Feeling Is First

I'm late to the party, but I just discovered Guante . His poem  "Ten Responses to the Phrase Man Up"  has been viewed over half a million times and will be published in the Button Poetry anthology  "Viral" . I heard that poem first, and it got me hooked, but his poem "Action" truly moved me. "Rape Culture is silence." I don't think I've ever heard a more perfect definition of Rape Culture the one he gives in this poem. It is silence. It's us not having the conversations we should be having with our friends and our siblings and our kids. We should be telling our girlfriends to stop slut-shaming and our guy friends to stop using violent terms for sex. We should be telling our kids about  enthusiastic consent . ("Consent is not the absence of a no. It's the presence of a yes.") Rape Culture is perpetuated by our silence, by our fear of the potential social isolation that comes from standing up for what's right

Literary critic Juan Vidal wrote a  piece  for NPR Books entitled Where Have All The Poets Gone? In it he   says, " The Beat Generation is dead, and literary provocation in America, I submit, is at a low." He hungers for a time when poets were at the forefront of marches and rallies, speaking out against injustice.  I don't know what the world used to be like. I don't know if poetry used to have a broader audience than it does now.  Allen Ginsberg died when I was six years old. I've never marched for any cause. But maybe that's because when people in my generation support a cause or are enraged by an injustice, we don't take to the streets. We go to social media. We raise awareness by sharing youtube videos. We try to change minds by blogging.  All the great poets aren't dead and gone. They're online. After Michael Brown's death,  Sarah Kay  shared the poem  not an elegy for Mike Brown  by  Danez Smith  on facebook. Poets are outraged. Poet

I just discovered the poet  Jason McCall . I was looking at literary magazines, and I stumbled upon his poem  Roll Call for Michael Brown  in the magazine  Rattle . The poem sets up the theoretical scenario of one of Michael Brown's college professors accidentally calling his name while taking attendance. I instantly fell in love with the idea behind this poem. It's entirely plausible. We are all so busy, so focused on our own concerns, we can forget Michael Brown's death, even though it only occurred a short time ago. Of course, the poem is also incredibly well-written. I think my favorite line from the poem is, "Someone will / read his name like the next item on a list / of groceries". Mm! It hurts! So I decided to read some more poetry by Jason McCall, and I found  We Love Throwback Thursday  in  The Rappahannock Review . The title suggested whimsy, but I was fooled. This poem knocked me on my ass before the first comma. He says we like to pretend that the pa

I recently quit my job. It's time to stay home and wait for the twins to arrive. I'm sad about it. I liked working. I was teaching math to kids at a learning center, and it felt good. It felt impactful. Quitting was the right thing to do, though. These are the sacrifices we make for our families. Being unemployed got me thinking about what else was out there. What might my next job be? Eventually the twins will be old enough for me to go back to work. Should I keep teaching? Should I try something new? Should I go back to school? So I started looking around online at various opportunities that peaked my interest. Maybe I'd like to work in a group home or a school for children with autism spectrum disorders. Maybe I'd like to get a certificate in bereavement counseling and work with women who've had miscarriages. I stayed up way too late reading about all these things. The whole time I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction in my gut. All the jobs that interest me are

Five 2 One Magazine has published my poem Like a Python !  Check it Out! I submitted the poem to them in January and received an enthusiastic response about 5 1/2 months later. Not bad timing. I'm honored to be a contributor to a magazine that publishes such interesting, unusual works. Thanks Five 2 One!

I just received a very kind rejection email from the editors at 5x5 Literary Magazine . (Read their most recent issue here ) They seemed genuinely grateful to me for submitting work to them for review, which makes sense. If writers don't submit work, literary magazines have nothing to publish. In any case, their gratitude was a nice touch. I also appreciated their relatively quick response time of about 2 months. That's not bad at all. So I thought I'd share that 5x5 is a nice place to submit work.

I'm enjoying my first small successes as a poet. A poem of mine has been published by The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly  , and it resonated with Bill Cameron ( a writer whom I have never personally met) so much that he wrote a very nice blog post about it. Thanks kind stranger! I've had other small successes as well. I wrote my first spoken word poem and performed it for a group of close friends. They were all speechless. One of them said, "I would listen to that on repeat." This same friend keeps a poem that I wrote for her on all her electronic devices. A friend of hers (a stranger to me) saw the poem about her and said, "I'm stealing this and reciting it to my girlfriend." How crazy is that! Strangers want to recite my poetry to their girlfriends! Needless to say, these little victory moments have renewed my excitement for writing. I have two main goals in writing this particular blog. The first is to pay it forward. It made me so happy to see that Bi