Wednesday, May 19, 2010

My poetry archive: Tilt-a-Whirl

As of this writing I've published 65 poems in sundry magazines. The majority are available online, a number of them in issues that are still current. My previous attempt to "archive" them on a website was axed by att, and I've been trying to figure out how best to provide access to them on this blog. I'd also like to voice appreciation for the magazines that have published them, and think I will essay a sort of narrative.

A fairly new magazine which has recently taken a couple of my poems is Tilt-a-Whirl: A Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms, a zine devoted to forms in which one or more lines or other elements are repeated. These include many French forms, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, etc; for a full list see the Cheat sheet on the site. (She adds new forms to the list as she finds them.) The zine is edited by Kate Bernadette Benedict and is a spinoff of her better-known zine, The Umbrella.

Issue 2, which is still current, contains my pantoum, Halo, as well as Arrgh poetica, a Treinte-sei. The latter is a 36-line form invented by John Ciardi, which I would never have dreamed of attempting had I not been experimenting with oddball forms while involved in a challenge. (Kate told me in accepting it that she had resolved not to publish poems about writing poems, but felt impelled to make an exception—partly, I suppose, because the form was new to her. It was new to me too, and poetry writing was the easiest subject to practice on.)

Back issues of Tilt-a-Whirl will be archived by form, rather than by issue; thus, when issue 3 comes along and the above links to my poems are outmoded, you can find them under the form in the archive.

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