One of the things I asked my online workshop to think about this week was the difference between prose and poetry as we looked at short form poems as well as prose poetry. I’m including a prose poem below that kind of ties in with the blog from earlier this week about my thoughts on watching a lot of True Crime kind of shows. As always my work will be taken down one week from today, and any work you post (doesn’t have to be poetry) will also come down a week from today although links to work would stay up.

—This poem will go chew up some new words

When I looked back at my list of things that I had been reading and watching I realized I missed one that kind of ties in with this poem as well – a documentary about the German cruise liner Gustloff. Didn’t know anything about this particular ship and the events surrounding it. There is so much information out there! Also in regards to WWII we had some documentaries about people who have one the British Victorian Cross.

On the reading end I finished two more items that I want to mention. The first is a chapbook called The Earth Boat by Joseph Hutchison (Folded Word). This is a nice collection of poems. I think of them as short lyric poems that have a touch of narrative. My favorite might be a unique take on the albatross image in “Black-Footed Albatross” where Hutchison writes: an albatross stands – draggled / wings cranked wide, the feathers / like charcoaled streaks. Such fresh word choices.

The second book is the novel The River King which I heard an excerpt from during a talk author Susan Woodring gave, and I had to get the book. I read this in an eversion. To finish out this post here is one of the beautiful bits of description that kept me reading, “How could they ever imaging what it might be like to have every object suddenly turn to tone? Put a stone in the palm of a boy’s hand and he’d merely toss it across the river. Give a girl a stone and she’d crush it beneath the heel of her shoe, then string the shards to wear around her neck, as though she possessed diamonds or pearls. But to Helen stone was that and nothing more; ever book on her desk, every pencil and pen, the clouds, the sky, her very own bones, all of it turned to stone.”

Be inspired