April is National Poetry Month, which makes it a great time to enjoy the beauty and power of words! Whether you love poetry or are just starting to explore it, reading a poem each day is a wonderful way to celebrate the art of the poem.
Why Read a Poem a Day?
Poetry helps us express feelings, tell stories, and learn new words. Reading one poem a day can:
Improve Reading Skills – Poems use creative language that helps build vocabulary and understanding.
Inspire Creativity – Poetry makes us think in new ways and see the world differently.
Help You Relax – The rhythm and emotions in poetry can be calming and enjoyable.
Grow Empathy – Poems share different experiences and feelings, helping us understand others better.
Easy Ways to Add Poetry to Your Day
Start Your Morning with a Poem – Read a short poem to begin your day with inspiration.
Read Poetry with Friends and Family – Share a poem out loud and talk about it together.
Use Online Poetry Resources – Websites like Poets.org and Poetry Foundation offer daily poems.
Write About What You Read – Keep a journal to jot down thoughts or even try writing your own poems!
Poets and other resources to Check Out
If you’re not sure where to start, here are some poets you might enjoy:
Classic Poets: Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop
Modern Poets: Amanda Gorman, Mary Oliver, Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón
Poets from Around the World: Pablo Neruda, Rupi Kaur, Wisława Szymborska, Rainer Maria Rilke
National Poetry Month is the perfect time to enjoy poetry. Challenge yourself to read a poem each day, share your favorites, or even try writing your own! Celebrate the power of poetry—one poem at a time.
What’s your favorite poem? Share it in the comments below!
I love words and sentences, writing them. I also love reading something really good. So, part of my day circles around writing and revising. Another part is reserved for reading.
If your desire is that each piece of writing you create is superior to its predecessor, then it’s a good idea to read other writer’s creations. We learn what we like and what we don’t like by reading the work of others. Experiencing through someone else’s words can give us the opportunity to learn new ways of approaching an essay, poem, or story.
Those five little earrings could represent the various framents of the essay that focuses on what we hear or don’t.
First thing this morning, I clicked on a link provided by the literary magazine, Sweet. A Literary Confection that was titled “In My Head: Tinnitus” by Marcia Aldrich which the editors have nominated for the 2023 “Best of the Net.” I liked the way Aldrich broke the essay into very short sections. This type of CNF essay is called a fragmented essay, specifically in this case, a narrative mosaic because all the sections were directly linked to the topic of Tinnitus, but all approached the word/ the subject/ the experience from different vantage points. Here is the link if you’d like to read it.
Next I read the under 250 word CNF essay from Riverteeth’s weekly newsletter Beautiful Things titled “Sugar in the Evening” by Jennifer Anderson. Deceptively simple. it resonates. I don’t necessarily like every weekly Beautiful Things selection, but this one is truly a gem. To read it click here.
Finally, to round out the morning, before I started revising a story of my own, I clicked to read some poems in Sunlight Press capturing a sense of nostalgia and the delight of movement by Alfred Fournier. You can click to read them here.
Evenings and Sunday afternoons are for “hard copy.” I love a book that pulls me in and keeps me guessing. I never want to be able to confidently predict where the plot is heading. So I’d like to recommend The Great Circle, published in 2021 by Maggie Shipstead, a Booker Prize finalist.
A very long novel (655 pages) I was lucky enough to pick up in one of the several Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood, it is both entertaining and instructive to fellow novelists in approach and structure. I try very hard not to read multiple books by the same author in an effort to “meet on the page” more writers and I’d already read Seating Arrangements, but I am so happy I did make an exception and grab that almost new paperback. This novel is far superior to Shipstead’s previous work in that it adds multiple layers of time, place and setting to a compelling storyline.
Comprised of two narrative arcs, The Great Circle tells the story of a pioneering female aviator, Marian Graves, born in 1914, who wants to be the first to circumnavigate the globe by flying over both the North and South Poles. The second storyline focuses on actress Hadley Baxter who is chosen to play the role of Marian in a Hollywood movie produced in 2014.
