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Pilot

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 Bill Cameron would want to write about my poem, and I want to do that for other poets. I want to highlight the poems that resonate with me. The second goal is to discuss my own journey as a writer. I often scour the internet for interviews with writers because I want their advice. I want their tips and tricks. I want to know where they first got published and how many poems they had to submit before one was finally accepted. I want to know which journals/magazines/blogs have short response times and kind rejection letters. I figure if I want to know all that stuff, other people probably want to know it, too. So I'll share my findings.

 As for the name of this blog, I stole it from one of my favorite poems. It resonates with me as a poet because I think poetry is about feeling things truly and deeply and then describing them honestly. Don't worry how it sounds. Don't worry if it's good. Just feel it, because if you can't feel it, why should anyone else?

 since feeling is first 

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

 ~ e. e. cummings 

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