Just a quick reminder that the poetry anthology is accepting submissions until September of 2021. I’m already receiving some truly amazing work. In the next few months I will be featuring and promoting the poets who have submitted their work. I encourage you to support their work and check out their other writing endeavors. If you have something to contribute to the “Wilderness of Soul” please feel free to contact me at sereichert@comcast.net.
Today, I’m offering up a couple of poems in semi-celebration of this strange month of ‘love’. Enjoy the broad spectrum of heart.
SCARS
Growing a scar is hard.
The wound never stops throbbing
It’s enough to keep you awake at night
And irritated during the day.
The thrashed skin, angry and red,
Prying open at the slightest provocation
So you wrap the bandage
Good and tight,
Until the rest of the limb
Distal to the wound
Throbs with its chokehold,
Gasping for blood.
No blood,
But no pain either
And no dead skin,
Hanging to catch on your clothes.
Reminding you
At every minute
Bump against door,
Hair toss
Or paper turn
That someone,
You love
Cut you.
Lizzy
We were girls in tall grass
Running with scraped knees
And dry throats.
Disappearing into the past
When things were simple
When life was sunshine
And big-dipper gazing
We were the past
I can’t quite recall anymore
But the whisper of memory I hold on to
Like the edge of a cliff
What if I forget?
Will we both stop existing?
Will we snuff out
Without the constant loop playing
Over and over in my memory?
Do I keep you alive?
Or does your memory keep me?
Your bike gears were gritty with sand
and the vinyl on your seat was cracked
so you never sat.
You were never still.
You were perpetual motion
And magic kept you aloft.
How still and fallen you lay now.
The earth is tender and cruel
Around bones that once
Commanded the rotation of the skies.
From now until September 30th I will be accepting poetry submissions to be considered for The Beautiful Stuff 2021 Poetry Anthology “Wilderness of Soul”.
This anthology will loosely follow the themes of nature, growth, transformation, self-awareness and personal resilience.
Poems may not exceed 80 lines, must be previously unpublished (unless it was on author’s website), and must be the original work of the author. Please send all submissions to: sereichert@comcast.net, or via The Beautiful Stuff website: (https://thebeautifulstuff.blog/contact/) with the subject line “Wilderness of Soul Submission”
In the body of your email, please include the title; your poetry, your name, and a short bio. You may submit up to three poems for every entry. You may submit as many times as you would like, but please ensure that each submission includes different work. If your work is a simultaneous submission please let me know.
There is no fee for submitting.
Every submission will be read and, if selected, the author will be notified by October 15th, 2021 via the contact information provided.
Winners will receive 2 free copies of the anthology, promotion through The Beautiful Stuff Blog, and a chance to have the book entered into the Colorado Book Awards for 2021. Authors will also have the option to purchase more copies at a discounted rate.
You may email me or message me via Facebook with any questions or concerns you have about the contest rules and submissions. As usual, I welcome poetry along the entire spectrum of creativity (from the traditional to the strange, from the sparkly-sunshine to the darkly macabre) but will reject any work that glorifies or promotes extreme violence, racism, sexual degradation, or harm against another human being.
That’s the long and the short of it. So send me something good. Give me guts and heart, all the dark and light of your thoughts. I look forward to reading your poems and giving you a chance to showcase your work!
From now until September 30th I will be accepting poetry submissions to be considered for The Beautiful Stuff 2021 Poetry Anthology “Wilderness of Soul”.
This anthology will loosely follow the themes of nature, growth, transformation, self-awareness and personal resilience.
Poems may not exceed 80 lines, must be previously unpublished (unless it was on author’s website), and must be the original work of the author. Please send all submissions to: sereichert@comcast.net, or via The Beautiful Stuff website: (https://thebeautifulstuff.blog/contact/) with the subject line “Wilderness of Soul Submission”
In the body of your email, please include the title; your poetry, your name, and a short bio. You may submit up to three poems for every entry. You may submit as many times as you would like, but please ensure that each submission includes different work. If your work is a simultaneous submission please let me know.
There is no fee for submitting.
