More Poetry!

So over the summer:

     I took a poetry-writing workshop sponsored by Crystal Lake Publishing.

     And yes, I know: I've been writing poetry for decades. There's been at least one poem in the Terebinth comics every week for months now, and I did that whole Plague Year Poems thing where I wrote a poem a day from March 22, 2020 through June 7, 2021. So why the heck was I taking a poetry-writing workshop?

     The official answer? It was strictly for the money. I write pretty much nothing but rhyming, metered poetry, and there are quite a few editors out there who simply aren't interested in seeing that sort of thing anymore. So if I wanted to broaden my markets, I needed to learn how to write non-rhyming, non-metered stuff that both I and the editors in question would consider to be poetry.

     The unofficial answer? I really doubted that I could figure out what that sort of poetry would even look like for me. I mean, after years and years of trying to wrap my tiny, blinkered mind around the concept, I can count the number of "free-verse" poets whose stuff I like on the fingers of one hand.

     Of course, I can count the number of formal poets whose stuff I like on even fewer fingers, but that's neither here not there.

     What is both here and there is that I took the course. And I think I've figured out how to write modern poetry a little. I cheated some, of course, by poking around with the Anglicized versions of a few Japanese poetic forms—haiku, tanka, haibun, et cetera—but during the course, I wrote a piece that I think really worked as a poem without rhyme or rhythm. It helped that the piece is about a piano-playing penguin, I think, because that's just a naturally poetic concept, right?

     Everyone in the workshop wrote nine poems during the twelve weeks. We all then picked our favorite three and submitted them to the instructors with the understanding that the instructors would choose at least one to be included in an anthology. So I did that, then one of the instructors asked if I could submit a fourth as well. So I did that, and now I've got four poems—including the piano-paying pegnuin one—in the newly released book, Whispers from Beyond.

     The major problem? Crystal Lake publishes horror. The blurb on the book's Amazon site reads, "This horror poetry anthology is a celebration of the dark and the macabre, a tribute to the power of poetry to evoke the deepest fears and fascinations. Each poem is a unique exploration of the shadows that linger in the human heart, making this collection a must-read for horror and dark literature fans." Yesterday, the first day of the book's release, it hit #1 in the category "Poetry About Death."

     And one of my poems is about a piano-playing penguin. The extra one that the instructor asked me to submit, in fact, is a formal sonnet called "Why I Don't Write Horror."

     I just hope the readers aren't too disappointed when they come to my selections and don't find their spines tingling or their kneecaps sweating or whatever reaction it is that people look for in horror poetry...

                                                  Mike