World Class Poetry Blog

I waited a long time before I decided to publish this review of 100 Sonnets. Honestly, I really hate to write negative reviews. But I felt like it was an honor issue. The poet sent the book expecting a review. He put out an expense in doing so - in giving away a free copy and in mailing costs. The least I could do was to give my honest opinion.

Some publications will not publish negative reviews. I, however, believe that negative reviews serve a worthwhile purpose. For one thing, an insightful poet can read the review and learn a thing or two - not necessarily the poet being reviewed, but any poet reading the review. If anything, a good negative review (I’m not saying my reviews are any good) can cast some light on the subject of poetics and lead readers to a deeper understanding of the issues that poets have to deal with when crafting their poems. And if that leads to better poetry being written overall then I say bring on the negative reviews in droves.

Still, I’d much rather write positive reviews. Even middle-of-the-road reviews.

Why I Offer To Write Book Reviews
I initially offered to write poetry book reviews because I wanted to share insights into poetic philosophy with my readers. I believe there isn’t enough honest discussion about poetics, particularly among independent poets who publish their own work. I thought, when I started reviewing books, that most of my reviews would end up being of independently published authors, and I was right. I was hoping they’d end up being better poets. But one doesn’t always get what one asks for.

Occasionally, however, I do find that rare gem of a poetry book that I love to tell people about. And that’s why I write reviews.

For instance, Jeff Rath’s The Waiting Room at the End of the World is one such book, though it isn’t a book of sonnets nor is it self published. Patrick Carrington’s Thirst is another book (actually, a chapbook) of non-sonnets I can recommend.

As for books of sonnets, The Poets Don’t Write Sonnets Anymore by Robin Ridington is an excellent book I don’t mind recommending, not so much for the poetry, but for the commentary that goes along with it.

I wouldn’t exactly call Ridington’s sonnets “sucky”. But they don’t make me kick my heels together either. Nevertheless, I loved reading the commentary/memoir mixed with thoughts on a myriad of topics important to Ridington that encompassed the poems. I think Ridington did well in putting together his book of sonnets and prose lead-ins. It’s a great book if not great poetry.

One Sonneteer I’d Recommend For The Poems
Truth be told, the sonnet is not exactly my favorite form. I’ve never been really good at writing them myself. That may be because I just haven’t taken the time to honestly practice the form. There are other forms I’ve done well with because of the practice. But the sonnet isn’t one of them.

Still, I love reading a good sonnet when I find one. And one person who writes sonnets that I think are just golden is a poet by the name of Barry Ballard.

Barry Ballard’s Green Tombs To Jupiter is an amazing collection of Petrarchan sonnets written in blank verse. They cover a wide range of topics, but they remind me of the metaphysical poets, only they deal with subject matter from the late 20th century, subjects that John Donne would not have imagined.

I used to read with Barry in Fort Worth, Texas when I lived down there. His delivery is as astounding as his pen and that’s another reason I’d recommend his poetry. I don’t know why his book sells for $173.91 at Amazon. That must be a typo, but it is definitely worth a read if you can get it for less.

If you’re going to write sonnets, it helps to read a few from classical and contemporary poets who write them well. Barry Ballard should be on your reading list.

For the last week I’ve been frustrated. I’ve tried to publish the May 2009 issue of my Twitter poems chapbook, but I’ve been running into some challenges that have held up the process.

For starters, I bought a new laptop, an Acer AspireOne. It’s a tiny little Ferrari of a laptop, but it really is a cool toy. But of course, Microsoft and Acer have teamed up to force me to purchase Microsoft Office or be relegated to using it the complimentary X number of times and be without. I downloaded OpenOffice instead, the committed cheap ass bastard that I am.

I spent three days trying to figure out how to convert from OpenOffice to .pdf. I couldn’t do it. My .pdf converter doesn’t recognize OpenOffice files and won’t convert text files properly. Nor would it work correctly with Microsoft Word 2007, which is the format I was saving my OpenOffice files in. I finally had to save it in MS Word 2003 then go to my desktop computer, which I gave to my six year old so he could play his games on, and open the document in Word to convert it to .pdf.

I thought that had solved all my problems. I didn’t.

It took me another two days to figure out why the .pdf converter was melding every document I’ve converted to date into one file. At first I didn’t recognize that was what was happening. The front cover of the .pdf document was the cover of HardSoftwood.

After scratching my head for a couple of days it finally dawned on me that I had used the combine documents feature of my .pdf converter on the HardSoftwood project and never turned it off. Duh! So besides being a cheap ass bastard I am now a dumb ass bastard. Two for one.

At any rate, long story short, I fixed that issue and now am ready to present to you the 13-page chapbook titled Twitpoems. You can download it for free with the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Quick announcement: Hyperbole e-zine/newsletter is now accepting submissions for free classifieds.

Have you subscribed?

If you’ve been waiting to get your free copy of Gary B. Fitzgerald’s digital chapbook HardSoftwood then now is your chance. It is available for download right now.

HardSoftwood can best be described as a dual chapbook - two chapbooks in one. Each section features a selection of poems from two of Gary B. Fitzgerald’s books Hardwood and Softwood. The digital chapbook gives you a chance to preview Gary’s poems before buying his books.