Every submission will be read and, if selected, the author will be notified by October 15th, 2021 via the contact information provided.
Winners will receive 2 free copies of the anthology, promotion through The Beautiful Stuff Blog, and a chance to have the book entered into the Colorado Book Awards for 2021. Authors will also have the option to purchase more copies at a discounted rate.
You may email me or message me via Facebook with any questions or concerns you have about the contest rules and submissions. As usual, I welcome poetry along the entire spectrum of creativity (from the traditional to the strange, from the sparkly-sunshine to the darkly macabre) but will reject any work that glorifies or promotes extreme violence, racism, sexual degradation, or harm against another human being.
That’s the long and the short of it. So send me something good. Give me guts and heart, all the dark and light of your thoughts. I look forward to reading your poems and giving you a chance to showcase your work!
The eve of the New Year feels different this year.
We’re standing on the precipice of a deranged, hurtful, hateful, fearful time of existence, wishing that the turn of the calendar will somehow magically allow us all to step into a new world, free of the worries and trials nipping at our heels. The hope that a new vaccine, a new administration, a new awareness, a new number on the end of the date will lead to a year that won’t be a complete and total shit show is riding on our shoulders and settling into our veins, like a bandage to a too-deep wound.
Picture a six inch gash that needs hundreds of stitches, antibiotics, and physical therapy. We’re talking muscle deep. And the change from the 31st to the 1st is the Curious George band aid you got from the elementary school nurse.
I’m not saying this to be a Debbie Downer.
I’m saying this to be cautious (Cautious Kate?) that a socially constructed but otherwise meaningless mark of ‘time’ doesn’t determine a great paradigm and brink-of-destruction shift.
I’m saying this to tell you—if you need that date to start a different way of doing things, then Hu-fucking-zzah to you and get on it, Girl (or Bro?) but don’t think that the minute shift to a new year is going to change the world itself.
That calendar flip won’t do anything until we change.
Until we start giving a damn about other human beings.
Until we start understanding if our environment dies, so do we.
Until we start to understand that science seeks truth and power corrupts.
Until we stand on our own, think for ourselves, and treat everything we touch (physically, mentally and emotionally) with the same care, empathy, and love as we would our own child (or cat if you’re a fur momma) our world will never improve.
I’ve thought often of ending this blog in the past year. Sometimes it feels like it’s all for nothing. One voice shouting into a vast expanse of darkness. One voice raised against so many overpowering facets of corruption. One voice aching for connection.
But I know I’m not the only one. And as long as our collective lights continue to shine, there will never be complete darkness. So I will stand for another year. For another day. For as long as it takes until love overpowers hate, for as long as it takes for humans to wake up to the gift of their existence.
For as long as I draw breath, I’ll write. I’ll shine.
This next year will bring about more poetry as well as a new request for submissions from readers and poets for a second anthology from The Beautiful Stuff. There will probably be some ranting, some raving, and some venting. I can’t help that—and I’m not going to try or even apologize for it.
I’m also planning on running a ‘dime novel’ series that will include some weekly submissions of short stories (a la novella style) ranging from sci-fi/fantasy, to romance, to speculative fiction.
Stay in touch, and I’ll announce submission dates for not only guest blog pieces, poetry, and anthology submissions, but also for “dime novel” contributions.
Until then…keep shining.
If you must make New Year’s resolutions, don’t think about a smaller pair of pants, but how you can make your voice and your power bigger in this world. Don’t think so much about an organized closet, but an organized movement towards social justice.
Let’s aim our sights on living large of heart in this new year.
Good morning poets, writers, daydreamers and those who’ve accidentally stumbled onto my blog. Welcome. Grab a seat and a cup of coffee.
I’m starting off today’s post with some poetry submissions that came in over the last two weeks. I want to commend all the poets who send me their work. On a site like mine, where no profit is made, the art I share and display is for the soul and seeks to create a connection between us all. It means a great deal to me, especially in these days of separateness, to have someone answer back from the darkness with pieces of their lives that have moved them.