The 20th century narrative is told in third person, and while it primarily focuses on Marian’s life it also tells the story of her twin brother Jamie, and the role women aviators played in World War II. The 2lst century narrative is told in the first-person voice of Hadley.
As to what happens, I’ll leave it to you the reader to discover first-hand. Enjoy and keep reading, whether it is long or short, on paper or on your phone. And yes, I listen to stories as well. My most recent listen was Companion Piece by Ali Smith, a melding of reality and splendid storytelling.
How we portray ourselves and others, is something memoirists grapple with.
We call it “Creative Nonfiction” when a writer presents truth in a creative format that can take the form of anything from a lyrical essay to a crossword puzzle. A selection of word artifacts can weave an interesting narrative inviting the reader to fill in the blanks, anything from a grouping of letters, the transcription of a phone call, or a photograph with a caption.
The words in a game or puzzle can inspire a short work of creative nonfiction.
In fiction, the writer shapes the story to create pacing and tension. In nonfiction, the writer selects and amplifies truth to produce a compelling piece they hope others will want to read.
The nonfiction writer often relies on memory. Memory and research. The research often draws on the memories and writings of others.
How accurate are those memories? According to the work of late 19th century German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s research, graphed as a forgetting curve, much of what people experience each day is quickly forgotten. In the May 20th 2024 issue of The New Yorker, writer Jerome Groopman, discusses in a book review the recently released book Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath.
Ranganath is a neuropsychologist at U.C. Davis and in his book, he discusses memory and how we may be looking at memory the wrong way. Memory, he conjectures, more likely functions as an adaptive trait to keep humans alive. Selectively we remember some things and forget others. Perhaps the forgetting is as important as the remembering.
Photos may help prompt our memories, but sometimes what others tell us about a photo my influence our recollection.
From a writer’s point of view, I find it fascinating to hear how people’s memories of the same event can be slightly different. What do those differences reveal about each person?
Folk tales and fairy tales clearly demonstrate how the same story can be adjusted to reflect the story teller’s preferences. In some versions of little Red Riding Hood, grandmother is locked in a closet in another she is swallowed by the wolf. In a family, one sister may remember beloved pet that was hit by a car and another may forget the pet because the memory is too painful.
But the sources themselves: diaries, letters, newspaper articles, trial transcriptions all have their bias—according to who wrote them. And Kavanagh reveals in many instances, the ulterior motives and prejudices some of the parties may have possessed in how they reacted to the events that took place.
Writing a short nonfiction piece, based on a personal experience can take the form of a letter, diary or puzzle. Part of the writing adventure is trying new things.
If we acknowledge our memories are always shapeshifting, I think it can give us a certain amount of freedom to experiment. Playing with episodic memory, using a trigger such as music, smell or taste, can provide a means to travel back to a previous episode in your life and re-examine it.
WRITING PROMPT: A smell you love or a smell you hate. If you have the item around, use it as a trigger, if not try to remember it. What comes to mind. A person you were fond of? A party you attended? If you write something you like, put it away and revisit it the following week to review and edit. If the piece has power refine until it is ready and then if you want to share it, submit it to potential publishers.
About the author:
Nadja Maril is the author of Recipes from my Garden, Old Scratch Press, September 2024. Nadja Maril’s short stories, poems and essays have been published in dozens of small online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, Invisible City Literary Review,and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM. A former newspaper columnist and magazine editor, she writes a weekly blog and you can visit her website at www.Nadjamaril.com.
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Many writers, including myself, write both prose and poetry. For me, it just depends on the subject matter as to which form I choose. Many writers begin with one form of writing and evolve to another. There are some writers who begin in one genre and stay there. In the end of the day, our paths are different, but we are all writers, and all writers want to tell a story. We want readers to feel something, experience something, remember something. We want them to leave us changed in some small way. Even if you don’t want to learn about the craft of poetry in a formal way, as in attending workshops, just reading a few poems a day will improve your prose writing in ways that will surprise you.