HardSoftwood is the first chapbook in the World Class Poetry Promotional Chapbook Series. Designed to help poets promote their books in print, each chapbook will present a small selection from the poet’s published book of poems and provide a link for readers to purchase the book if they like what they read. All the chapbooks will be free downloads.

If you are a poet and think you might be interested in having your published book of poems promoted in this manner then read our submission guidelines and send us your published book for review.

If you enjoy good poetry and just want to experience Gary B. Fitzgerald’s poems then I invite you to download his dual chapbook HardSoftwood for free.

Yesterday I announced the addition of the second chapbook by Gary B. Fitzgerald to the World Class Poetry Toolbar. Today I’d like to offer you two free poetry chapbooks available for download.

• Going Dutch - Going Dutch is actually a couple of years old, but I’m making it available for free for the first time. These are poems I wrote while on R&R leave from Iraq in 2005 when I met my wife in Germany and we toured the country by train. A nice little poetic-pictorial journey just for you.
• Twitter Poems - Twitter Poems is the outgrowth of my Twitter poem experiment, which I conducted in April. I posted one poem a day on Twitter. Each poem was limited to 140 characters or less, a stricture placed by Twitter itself. These are the poems in a chapbook, free and available for download.

In addition to adding these two chapbooks to the toolbar, I’ve reorganized the blogs that are accessible from the toolbar as well. This was long overdue and finally I made the time to get it done. The blogs are alphabetized now for easier reference. There are 29 blogs in addition to the WCP blog and website. The latest addition is PoemShape.

Feel free to download the World Class Poetry Toolbar and enjoy your free chapbooks. There is also a call for submissions at the end of Twitter Poems.

In the mid-1990s, those of us who were brave enough to risk our lives and reputations by using this thing called the World Wide Web found a little web community that allowed us to set up our web pages for free. It was really nice.

Actually, it wasn’t. But it was free, which made it seem really nice. And if you had any technical know-how, and most of us didn’t, then it was really good because you didn’t need any. Geocities had all the tools you needed to set up your own website. And since there weren’t any search engines not to get found in (well, not many anyway), it didn’t really matter how good you were at building a website. The few hundred other website owners at Geocities might find you anyway because you might have been smart enough to list your little website at Yahoo!

Back then, Yahoo! was a directory and not much more. It was the leading place on the Web to find information because website owners themselves submitted their sites in the categories they wanted to be found in. Google hadn’t even been thought of yet.

One year after a little start up called Google turned its lights on - 1999 for those of you with no fingers - Yahoo! bought Geocities. We were all in awe of Yahoo!

I was one of those Geocitizens with a presence in the little community that came to be owned by Yahoo! The year was 1997. I thought it would be cool to publish some of my poetry on a website so Geocities was a nice place to stack my pens. It really didn’t last long. I went on to buy my own domain name and built an actual website using HTML (though I won’t reveal what that website is because it’s just too much an embarrassment). But I was cool for about a year.

Imagine my surprise when I read the other day that Yahoo! was shutting down Geocities. They weren’t even selling it. Or replacing it with anything. Not even a plan to revamp it. Just killing it. Splat!

I wasn’t really surprised, but I feigned it for a second. I’m not making this up.

Get Your Own Poetry Blog Now! (Before It’s Too Early)
This just goes to show you can’t say never and you should never rely on free hosting.

So why should I mention this? Because it seems that the majority of poets publishing a blog today are doing it through another free host - Blogger.com, owned by Google. The largest search engine on planet earth. (Drumroll please: This should really be dramatic!)

Do you really think Google will be the biggest and baddest forever? We thought that about Yahoo! Do you think that Blogspot (Blogger.com) will be around forever? We thought that about Geocities. Today, Yahoo! is threatened with extinction and Geocities is studying to be a paleontological discovery. And me? I’m just looking forward to Armageddon.

So anyway, short story long, what will happen to all of your blog content if you are hosting through Blogger.com and Google decides to abort the baby? Well, you’ll just end up scraping little pieces of placenta off the pavement (if you can bend down that low) and wish you had listened to all of those fire and brimstone preachers warning you about the end of the world. Hell hath no fury like a blogger forewarned!

Ah, digressions aside (and indiscretions too), if you really want your blog to be a lasting document (like a will and testament or a Supreme Court decision) then you should spring $10 for a domain name. No, really, that’s all it costs. $10. Of course, you’ll have to have a host for your domain, but that usually costs about $3 per month if you go with the shared hosting plan at one of the least expensive hosts. And the benefit is this: You’ll own the blog. Lock, stock, and gunny sack. And no one can shut you down.

My One And Only Offer For Salvation (Baptism Optional)
I realize not everyone has the technical know-how to install blog software and set it up properly. I bet you could teach yourself. It really isn’t hard. But you may not want to. No problem.

If you want a poetry blog and you are willing to buy a domain name and pay for the hosting, I’ll install and set up your software for you. WordPress is very easy to use. It’s almost intuitive. If you can type a letter using Microsoft Word then you can write a blog post using WordPress. It’s free, just like Blogger.com. Except that you can keep WordPress forever, like concert tickets. (In fact, I have the latest copy of WordPress and I’ll let you have it.)