The second portion of this blog will have a run down of helpful tips (f*&k yeah! another bullet list!) on submitting your poetry for publication or competitions as well as a list of respected journals, websites, and independent magazines that are currently accepting submissions.
Please enjoy the poetry first. Roll it over in your brain and let it affect you.
From a small foam couch by a wide still
morning spreads hummingbird wings
and hovers above sweet shared generosity of
green breath, fragrant openings berries rounding
toward giftable ripe.
In my hand a letter of
urgent pleas, a photo of a severed head, defaced, a supine body.
i hear the cries of the killers’ children
starved of homeland, thirsty for water
not weighted by toxic sludge, in the
mourning touches and silent vigil—those who
gather to hold the immensity of loss and betrayal
together, whose hearts beat slow and whose long
trunks touch, mourner to mourner, connecting.
In my head echoes a question the letter refuses
to ask. Who buys this ivory?
Earnest groups patrol for poachers and
arrest sellers and confiscate poached evils, but
those with money enough to buy have
clout enough to hide or we allow them
to remain hidden behind lavish excesses
of endless kinds, hiding the sickness they carry
behind false fronts of our own contrived desires—
convinced that their perceived ease is our only goal.
In the pain of this poem is not where
i want to be this morning. In the dusty
Mara waiting for rain, waiting for humanity
to remember where we came from, where
we can again live whole and connected
among kin of all kinds who know us
as worthy of being mourned, i feel
the touch of sensitive trunk on my streaked cheek.
In my breath can i carry this song
of our truth—our birthright wealth? In my
heart can a scent of love spend the only
currency that matters? With my strong legs
i can embrace the work, celebrate the work, of
releasing our aspiration to laziness, so that
in my cupped hands, i can gather ripe fruits
to carry to all who hunger.
sid sibo
What I Didn’t Say
What I didn’t say
was that I was not sorry,
That you deserved
every faltering and bold moment
I loved you
What I didn’t say
was the space between notes
and the harbinger of changes
that I hadn’t heralded yet
All the words I did not speak
Still bitter on my tongue
And in their place
A thousand sorrys
I did not mean
I am not sorry
for my heart tremors
erotic night dreams
and the wicked way my hands scraped skin
I am not sorry
For falling, impetuous and blind
into the volcanic mess of you
The stifling and choking cloud
Heat of resistance
burning around
a cold,
locked heart
I am not sorry for sacrificing
my heart cells to the lost cause of you and yours
You can have them,
the cardiac muscle and hardest working fibers
What I didn’t say
is that
you can take them all
You need them more than I do.
Elliana Byrne
Non attachment
I’ve been preaching to my mind
In forced moments of stillness,
When images of you surface
Non attachment.
Nothing really exists.
Least of all you
Least of all me.
Nothing is permanent.
Ever changing
Ever moving
To hold on is to suffer.
i am not attached.
i am not in need.
You are nothing.
And everything.
As everything is nothing and
Nothing is in the everything.
So even though you may
have seemed my everything
You are, as all, just nothing.
Just Neo’s spoon.
And I know now
There is no spoon.
So it can bend and move,
Or cease to exist.
There is no you.
No me.
No this,
No words you gave
Or thoughts you implanted.
There’s nothing but the breath
And the heat within me
Forging in time,
mine of universal light
Perfect harmony
And maybe this is the way I let you go.
Because you are the
Regret of my past
The ill-placed hope of my future
And all I really have…
Is the empty now.
Thanks for reading through all of those beautiful journeys into humanity. Now, I present to you a short and sweet bulleted list of tips for submitting your work:
Do your research: There’s nothing worse than sending your erotic, atheist, non-trad poem to a Christian Journal looking for pieces to be read aloud at their yearly conference. Know the journal/mag/contest you are submitting to. Try to write or match up a poem that fits what they’re looking for or at least the general “flavor” of their publication.
Be respectful and follow the guidelines: Every submission has guidelines. Read them. Follow them. If it seems like jumping through hoops is a waste of your time, thinking of sending out 35 submissions that don’t even qualify. That’s a waste. Most guidelines can be found on the website beneath or within the “Submissions” page.