Poetry as a form succeeds on bold, visual imagery, exact information from all the senses. This is how the reader enters the poem and lives inside it for a brief time. By reading lines of poetry, prose writers will also experience and come to understand why rhythm matters. There is great impact when rhythm is found in sentences and phrases.
One of the defining benefits of studying and writing poetry for me as a prose writer has been that in poetry more than any other genre, each and every word must do work, and I mean each and every word. Poets take time and great care choosing words and prose writers, if you want to be your best, you should be doing that as well, but it takes practice. Read Hemingway again to see why this matters.
Poetry has the same elements as prose writing, such as characterization and narrative arc, but it contains more unexpected phrases, surprises and turns that send readers in directions they didn’t expect. This is often missing from prose writing, and it shouldn’t be. Additionally, poetry teaches us about pace. How long lines with no punctuation slow the reader down. How a short line placed just right can then really pack a punch.
Prose writers can also use traditional poetry techniques to enhance their narratives such as assonance, linking words with similar vowel sounds. Using words in this way can produce a desired effect on the reader such as a calming effect as if listening to music.
My greatest lesson and take away as a prose writer who reads poetry every single day is that endings are so incredibly important. When you read enough good poems, you’ll see what I mean. And stories, like poems, deserve the best endings possible. This is something to strive for.
So, you want to be a good prose writer? Then read poetry. Simple as that. Poetry teaches us all how to use our language. Poetry teaches how to describe. Poetry demonstrates mood, voice, momentum in unexpected ways. We all want the same thing. To tell the story we want to tell in the best way we can. Reading poetry will help us learn to do that.
There are many good online literary journals where you can read poems: Narrative Magazine, Agni, Carve, Rattle, 32 Poems, A Public Space, Apple Valley Review, Evergreen Review, The Cortland Review, Waxwing, Pigeon Pages, Cleaver Magazine, Able Muse.
You can also sign up to receive daily poems from: Rattle, Your Daily Poem, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poem of the Day. All these are free as is the wonderful podcast written and hosted by one of my favorite poets Padraig O Tuama: Poetry Unbound. I would also highly recommend Padraig’s wonderful book: 50 Poems to Open Your World.
Happy Reading!
~Ginny
Virginia Watts has been fortunate to have published nearly 100 pieces in literary magazines including CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Broadkill Review, Two Thirds North, Hawaii Pacific Review, Sky Island Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, Evening Star Review and Streetlight Magazine. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net, in 2019, Watts won The Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction.
All poems submitted for consideration must be original, unpublished, and short.
Short is key. No epics, please.
Meter, rhyme, free verse? Haiku, limerick, quatrain, sonnet? The choice is yours.
Entries should make a point about language: grammar, usage, typos, writing, editing — whatever inspires you think captures the spirit of National Grammar Day.
Who can enter
Everyone is invited to participate. You do not need to be a member of ACES or work as an editor. The winning entry will be selected by a panel of judges that includes the previous year’s winner, along with language and poetry experts. ACES administers the award; it does not decide the winners.
That said, we encourage you to share your entries on your favorite social media platforms. If you tag #ACES and #GrammarDay we will be able to find you and reshare.
When to submit
The submission form is open Feb. 15-28. The link will be available here during that window.
Learning the results
ACES will announce the winner on, naturally, March 4, in a post on its news channel and in its social media channels. The winning poem will be included in the story, along with the runner-up entries.
By R. David Fulcher, Old Scratch Press Founding Member
Recently I had the honor of joining the Folkloring podcast. This podcast addresses how we can integrate folklore into our everyday lives, including our writing.
Preparing for this podcast prompted me to reflect upon the influence of folklore, myth and legend on my own writing and was surprised to discover the influence has been quite profound.
