Today, I get to share another failed writing contest entry. This one was a freebie to enter from my province’s Writers’ Federation. It was poems to be displayed on our transit buses, with the theme of connections, a limitation of ten lines or fewer, and be suitable for an audience of all ages. There were 70 entries, and ten was chosen, so pretty good odds, but mine was not one. It didn’t earn the accolades, but I’m sure I didn’t help in writing not only semi-classical format with rhyme and even meter in a modern poetry world, but I also wrote on subject matter that might not be suitable for all ages. By that, I don’t mean violent or sexual content, but just the harsh realities of relationships and friendships. I’m sure if some kids read the poem on the bus, they’d have some hard questions for their Parents or adults with them! Regardless, I really liked it, not the least because it’s personal enough to reflect my situation that is core to poetry, while having enough universality as people are re-thinking their relationships and friendships the world over in reopening post-COVID. Read and see what you think.
poetry
The Collective Poet
I’ve always thought poetry as something very personal. As such, when you wrote in the first person voice, you are writing of your perspective and/or your experiences. If you wrote about someone else’s perspectives and/or experiences, like how Chaucer wrote of others’ tales, or how Coleridge wrote of Kubla Khan, among many other examples, you wrote then in the third person voice, aside from personal quotes of certain characters. However, in my newly intensified exposure to modern poetry, I have seen more examples of poets writing in the first person about perspectives and/or experiences not their own. That’s fine as a literary tool in prose, but I’m not yet comfortable with that aspect for poetry given how I associate poetry as something deeply personal, even if only on choice of expression to tell someone else’s story… as if you knew it rather than as if you were it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks of poetry as something deeply personal to be handled this way, but, it seems, the world doesn’t agree with me.
Phonto and the New Instapoet!
It seems like forever since I have posted. Relatively speaking, for 2021 when I started my two year writing journey, it has been forever. Barely having missed a day, let alone two in a row up until recently, it’s been a week! But rest assured, I have been writing, just not prose. Rather, I’ve been writing lots of “modern poetry”, or what I think is modern poetry, on my microbursts poetry blog. That, too, though, would not be complete accurate. I’ve been writing a ton of drafts, but posting only a bunch, and most of which is for a secret writing project rather than that modern poetry blog I have shared.
Changing My Poetic Punctuation Style After 1870 Poems
Scan the poem visually first
If you see a poem
With at least one line
Ending in a long dash –
You should read that poem –
With a pause at the end
Of only the lines –
Ending with that long dash
A Self-Study of a Contest’s Winning Modern Poetry Entries
A few weeks back, I was able to share a short poem I had written this year that didn’t fare well in a local poetry competition, with anticipation of seeing the finalists and/or winning entries so I can “self-study” them as one more of many attempts to “get” modern poetry. Well, I got them and have shared them below, along with some self-study notes.
Digital Citizen 