Friday, August 29, 2008

comments on “Green Spree” version 4

I like it. Surprising myself. I’ve been having so much difficulty with poetry lately. I write something and I hate it. I hate writing it. The writing isn’t fun. The writing used to be fun.

The first line came to me and excited me so I wrote it down. I still like it. “The green story is the only story.” And the writing after that was fun. It felt like it knew where to go, and the good parts from earlier versions seemed happy to abandon their old contexts and come aboard.

I presented it to my little writing group and they liked it, too. Ah, I remember that! The praise of the peers. It was always so warming (then the praised poem got rejected again & again by the magazine editors).

I have a version of “Green Spree” formatted so “green” appears like a trunk or spine down the middle of the page, the rest of each line poking out to the left or right. I don’t know how to set that up on blogger …

Speaking of sending out to magazines: I got response from two ezines this week. One a yes: Shampoo. The poem will appear soon, editor Del Ray Cross says, in a “sneaky previoo” of the next issue. The other was a no. After getting the Shampoo response I wondered about the other to which I’d sent poems at the same time. In response to my status query the other’s editor wrote back: We said no on 6/22/08. Maybe it got caught in your spam filter? If so, I suppose my spam filter meant well, wanting to save my feelings.

3 comments:

Kent said...

use your word doc with non-proportional spacing (e.g., courier), but use   instead of each space (this is a non-breaking space).

so, if you want blank-blank-blank-green, use    green and the word green will appear starting in the fourth space position.

you can also ask me in real life.

Kent said...

that's funny, it published blank spaces instead of the character (of course; it's an html character).

the "blank" space is " " without the quotes; so use "   green" if you want "blank-blank-blank-green"

Kent said...

okay, third attempt:

the blank is &-n-b-s-p-; without the dashes (-) if you use &_nbsp; (without that underline) it turns into a fixed blank space.