Make sure your work is complimentary and tight: If you send out a group (3-5) poems it will help to have the poems compliment one another in some way, so the tone is not too disruptive but it also shows the depth of your writing skill. Also. EDIT. I know poetry is a bit free form and we can play with spellings and words to make things interesting, but don’t play it that way if you really just didn’t feel like spell checking.
Keep a Log of your submissions: If you use Submittable (and many contests, journals and mags do), it will track who you’ve sent work to, when, and how much the fee was if applicable. This not only helps you keep on budget but it allows to see where your work is and query or move on if no responses are given with the appropriate time frame. If you don’t want to go that route, you can make a spreadsheet in Excel, or keep a notebook with the date submitted, the publisher/journal, the poem(s) sent, the expected response time, entry fee, and anything else that you feel like creating a column for.
Don’t be afraid or discouraged by rejection: I’ve known poets who submit over 700 times a year and maybe get only five to ten poems published. I’m not nearly that ambitious but it helps to know that its just part of the game, and is not necessarily a reflection of your work so much as it is a matter of odds.
Know your ownership rights: Some forums will require that they have the sole publishing rights for a certain amount of time, meaning you can’t put it on your website or shop it around, even to local or smaller works. Be sure that you are okay with their terms of publication.
Start Small: Ya’ll I’m not even joking. One of the biggest secrets to publishing is to not throw your heart into the cauldron of huge publishing factories. Not only will your work get lost in the endless entries from around the globe, but it may not get into readers’ hands in the same way you wrote it. Do yourself a favor and research local magazines, niche magazines (think Erotic Atheist Digest?), local writing groups, and small literary presses. While they can be more discerning in some respects, they also carry the torch of being outliers that appreciate the art in a more grassroots way.
Well…holy smokes this might be one of my longest posts but, I did also promise you some good starting points for sending out your work. So, big breath in, you’re in the home stretch.
Thrush Journal
8poems
32poems
Rattle
FreezeRay
Ghost City Review
Barren Magazine
Little Death Lit
Palette Poetry
Wildness Journal
Androit Journal
Frontier Poetry
Winter Tangerine
Don’t forget to search local college/university literary journals, local publishing companies or poetry groups, and independent journals. Don’t be afraid to, every once in a while, send your stuff to bigger places too. The Harvard Review and Poetry Magazine as well as The New Yorker usually also accept submissions.
Disappointed I can’t find an image of the scene when John Gavin shouts this line while fumbling with a live chicken and coming out of a tranquilized haze.Apparently, the internet DOES NOT have everything.
I’m not immune to the fact that this blog has tripped around in the dark a bit lately. Let’s be honest, all of us are probably tripping in the dark. We’re in unprecedented times, facing stresses and noise that we’ve never dealt with before. It’s easy, in the dissonance, to lose our path.
So for the next three to four weeks I’ll be getting organized and coming back to the basics. No, I’m not going to make you deconstruct your sentences into diagrams, circling your subject, double scoring your gerunds, slashing through your adverbs (or will I? Could be a fun practice in the lost art of sentence diagramming AND tortuous. I’m a girl who likes it a little rough).
For the love of all that is good and holy…if this doesn’t make you hot…you’re not my kind of nerd.
First, we’ll be taking a few weeks to explore the basics of each type of the most prevalent submissions for authors: poetry, flash fiction, short story, and novel.
Following that, and into the fall, I’ll start breaking it down further into genre work, dialogue, plot building, scene construct, story structure and the basics of good editing.
That’s not to say I won’t occasionally throw in a “stop being assholes to each other” rant. I like to keep it exciting after all.
It’s been a while since we dabbled in the lighter word count and heavier hand of poetry so I thought…why not start there?
(Hold on to your asses, she’s about to ADULT over here!)
Poetry used to be the sole conveyer of great stories, epic tales, and the meat and potatoes of religious creed. The first believed poem, author unknown, was called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Besides this epic, there was Rig Vedas of Hinduism, and The Song of The Harper from Egypt. Centuries before we first heard a Greek throw down an ode to an urn, people were writing poems.
