collection had shut down: qarrtsiluni, ouroboros review, Bolts of Silk, The Houston Literary Review, and a handful of stones. Literary journals are often transient things, but some of these were true favorites, and a handful of stones was where I got my first acceptance for a poem.

Now, I don’t know if the world needs another online literary journal, but I’m pretty sure it won’t hurt anything to add a little literature, art, and beauty to the web, and anyway I had this site and URL doing nothing, so I figured it might be fun and worthwhile to see what might grow here at this old Gnarled Oak. And if I can do this even half as well as the editors of the above-mentioned journals did, I will be very happy indeed.

I hope you’ll check it out and consider submitting. I’m reading for the Fall 2014 and Winter 2015 issues. The first issue will be a micropoetry, microprose, micro-whatever issue. Go, on, now. Check it out.

My Poems in Other Places

October 2, 2014 • • 4 Comments

Over the past few days, I’ve been fortunate to have had two poems published. Red Wolf Journal published my prose poem “Walking Down the Night” as part of their Fall 2014: Celebration & Ritual issue, and Austin-based journal Carcinogenic Poetry published “Ghazal for Seven Goddesses.”

I also recently learned that three of my April NaPoWriMo poems made the daily top ten lists at Poetic Asides Daily, and one, “Trigger”, even won the day (Day 29: Realist and/or Magical Poem, chosen by guest judge Adam Fitzgerald). The two that made the short lists are “Sticky Note” (Day 3: Message Poem) and “The Summer Forecast” (Day 18: Weather Poem). Each days’ winning poem will be published in the upcoming anthology/prompt book Poem Your Heart Out (Words Dance Publishing).