Below are some of categories of folklore I came up with in case they could be an inspiration for your writing.
1. Global folklore
By this I mean folklore that originated from a specific geographic location hundreds of years ago, but now is so well known it is generally accepted.
An example of this would be the legend of the vampire from Romania. First something that was very localized, vampires are now so common they now appear on cereal boxes and television series.
I integrate the vampire myth into my writing in several stories in my book The Pumpkin King and Other Tales of Terror in such stories as “The Night Flyer” and “The Watchman’s Web”.
2. Urban Legends/Localized Folklore
In this category would be legends still most popular in specific geographic regions, such as the legend of the New Jersey Devil that haunts the woods of New Jersey, or the infamous Bunny Man of Clifton, Virginia.
The mythology of native Americans is extremely rich and strongly connected to the natural world.
In my book The Cemetery of Hearts, I reference a native American myth from the American Southwest that claims that the majestic canyons and mesas were spun out of a gigantic spider.
In my story “The Land Spider”, a gigantic spider starts swallowing a small town in New Mexico building by building.
These are just a few ideas to get you started, but the world is full of legends and folklore, and weaving them into your writing will enrich your fiction and poetry.
You can learn more about the Folkloring podcasthere
Happy Writing!
R.David Fulcher, Founding Member of Old Scratch Press
Ben’s book is, “A captivating series of short stories, both dramatically and philosophically enthralling.” KIRKUS
“Ben Talbot excels at depicting a world both alien and familiar at the same time.” MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
Welcome to Periscope City, a place where nothing is quite as it seems. Its citizens are those with no one to love, caught in a paradox of escaping loneliness while clinging to it. Here, human emotion is fleeting, and love is nothing more than a transaction. Each story in this collection delves into the heights and depths of solitude through its characters: a writer torn between seeking validation from fleeting romances and finding comfort in the safety of isolation; a former college football star lost in nostalgia, unable to connect with the present; a young runaway scarred by her past, drawn to this desolate town inhabited by loners and serviced by robots. Prepare for an emotional gut-punch as you enter a strange, unsettling place where the broken-hearted choose to stay broken and prefer to live in solitude. Talbot’s haunting, satirical, and often absurd interconnected tales explore themes of self-destruction and elusive redemption. Periscope City will immerse you in a world where the boundary between reality and fantasy is constantly shifting.
Ben is going to read a little from his book, and then we will open it up for poems, flash fiction/non-fiction to give you a chance to add your voice to the conversation about love and loss and loneliness, and answer the age-old question, “What becomes of the broken-hearted?”
If you’re not a pro at reading, it is imperative that you come and try your luck! What better night? We can be awkward, clumsy, lonely, and literary together!
Hope to see you there, and hear you read. We’ll be sad without you….
In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from the book!
Periscope City
A sign greeted me at the border: Periscope City: Where the Lonely Go to Live Alone.
It spoke my language, so I crossed in by foot, to the nearest place it took me to. That place was a one-story house with a long driveway called the Institute. There, they asked me dozens of questions about my immediate past and made me take a personality exam. I told them the truth: that I was a thirty-four-year-old loner whose friends had deserted him for marriage or death. They set me up in the Cramden Hotel.
During the first week, I interacted with only housekeeping and the concierge. They were all robots. It was the best the town could do to live up to its tagline.
—
Although I loved loneliness, I was still lonely as hell. After months of wallowing about my life situation, sinking into the lack of fellow humans, there was nothing I wanted more than to mix it up. I thought being lonely among robots was a different lonely as being lonely among humans. The scratch needed to be itched.
The concierge suggested a dating app called Loner, and the concierge said it had the best reputation for keeping the lonesome lonely. I filled out a profile and submitted it to the AI gods for review. It matched me with Raylene, a blonde Puerto Rican who stood over six feet. Her profile said very little about her beyond the fact that she’d moved from Buffalo, New York, and loved pets over people. In her picture, she sat on a snowy park bench and wore a fleece jacket. A French bulldog sat in her lap, and it wore a black-and-white dog poncho. It looked like a staged photo, like something in an L.L. Bean catalog, but where L.L. Bean was trying to pull off cozy, it was a cold, plastic, disconnected photo. I assumed her entire profile was an attempt at sarcasm.
