Marc Beaudin's Blog

1.
Read the Submission Guidelines and actually follow them. Poetry editors don't set up guidelines just for kicks: there are specific reasons for each guideline. We receive a lot of submissions and having them formatted a certain way or delivered a certain way means less time making sense of things and more time reading your work. There's a lot of great poets out there all trying to get published. Why blow your chances of being considered one of them by failing to take some simple steps that a...

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That seems to be the question I'm being forced to ask myself.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer yet another techie, time-eating attempt at book promotion
Or to take arms 'gainst a sea of silliness and by going offline, end it.

In the last few days (my apologies if you were hoping for more mangled Shakespeare), I've read in if not a horde of blogs and articles, at least a plethora of them, that Twittering (or is the verb always Tweeting?) is an indispensable tool for a writer. Somehow, tel...

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Here's something that showed up in my inbox recently:

Calling all feminists, wizards, Queer theorists, ex-Black Panthers,
Christians, Green activists, avant-gardists, Kabbalists, vegans, Hawaiian
nationalists, kickboxers, Punks, Hip Hop evangelists, New New Leftists,
pink-haired emo warriors, organic gardeners -- submit your work for "The Big
Book of Revolutionary Poetry," edited by Sparrow and Mickey Z. Send up to 3
poems to: sparrow44@juno.com or info@mickeyz.net

Also, please forward this...

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Lying on the couch with a fever raging through me, I watch leaves dropping from the cottonwood outside my window. I have one hand on a speaker so I can feel this violin sonata of Mozart. Sometimes hearing just isn't enough. In my fever, with the gently-refracted light through the streaked glass, I can't be sure if it's leaves or little birds that are falling; pine siskins perhaps, or mountain bluebirds.

Suddenly, it's the last autumn. The final fall. All the birds fall silently from the trees ...

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So here's some news: I'm now the poetry editor for CounterPunch's weekly installment of "Poet's Basement." CounterPunch is the internationally renowned political newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. "Poet's Basement" has published work by Robert Creeley, Harold Pinter, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Patti Smith, as well as many talented new and upcoming writers. We generally publish three poems per week...

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Blaine revels in the double entendre: In "Guns and Butter" he describes a love affair with oil, the "hydr...

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New from Outsider Writers Collective:

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... Perhaps this is too many. Maybe our poetry would be stronger with less to choose from.

As Jim Harrison says, "The earth's proper scripture could be carried on a three by five card if we weren't drunk on our own blood."

Of course, he uses 20 just for those two lines.

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A recent invitation to a conference on "Ecocriticism" has me thinking about some definitions.

I've always been uncomfortable with the term "nature poetry." It seems to instantly conjure up images of some effete versifier with a quill pen regaling us with adjective-laden descriptions of flowers and sunsets. The problem with this, is that singing of the beauty and inspiration of nature often ignores the fact of our destruction of it. Bad nature poetry uses the natural world for its own selfish end,

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