Poetry was borne in the heart of burgeoning cultures and empires. As we move west across the world, we have The Iliad, Beowulf, 154 shout outs to Will Shakespeare’s best girl(s), and eventually, on to the new world with works like The Song of Hiawatha.
From these epic and structured beginnings, poetry has evolved and moved, like a river around obstacles, constant but ever-changing. One of the reasons I love poetry is its ability to capture the heartbeat of time-periods through the use of its language and form, as well as the ideas that it holds.
Poetry records history. From the simplest nursery rhymes (“Mary, Mary Quite Contrary” was actually based on Queen Mary I, aka Bloody Mary, who tortured and killed hundreds of protestants. Silver Bells and Cockle Shells aren’t perennials, they’re torture devices.) to Walt Whitman’s descriptions of the horror and decimation from America’s Civil War (“O Captain, My Captain” was written about the assassination of Lincoln just before the close of the ‘storm’ of war) poetry is a powerful conveyer of humankind’s journey through time.
Poetry connects. It’s visceral and often uncomfortable. It paints pictures with the deepest hues of language. Poetry is vital to song writing, memory retention, and a host of other deep-seated neural mechanisms humans use to survive. (the ABC song, “Thirty days hath September…”, “I before E except after C–and about a dozen other exceptions because the English language is a bastardized torture device for anyone learning it”)
So how do you write a poem?
Well, that’s the beautiful thing. We are no longer shackled to the 15 line iambic pentameter, nor are we beholden to ends that rhyme. Poetry can be written in just about any form you can conceive. You can write it, you can rap it, you can sing it, you can paint it across a street in bold letters. There are no rules but one.
Poetry should be true to your soul.
It should never be half-way. It should fling open the shutters of your close-held heart and expose it to the light. Poetry should reflect the thoughts and the feelings, the commiseration and worry, the anger and peace, the joy or the sadness that fills your head and your community.
When I think of poetry, I think of catharsis and a means to work through big and hard emotions (a girl’s favorite kind?) I think of finding meaning and perspective, shrinking down the large imposing impossibilities to moments I can do something with. To feelings I can direct towards change.
To write a poem is to be truthful about what hurts most in that moment.
I’m sure you can guess this week’s exercise. Write some poetry. In any form you want. Send it to me, let me know if you want it to have a little spot here on The Beautiful Stuff, or if you rather just share it with another soul. I don’t have a preference for form or length. Just get to the darkness, poke around in there, tickle the tender underbelly of what drives your biggest emotions and tug it out into the light.
As we are in the last week of National Poetry month I have a couple to share from last week’s exercises before we get into some fun little distractions from your current pandemic confusion.
But first…some Verse…
LESSONS
The children must be taught
But why?
So they can “grow up”?
So they can feed this horrible and unequal shipwreck of a country?
This continuous machine that steals their joy
and forces them into tiny boxes of pre-approved paths?
Paths that continue to feed the privileged?
who ride, like great white kings, on the backs of former dreamers?
Dreamers forced to live on the crumbs of cake that fall
from their slovenly white jowls?
The children MUST be taught
A new lesson.
A new way…the way of their heart.
The way their soul already knows.
The way that shouts out,
“You don’t get to tell me what my potential is–
You don’t get to standardize my worth by tests and deficient wages.”
The lesson of straightening spines
To topple the oligarchy from their shoulders
and down into the mud, to take their turn in wallowing.
Lessons must be learned.
The children must be taught.
–J. McLaughlin (Fort Collins, CO)
And from Miss Elliana (past contributor) :
IMBALANCE
And so it is,
Not one damn word in my head,
While the world rolls and sways,
Constantly tipping the balance point
Now to humanity
Now to the hungry gnash of teeth.
And I can’t remember the last words I said to you.
I can’t remember if
I was human that night
Or gnashing.
I must have felt the full and oceanic spectrum
all the love
and the hate
desire
and regret
Heart and mind, a mirror of the worldly indecision.
I like to imagine I was kind.