Do you want to meet or not? she wrote.
Because of my lust for tall women, I wrote her back: Yes.
I have tickets to The Late Show, she wrote. Meet me at Geraldine Park at eight. I’ll be at the corner of Alaska and Winter Bear. And don’t be awkward.
—
When I showed up, Raylene was sitting on a snowy park bench in the same jacket as her photo, with her service bulldog in her lap. The dog even wore a black-and-white poncho. Raylene’s smile was all the picture was missing.
“Joe?” she asked.
Her perfume was cedar, or maybe it was the trees. Whatever the case, the scent had found its way to me, and it smelled lovely. The Loner profile was missing a smell.
“Raylene?”
“No,” she said. “Of course it is. How would I know your name was Joe?”
The bulldog barked at me.
“Sheepshead, knock it off,” she said.
Sheepshead? After Raylene fed her a pill, the dog calmed down. The pill must’ve been a fast-acting depressant, which they sold over the counter here in Periscope City. I know because of my own dog, but he didn’t need medication like me.
“You look different from your picture,” she said.
Ditto. Not only did she frown but her hair wasn’t blonde. It was purple. “How so?” I said.
“I thought you were taller,” she said.
I ignored her comment (let’s call it an insult), already being my tallest.
“Ask me something,” she said.
She was testing me, but then I remembered how sarcastic her profile had been attempting to be. The memory of it made me sweat a little with anxiety because I tried to think of something witty to say quickly, so I used a cliché. “If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?”
“Come on, dude,” she said. “Ask me something else.”
I gestured out to the surrounding park with my hands as if that were the explanation. “It was all I could think of,” I said.
“I told you, don’t be awkward,” she said. “What about you? Who would you have dinner with?”
I hated the question, too.
“Abraham Lincoln,” I said, and the words tasted like tinned fish.
“Why?”
“He was the first person who came to mind,” I said.
“Lame,” she said. “Now ask me a good question.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why did you name your dog Sheepshead?”
“Sheepshead Bay was the last place where I went with my husband,” she said.
“Did you separate?” I said.
She pressed her beanie down to her eyebrows, and I did the same with my trapper hat. We shared an awkward silence. It was what I got for asking a good question.
February is Valentine’s Day month. Instead of trying to send everyone Christmas and New Year’s cards, I like to surprise friends with Valentine’s Day cards. My handmade cards feature words as well as images. So why call them cards at all? They are actually Visual Poems. And because they are made from bits and pieces of collected words, colored paper and illustrations glued onto paper, they are also Collage Poems.
Try it. Once you created a few, you may become hooked. Many artists gravitate towards working in more than one medium. Visual art and poetry work well together. If you desire to be published, a market exists for creative work which combines the two mediums of visual art and words. I will providea list of publications at the end of this article. But first, let’s get started with a little inspiration.
Assembling the materials is part of the fun.
Valentine’s Day Origins
The name Valentine comes from Saint Valentine, and there are three men who are recognized as Saints by the Catholic Church. The most popular Valentine story, according to my research, is the one about the priest who performed secret marriages in opposition to Emperor Claudius II who ordered that all his soldiers remain single. Who the actual St. Valentine was is open to debate. Maybe February 14th is the approximate date of one of the martyred St. Valentines’ funerals, but it is remarkably close to the Roman fertility festival Lupercalia, once celebrated on the Ides of February ( February 15th). In some Roman villages it is said that young men and women were matched up as lovers for a year in an effort to produce more children. A day that honored love and passion, in England and France February 14thwas the start of the birds’ mating season.
