Rachel Kovaciny's Blog, page 111

Poetry Celebration Recap -- Week 2

Time to share links to all the posts people wrote for the Poetry Celebration this past week, April 10-16!  Here they are, in case you haven't had time to read them all and want to catch up, or if you're just joining us.  

Poetry and Baseball -- Joseph
"Narnian Suite" by C. S. Lewis -- Cleopatra
Galvanized by Leland Kinsey -- Lory
"The Boy in the Moon" (original poem) -- Joseph
"Sonnet 6" (original poem) -- Hamlette
"High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee,...

"Sonnet 6"

I went through this phase toward the end of college, and continuing a bit afterward, where I wrote a lot of sonnets.  Because I liked the structure and the rules, and because... why not?  I've decided to share a few of my own poems here for the Poetry Month Celebration, and I'm starting with this one because... I can.


I wrote it during the mid-break in this 3-hour, one-night-a-week science class I took my senior year.  The professor told us something about a place called Puku-Pu...

Her Hair was a Hot Sunset: Inkling Explorations for April, 2016

This month, the topic for Heidi Peterson's Inkling Explorations literary link-up is "A description of a lady in literature."  Partly because I'm re-reading one of his novels now, and mostly because his descriptions are what I love best about him, I am today going to share with you not one, not two, but five descriptions of women written by my favorite author, Raymond Chandler.

Chandler can take any image and find some fresh, unusual, and often sarcastic or cynical way to describe it. &nbs...

"The Black Moth" by Georgette Heyer

Well, it took me three months to read this book, which tells you a lot right there about whether or not I liked it.

I didn't hate it, truly I didn't.  I just didn't like it all that well.  Actually, I very much liked one character, and if we'd just stuck with him, I'd have polished off the book in a couple of days.  But we had to keep bobbing off to spend time with characters I either disdained or positively loathed, as the case may be, and that got tiresome.  

Set in Georgi...

Winners of the Poetry Giveaway!

The mighty Rafflecopter Widget has spoken!  Here are the winners of the six poetry books:

Cornhuskers -- Cleopatra
Songs for the Open Road -- Julie Diane
Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson -- Jessica P.
Great Short Poems -- Melanie S.
Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems -- Heidi P.
100 Best-Loved Poems -- Ashley P.

Congratulations, everyone!  You'll be receiving an email from me later this morning at the address you provided to the widget, asking for yo...

Poetry Celebration Recap -- Week 1

I thought it would be nice to do a recap post every week with links to all the posts people had written for the event.  You can also find these links on the Poetry Month Celebration page too, of course.  But as the month progresses, this might make it easier for people to find which posts are new and so on.


So for April 1-9, here are the poetry-oriented posts people contributed:

Two Favorite Poems -- Joseph
Why I'm Celebrating Poetry -- Hamlette
"The Morning of Life" by Victor...

Poetry Giveaway Extension

I'm going to be extremely busy this weekend, and I'm not going to have time to choose giveaway winners and contact them, and so on.  So if you haven't had a chance to enter the giveaway yet, now you have a bit more time!  It will run through the end of Sunday now.  You can enter it through the widget on this page.

Why I'm Celebrating Poetry

A lot of people I've encountered think that poetry is pretty, but boring.  Or that it's hard to understand unless you're a poet yourself.  Or that poetry is just fluffy, romantic glop.  I felt that way myself until I went to college.  I disliked almost all the poetry I read for my high school lit courses.  In fact, I avoided poetry whenever possible.  My lit classes made me memorize all kinds of things about iambs and feet and meter and other technical jargon tha...

Femnista March/April 2016

The latest issue of Femnista is out now!  You can read it online here, or download it as a PDF file here.  In it, I've reviewed the film One Night with the King (2006), which retells the Biblical story of Esther. 

The Poetry Giveaway

Do you love poetry?  Kind of like poetry?  Are you curious about poetry, but aren't sure what poets to try out?  If you answered "Yes" to any of those, then this giveaway is for you!  I am giving away SIX books of poetry!

I figure this is a fun way to kick off my month-long celebration.  These are inexpensive poetry collections, and would be a good place to start if you want to expand your knowledge of poetry.  If you don't win one here, you can find them online...