Happy Jewish New Year

At sunset tonight, the Jewish New Year begins; it ends at sunset two days later. As such, I will not be blogging for ~49 hours, and I will have to play ‘catch up’ with my online poetry community on Tuesday night. (Of course, I will schedule some blog posts in advance of the holiday.)

Honestly, as a non-believer, I’d much rather be writing poetry for ~49 hours than abiding by the religious restrictions of the Jewish New Year, but them’s the breaks. Actually, I very much enjoy the rituals – I’m more than happy to light candles, sanctify wine, dip apples in honey (for a “sweet” New Year), etc…. It’s only the religious restrictions that grate on me.

Anyway, I’ve written about my frustrations in the past; there’s no reason for me to rehash them again.

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W³ poetry prompt this week

This week’s host for our W3 community poetry prompt, which is published weekly on Wednesdays, is Deepthy; and she has been kind and considerate enough to send me her guidelines for the prompt well in advance – so, I already have everything I need to publish her W³ prompt come Wednesday morning.

I must also deeply thank Murisopsis, last week’s W3 poetry prompt host, for being so quick in selecting Deepthy as this week’s ‘Poet of the Week’. I’m greatly indebted to her and Deepthy both.

Thanks, guys!

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Poetry partnerships

Today, I deliberately posted two collaborative poetry blog posts, as I wanted to get them published before sunset… That way, I could share the links with my collaborators.

The first piece is a collaboration with Kunjal, which he shared with me just recently: “In the darkness, or: In the end”. Actually, this is our second collaboration… Back in Dec. ’21, we published “Fast, or: Furious”. Kunjal is one of several poets I’ve had the privilege of working with more than once through the Poetry Partners initiative.

The second piece is the latest in my collaborative poetry series with Sangeetha, in which we’ve been exploring various poetic forms. Our most recent form, published today, is the ‘monometric’, which was fun for me. It requires a lot of monorhyme, which many poets reject out of hand and which I rarely employ myself, but it was truly enjoyable to write. This particular collaboration has left me wondering how long a “monometric” I could produce if I really put my mind to it…

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My weekly flash fiction

Thankfully, I was also able to publish my weekly flash fiction piece last night, which is my attempt at a response to several different writing prompts. I have come to love this particular exercise… There’s always a tug of war between the various prompt words and my own storytelling inclinations, and it invariably produces unexpected results.

This week’s piece, for example, is about a doe looking for food in early autumn… certainly not a theme I would ever have come to if left to my own devices!

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Blogging versus poetry

Following the Jewish New Year, in the next week or so, I’d like to write a couple of blog posts, which I haven’t done in a while. My last blog post was written more than three weeks ago, if you can believe it. That was shortly after my daughter returned to school following summer break (she’s now a second-grader!).

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the extent to which the identity of poets themselves draws potential readers. This train of thought was inspired by my recent discovery of the poet Toyo Shibata, an incredibly successful (in terms of poetry book sales) Japanese poet who only began writing poetry at the age of 92.

Her poetry is lovely, but I can’t help thinking that the novelty of her unique biography must have drawn readers no less than her verses did. After all, how many 92-year-olds turn to poetry for the first time, get published, and manage to sell more than one-and-a-half million copies of their first anthologies?

Obviously, hers is a particularly unique story, but it does leave me wondering about the importance of a poet’s own life story when it comes to professional success.