The tradition of exchanging cards and love tokens is thought to begin in the middle of the 18th century. By the 19th century, the mass production of printed cards made Valentines’ cards even more popular. Gloves and handkerchiefs were two personal items lovers often gave to one another during the Victorian era. Flowers—pressed or fresh, as well as lines of verse given to our Valentine follow the romantic tradition of conveying ardor for those we adore.
Collage Poem by Nadja Maril. This collage takes lines from several well-known poems and integrates them into a collage of images and shapes connected to love.
Collage
The word collage comes from the French verb coller, meaning to paste or glue. In visual art, a collage is comprised of pieces of paper, cloth or other gathered materials arranged and permanently attached to a surface. Old photos, advertising flyers, ticket stubs, magazine illustrations; are some typical collage materials. As a teenager I’d collect shells, dried seaweed, bits of sea glass to glue on to a flat piece of weathered wood; another type of collage. Whether you use buttons, lace, tissue paper, bits of colored plastic, feathers or fur- the possibilities really are infinite.
Now, think of a collage of words. Instead of collecting physical items collect words, phrases, entire articles that resonate with you. While modernist artists in the early 20th century were creating collages of shapes and colors, Avant-garde groups that included Surrealists and Dadaists took the form to another level by including language. Tristan Tzara famously advocated a “cut-up” method of composition, involving cutting out words from a newspaper and pulling them out of a hat to create a poem. Whether you take excerpts from a political speech, a nursery rhyme or a popular song, by incorporating a medley of sources you are creating a collage poem.
Take another step to combine a visual collage with a literary collage and you have a hybrid, a poem that provides a visual and verbal experience. Whether you want to call it a collage poem, a merging of two art forms or an awesome Valentine’s Day Card—that’s up to you.
Publications that Publish Work that Combine Images and Words
If you need a different sort of Valentine’s Day gift, not the typical candy or flowers, considering purchasing a poetry chapbook and sending it to a friend. At Old Scratch Press we have published five chapbooks thus far, all under $9, with more to come. Take some time out of your day for some quiet reflection and share the love. Whoever started the idea of a day celebrating our connection to one another, let’s try and keep it going.
Nadja Maril is the author of Recipes from my Garden, Old Scratch Press, September 2024. Nadja Maril’s short stories, poems and essays have been published in dozens of small online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, Invisible City Literary Review,and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM. A former newspaper columnist and magazine editor, she writes a weekly blog and you can visit her website at www.Nadjamaril.com.
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So confused. Isn’t a voice linked to speaking, singing, and screaming? What does a voice have to do with writing? What the fu** Robert?
A “writing voice” refers to the unique style and personality a writer expresses through their writing, which is a combination of their vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, and perspective, essentially how their individual personality comes across on the page.
Most poetry magazine acceptance rates are about 2.4%. In order to increase your chance of publication acceptance success, create a writing voice and then target publications that have published work with your voice within the last two-years.
A writing acceptance rate is like a baseball player’s batting average (BA). Josh Gibson’s 1946 BA of 37.2% is the highest career Major League Baseball BA.
Josh Gibson
My poetry voice profile:
Style: experimental
Themes: masculinity, sexual orientation, sin/virtue, dystopia
Forms: visual poetry, free-verse, Japanese Haiku/Mondo, sonnet, and pantoum
Devices: sound (rhyme, alliteration, assonance), duality, homonyms, multiple-word-reversals, and end-titles
CREATING a WRITING VOICE
Oh NO Mr. Robert, an assignment is coming. Sir and madam, it is, I cannot lie.
A sleepless night, 3/14/1996, yours truly obsessed compulsed, to translate four of his favorite poets to a gay style: Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Berryman, and Dorothy Parker.
