Writers News Weekly

http://www.writersnewsweekly.com/taxonomy/term/214

Poets submit if you have a poem about writing~good luck.

Prolific Nora Roberts Bride Quartet was mentioned here once before when I reviewed the first book, Vision in White. The books revolve around the story of four childhood friends, Parker, Emma, Laurel and Mac, the founders of Vows, one of Connecticut’s most popular and successful wedding planning companies. In the first book, photographer Mac finds her true love.

Book 2 in the series continues the story of the ups and downs of running weddings, showers and rehearsal dinners for everyone from Bridezilla to The Perfect Couple in Bed of Roses. This time the focus is on Emma, the florist of the pack and the true romantic. She yearns for a lifelong love affair with her man, if such a thing is possible.

Book 3 in the series is Savor the Moment, another delectable piece of romantic candy. This time baker Lauren is up for the spotlight.

For those of you looking for a mega-dose of romance to cool your days, try one of these sparklers.  All are quick to read, maybe while you sit on the beach and let the sand sift through your toes.  Roberts Book 4 will premiere in November, when Parker gets her man. But trust me, if you read the others, you’ll already know who her Mr. Right will be.

Melissa Westemeier

I’m no poet.  I try.  I read poetry.   I scribble a few lines now and then.  I even submitted a few poems that made it to publication.  I believe in my heart that even if I never become a good poet, learning and trying poetry makes me a better writer.  Poetry relies on all the loveliness of language–imagery, metaphor, assonance, rhyme, rhythm–that improves any kind of writing.

But I feel rather lonely writing bad poetry.  I don’t aspire (really) to write good poetry.  Most poets I know either have their poems come easily or they make much of even mediocre poems that they write.  No one goes around talking about bad poetry or admitting to writing any.

Until today.  Today at BlogHer I got to peek at someone else’s bad poetry habits and learn two things:

a) I’m not alone.

b) Bad poetry CAN lead to better writing.  And occasionally a decent poem.

Check it out over at BlogHer:  How to Write (Better): Even Bad Poetry Can Make You A Better Writer by Schmutzie.

to fill black and rusted cauldrons
between witches cackling
on the Rorschach test,
to fill Greek urns,
of incense-breathing musk
between handles curving inward.

How the poem labors
to fill trenches of severed heads,
the abandoned helmet my sister wore;
to fill mental miles
on the long road rutted,
to linger in orchids forever bound,
to fill coupling
with the tiredness
of love and doubt.

How the poem labors
with button-shirted words;
wearing gauze bandages
to salve the wound that never heals.

Appears in Curbstone Review

How Long Do Others Speak if We Have Already Spoken?
Title after Neruda

Get beyond it, my newly-found cousin says,
while my fork and knife remain
in the air and I  feel like the poached
salmon on the flowered plate,
the lemon bleeding citrus
through its skin. It’s hard to get
beyond having no grandparents,
aunts,  uncles, not even a birthday card
while your mother cruises,
your father dies, and your sister
goes craaaaaazy.  So I say,
“you’re absolutely right,”
before I lower my cutting tools.

Appears in In the Tunnel

Author’s bio: Lucille Gang Shulklapper has been a workshop leader for The Florida Center for the Book, and workshops facilitated through the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She writes fiction and poetry and her work appears in numerous publications, as well as in four of her poetry chapbooks, What You Cannot Have, The Substance of Sunlight, Godd, It’s Not Hollywood, and In The Tunnel.

Why not read a poem for breakfast along with your oatmeal
and your bacon and eggs? After perusing The New York Times
satisfy your intellect on whimsical rhyme. Politics with poem-
we serve up the best, orange juice and sports verse, dress and undress–
poets sculpt as the muse. Any subject that’s in the news…

As a proud Gen X’er I get a lot of my news and info from Internet news sources.  With the massive amount of information available to me, content organization tools make my online time more efficient and pleasant.  Two of those tools that help streamline my online experience are Readability and Instapaper.

Instapaper

While online, I frequently find and receive links to pages that I would love to look at, just not at that particular time.  A number of quick, dirty, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions are available for this problem, including: leaving the links open in separate tabs until an opportunity to read presents itself; emailing the links to yourself; or bookmarking the pages.  But each of these fixes presents problems of confusion, disorganization, and clutter.  Enter Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/).  Instapaper is a free application that provides subscribers with the means to save webpages in a neat and organized fashion for later viewing. A  quick, easy, and painless installation places a link, “Read Later”, in the bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Read Later” link saves a page to your Instapaper account.   Accessing your Instapaper account page reveals a record (list) of your saved content as well as a link to read those pages at your convenience.  Instapaper offers a number of ways to manage your saved pages, but some highlights include: an option to load a text-only version of your saved page, the ability to archive your content or export it to a folder, as well as to edit and delete an entry. Oh yeah, Instapaper is also available for your iPhone as well.

Readability

Unfortunately reading all those saved pages is often a less-than-pleasant experience.  Filled with links that open pop-ups when moused-over, distracting side columns, and annoying adds and animation, the online article format can usually be described as, and  I’m being charitable here, the dogs breakfast.  But there is a fix available to deal with this issue.  Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) is a free and powerful online tool that strips the extraneous info from your articles and renders them in a simple text format for easy reading.  Similar to Instapaper, installation is a breeze and place a “Readability” link in your bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Readability” link reloads your page in a clear and easy-to-read format.  Readability offers a fair degree of customization as well, including the option to change font type and size, article format, and margin size, as well as the ability to print content in Readability’s new, neat format.

Used in tandem, Instapaper and Readability are a powerful combination of tools that may improve your online information retrieval and consumption experience.  If you spend time online and run into problems of the sort listed above, give these programs a shot.