This offer is only good if you set up a poetry blog. No charge. I’ll install WordPress and set it up for you, including ensuring that your settings are set to the best optimization standards. The only thing that I ask in return is that I put a link back to World Class Poetry Blog and my sister site, World Class Poetry, in the footer of your blog. Nothing auspicious or conspicuous, just a little attribution link for doing the work (I normally charge $200 for WordPress setups).

I’m limiting this offer to five poets or poetry-related blogs. Your blog can be for a blog on poetics, a blog on which you post your own poetry, a blog for a poetry journal, or any blog that is poetry in nature. You can’t take advantage of this offer for any other type of blog. Exclusively for poets. Plus, I’ll add your blog to the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

To take advantage of this offer, send me a request through my contact form (be sure to let me know in the comments that you are responding to this offer) and I’ll get back in touch with you about your poetry blog. Wouldn’t you much rather own the property and not just the content?

As National Poetry Month draws nearer, I am planning an experiment that I predict will catch on en masse. I won’t be the first person to do this, but I will be (as far as I know) the first person to codify principles for doing it. The “it” I’m talking about is writing and publishing Twitter poems.

If you are familiar with Twitter, kudos to you. If not, allow me to introduce you to the 21st century version of mass communication.

Twitter is an opt-in service that allows you to set up an account and a profile and instant message multiple people who have agreed to receive your messages. The messages, however, have a 140-character limit. Because of this limit, Twitter has been dubbed “microblogging”. It’s a way of sharing information in short snippets. I like Twitter for a number of reasons, one of which is because it forces me to think concisely. Brevity is key to good writing and Twitter forces you to be brief.

What Is A Twitter Poem?
So what is a Twitter poem? In a word, a Twitter poem is a poem that you write for Twitter and publish on Twitter. I have seen Twitter haikus and other poets have used Twitter to write short poems. I’ve even seen people Twitter an entire book.

As I see it, there are two ways you can use Twitter to write a poem. You can write a single poem within one “tweet” - the word for a message on Twitter. Or you can use each message to write a line in a poem. In the latter’s case, your poem can be as long as you want it to be as long as each line is no more than 140 characters. That’s not quite as challenging as writing a 140-character poem.

Keep in mind, we are talking about 140 characters, not words.

My Twitter Poem Experiment
Starting April 1, I will tweet one poem a day for 30 days. Each poem will consist of 140 characters or less. Each poem will exist within one tweet. No more. I will tweet each poem three times and every day throughout April I will publish a new poem. I’d welcome you to follow me, if you have an interest in seeing how this little experiment goes.

All you have to do to follow me is open a Twitter account and look for me at http://twitter.com/Allen_Taylor. My username on Twitter is Allen_Taylor. When you find me just click the Follow button and that’s all there is to it.

If you want to write your own Twitter poems in response I’d like to read them.

How To Write A Twitter Poem
Here are the guidelines that I’ll be using for my Twitter poems. You can write a poem on Twitter any way you like. But I’m using this method as a means of efficiency and so that there is consistency throughout the month. Whenever you see a Twitter poem it will look like this:

• Every line will end with /
• Stanzas will end with a double / - just like this //
• Poems will appear as one line with the above symbols to represent line and stanza breaks
• At the end of each poem you’ll see #twitpoem

That’s about it. Pretty simple. The #twitpoem is called a hashtag. If you go to http://search.twitter.com and type in the hashtag you’ll find all of the poems on one page.

Remember, the Twitter Poem Experiment starts on April 1. I will write one poem per day for 30 days. Each day I will tweet the poem three times. To read, you’ll have to follow me on Twitter. I hope to see you there.

A few days ago I put out an invitation for guest bloggers. I immediately had a few nibbles on the hook of my line and it wasn’t long before one of the mud cats snagged it good. Yes, I have my first guest blogger.

His name is Will and he’s a high school teacher and poet who writes the blog The Search for Health in Decadence.

Will’s first blog post will appear here on World Class Poetry Blog tomorrow evening. I hope you’ll wait in eager anticipation, as I will be, and be on the edge of your seat as he shares his thoughts on simulacra and poetry.

Tomorrow night. Be here.

Here’s a quickie: I found a cool website where you can search for a topic and create an instant page with multiple resources. I typed in “poetry” and got this.

If you’re a fan of Edgar Allan Poe as I am then you might appreciate poetry videos based on his poems. I’ve uploaded four videos based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and derivative work by Alan Parsons Project, at World Class Poetry. Feel free to check them out.

If you were around in the late 1970s then you’ll probably remember the progressive rock group Alan Parsons Project. “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” was an imaginative take on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and still sells considerably well. You’ll love the video of the same title featuring the title track.

Other poetry videos included in the Poe collection include:

• The Raven (of course)
• Ulalume
• Annabel Lee

These are all amateur productions, but I consider them done well enough to share. I particularly like the high school production of “Annabel Lee”. But I’d encourage you to check them all out for yourself. You can do that by visiting the World Class Poetry video library, courtesy of YouTube.