Even though I’m well aware,
of the splendid mess I am
for that boy.
A stammering, uncontrolled fool.
But these are stammering, uncontrolled and
foolish times.
–Elliana Byrne (Boulder, CO)
Finally, because I cannot ask you to do something that I wouldn’t do myself I decided to experiment with storytelling/dialogue in poetry:
TRUTH
“The truth–“she breathed. “The truth is that love changes.
In ways we don’t expect when we first fall.
It grows and festers, or it cools and softens.
It recedes and fades.
Sometimes it aches,
like a bone that healed wrong.”
His thought crashed out loud.
Thick skinned rhino parting reeds.
“How did you love me?”
Heavy stillness settled
Hot, lazy, savanna swelter
hanging over, waterhole dried.
Air so thick, she could cut it
With the truth.
“The festering, aching way.”
And, since it’s still Poetry Month…here’s some ideas to squeeze in a few more exercises in the art for this last day of April!
You’re welcome.
Write about something that will always be out of reach (everything from the cookie jar to the corner office)
Write a poem where each line/sentence is about each day of a week (maybe last week, maybe an alternate universe week)
What does your favorite color taste like?
What it feels like when you don’t belong in a group of others. (do you want to belong or are you trying to stay an outcast? Play with the difference in those emotions.)
Start the first line of your poem with a word or phrase from a recent passing conversation between you and someone you don’t know. (it can be a simple, “how’s your day going?” from the clerk at the grocery check out line, or more intrusive like a “Have you found Jesus?” concern from a person on your front door step. Maybe it’s the “It’s called a blinker, jackass!” you hear from behind you in traffic (back in the day when we sat in traffic).
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” –William Butler Yeats
I cannot believe it’s taken me nearly all month to remember that it is, in fact, National Poetry Month. I think I may have skimmed over something in the deluge of news clips and overthought, under-edited articles that pervade my cyber space, but in a world where days blend together, I nearly missed it.
You know what coming next, don’t you?
Oh,I’m not being lazy! It’s good practice!
And its more a matter of economy–I’ve got end-of-school projects due and a Black Belt Progress check this week, and therefore, my plate is a little full. So this week your exercise is simple. Go outside, mask it up if you find yourself in a bustling park, of course, but if it’s a deserted early morn, breathe the un fettered air, allow a scrap of paper and pen to tag along with you.
Take ten minutes of just being aware of the moment. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? What do you smell? Use these observations and notice how they filter and affect the thoughts already on your mind. Have a quarrel with yourself and see what arguments emerge. What solutions? What epiphanies?
Then go find yourself a favorite place to sit and write me a poem.
I was going to give you some restrictions but I think we’ve all had enough of those. Any length, any form, rhyming or blatantly against, iambic pentameter–why the f%*k not? Limerick or Odyssey, dark or light, whatever is on the tip of your brain, no matter how sharp or dull.
Send them along, and let me know if you want me to include them in the weeks to come.
To the moments that change us. Those irreversible seconds, milliseconds, and angel-blinks, that unpend and rearrange the perspective of our lives. May you get upended occasionally.
Happy VerseDay my dear readers. Today’s contribution and ode to the brave and selfless men and women of our military comes a from a long-time (I wouldn’t say we’ve known each other since we were knee-high to a grasshopper, but pretty damn close) and dear friend, Ethan Hejki.
Enjoy, share, and take a minute to contemplate what it means to serve our country, and the high costs both to body and soul it demands.
Untitled
I was that which others did not want to be.
I went where others feared to go.
I did what others failed to do. Not by choice
but necessity
I asked nothing from those who gave nothing.
I took nothing from the unwilling.
I was the hero and the villain.
I have accepted the fate of eternal loneliness
and damnation for my actions
I have seen the face of terror
and the face of happiness
I felt the stinging cold of fear
the searing heat of rage
I have heard death’s whisper, beckoning to me.
Soon, soon
I enjoyed the sweet taste of love
the bitterness of loss
I have cried pained and sorrow. but most of all,
I have lived times others would say were best forgotten.
At least some day I can say that I was proud of what I was.