Would I  know you
with green whisperings for hair,
cyber-space eyes, your bones
white remains of obligations?

Do you still wear our father’s face?

I have become Mother,
with corseted morals and hair dyed mink.
My blue eyes turned brown like yours,
shoveling the pungent refuse
left by your husband’s dirty dealings.
Where is the brass marker
with our family’s name? It is gone
from our seats in the synagogue.

Your locker at the country club
has also been removed.
The city folded your name
into an origami bird and burned it.

You will find me by the sea;
wearing a hair shirt of grief and guilt.
Seeking me will be a slow hot secret,
like a snail trailing a crack.
Hot sand will grind calluses on your tender feet.

We will meet in an angry embrace,
crabs scuttling envy and greed,
still snapping blue at Maryland.

Butterfly curses will rise from your lips.
Praise will fall like anvils from my mouth.
Stinking like dead fish, we won’t get
close enough to resolve anything.

Alpha / Omega

They say: “everything comes to he who waits”
Age – definitely
Wisdom- still open for discussion
Happiness -intermittent

How did we get here so fast-
deep into the third third?  Time,
desire and decisions directed us forward.

Life is like a canoe, (narrow as a birth canal,)
buoyant in placid water, and then
rushing over unforeseen rapids of pain;
devastation, swamping us with negative surprises
(life jackets are not always provided).

Friendship is a reward for staying the course.
The paddle, thin, lovely and strong; but misunderstandings
sometimes make it a blade of destruction.

Now the journey is becalmed, but we
are still friends, hand in hand
waiting for the end, together .

Author bio:

Magi Schwartz is an independent poet writing in South Florida for thirty years. She gives readings, and conducts an interactive poetry workshop called “Imagine That” in both the public and private sectors of the community.

She is vice-president/ treasurer of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation. Schwartz is Poet Laureate of Hollywood, Florida since 1992. Her chapbook, Pieces of Glass, features poems about women.

As a proud Gen X’er I get a lot of my news and info from Internet news sources.  With the massive amount of information available to me, content organization tools make my online time more efficient and pleasant.  Two of those tools that help streamline my online experience are Readability and Instapaper.

Instapaper

While online, I frequently find and receive links to pages that I would love to look at, just not at that particular time.  A number of quick, dirty, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions are available for this problem, including: leaving the links open in separate tabs until an opportunity to read presents itself; emailing the links to yourself; or bookmarking the pages.  But each of these fixes presents problems of confusion, disorganization, and clutter.  Enter Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/).  Instapaper is a free application that provides subscribers with the means to save webpages in a neat and organized fashion for later viewing. A  quick, easy, and painless installation places a link, “Read Later”, in the bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Read Later” link saves a page to your Instapaper account.   Accessing your Instapaper account page reveals a record (list) of your saved content as well as a link to read those pages at your convenience.  Instapaper offers a number of ways to manage your saved pages, but some highlights include: an option to load a text-only version of your saved page, the ability to archive your content or export it to a folder, as well as to edit and delete an entry. Oh yeah, Instapaper is also available for your iPhone as well.

Readability

Unfortunately reading all those saved pages is often a less-than-pleasant experience.  Filled with links that open pop-ups when moused-over, distracting side columns, and annoying adds and animation, the online article format can usually be described as, and  I’m being charitable here, the dogs breakfast.  But there is a fix available to deal with this issue.  Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) is a free and powerful online tool that strips the extraneous info from your articles and renders them in a simple text format for easy reading.  Similar to Instapaper, installation is a breeze and place a “Readability” link in your bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Readability” link reloads your page in a clear and easy-to-read format.  Readability offers a fair degree of customization as well, including the option to change font type and size, article format, and margin size, as well as the ability to print content in Readability’s new, neat format.

Used in tandem, Instapaper and Readability are a powerful combination of tools that may improve your online information retrieval and consumption experience.  If you spend time online and run into problems of the sort listed above, give these programs a shot.

~~~~Dylan Thomas

This poem can’t sleep.
It slips in and out of bad rhyme.
The lines bump, run on
come up short.
It hears explosions between syllables.
Smells death in the distance.
The poem blinks, rolls over
on its back.  Its lover
tucks her head on its shoulder
and the poem thinks, oh yes
now I can count my breathing
finish it in the morning.
But the poem can’t listen.
It keeps seeing faces
blank faces, white nothing
and silent screams keep the poem
running after itself.
Something, someone is dying.
The poem dodges looking for a place to hide
a fox hole, a haiku, a villanelle.
It just can’t sleep with all the goings on
all the young faces, the bodies blowing up
in darkness and repetition, all the bruised
words, the onomatopoeia, alliteration
gods, tyrants, poetry flags and enormous bombs
shaped like poems for the flash
and forget, of what is, or not
that keeps it awake this time.
Maybe a glitch, the poem thinks.
Maybe start over, free itself
find another truth in what ever
Godforsaken hell flashes
in the poem this time.

Mendocino Sky

For Bobby Markels

You are the matriarch, the muse..
Gymnast for moon people.
Ring master for effervescence.
Leap Frog for night turtles and rooster girls.
We cheer.  Rabbits wag their ears.
Mice are hula hoops in disguise.
We wait for the aha..
The song called Wind.

Author’s bio:

David Plumb’s new book is, Poetry on Strings with marionette maker, Pablo Cano.  Writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, New College Review, Homeless Not Helpless Anthology, St. Martin’s Anthology, Mondo James Dean, 100 Poets Against the War, Salt Press, UK and his weekly blog,Notes from a Wavering Planet Will Rogers said, “Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” David Plumb says, “It depends on the parrot.”