What I did for each poet:
Select a favorite poem
Analyze and document what the poem is (theme, form, devices) and why you like it
Read the poem out loud
Make an audio recording of your reading
Handwrite the poem
Type the poem
Translate the poem to your style
Place the original poem and translation side by side
What was the outcome impact of yours truly doing this exercise:
In 1997, a follow-up creation of a visual poem that translates Dorothy Parker was included in art show in the District of Columbia
Self-discovery that my style is experimental and an integration of one of the poets studied: Robert Frost and another poet: Dr. Seuss
More Voice Discovery guidelines: make diverse selections
Select work written in different time eras: 50% 1,800 or earlier, 50% 1,900 and later
Gender: 50% men, 50% woman
Style (traditional vs experimental): at least 1 experimental
Discover your writing voice and use it!
Yours Truly is:
Robert Fleming, a contributing editor of Old Scratch Press
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By R. David Fulcher, Founding Member of the Old Scratch Press Poetry and Short Form Collective
Floetry (my definition) a written form of expression combining fiction and poetry.
It is uncommon, but not unheard of, for writers to embrace both fiction and poetry. As one of the writers in this category, I often wonder if this is a benefit or a detriment. To a purist, being competent in both could perhaps mean I’m a master of neither, to echo the old saying “jack of all trades, master of none”.
More recently, I’ve decided being fluent in both fiction and poetry is a definite advantage. To begin with, several of the masters of speculative fiction integrate poetry into their work to great effect. Consider these lines of from Stephen King’s novel The Tommyknockers:
Last night
And the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers
Knocking at my door.
And these lines from Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes:
By the pricking of my thumb,
Something wicked this way comes.
These are by no means the only examples. Dean Koontz dives into poetic verse within his many novels, and it can be argued that the fantasy writings of the Irish writer and dramatist Lord Dunsany (a possible influencer or JRR Tolkien, discover more here) read more like poetry rather than prose.
Therefore, having made the case for “floetry”, how do I employ it? Primarily I interweave poetry into my prose in two ways:
As bookends to start and end my books, with the remainder of the book being fiction, and
The Pumpkin King and Other Tales of Terror starts with my poem “Eulogy to E.A. Poe”:
Man of dark musings and opiate visions!
Mind of pits and rats,
Black cats and ancestral corpses!
How is it that love sparkled within those dark recesses, Like diamonds within a bedrock of obsidian— That verse sprang from that ebony hand,
As vibrant and unlikely as lilacs from snow?
Tales of cities under the sea,
Of waves weeping softly, “Annabel Lee!”
Did the bells, the bells, the bells, foretell of your demise, Or was it borne on Raven’s wings, thus falling from the sky?
Could it be that your last vision was your brightest?
Oh, soul of all that is night,
Inspire my pen to wail and to write.
In a similar fashion, my book Asteroid 6 and Other Tales of Cosmic Horror starts with the poem “The Outer Reaches of Unknown Kadaath” (Kadaath is a reference to the works of H.P. Lovecraft):
Rest awhile, friend, for it is clear that you have walked far over hill and valley, and penetrated the wild and strange woods, to have happened upon this long-preserved manuscript beneath the moss-covered rocks.
I came upon this very spot, perhaps many years ago now, as just a lad. Here I took my respite, beckoned by a fair breeze sweeping over the verdant fields and a song sung in dulcet tones far sweeter than any produced by mortal throats. I was weary from hiking many miles, and my body eagerly fell into a deep sleep.
A song floated over my consciousness, sung by a thousand child-like voices:
Weary traveler,
Rest your head,
And sleep awhile
Where the faeries tread.
Weary traveler,
Laugh in kind,
And take deep draughts
Of faerie wine.
Weary traveler,
Spend the night,
Follow the trail
Of the faerie lights!
Additional stanzas of poetry are injected into other parts of the tale, with the intent of lulling the reader into a sleepy, dream-like state.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it – a brief introduction into the concept of “floetry” with several examples of usage.
What do you think?
Can poetry and prose peacefully coexist on the same page?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks for reading,
-R. David Fulcher, Old Scratch Press Founding Member
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