Poems

Got going again on my writing "hobby" a little this week and worked on some poems to submit. I like to write poems, but I have to be in a certain frame of mind to write anything decent. I often just stare at the blank screen. I've tried picking topics out of thin air and forcing myself to write a poem about them, but that never works. Something's either there or it isn't.

For this batch of submissions, I wrote three new ones and picked out five older ones that haven't yet made all the rounds. (Or maybe they have, I'm not sure. When the old computer died I lost my submission tracking file, so I hope these aren't resends. Although even if they are, the worst they can do is reject them again, right?) The new ones include a poem about a wagon ride, one about a Spanish duck with a sense of humor, and another about a kid who decides to stay in bed because of his allergies.

I'd like to think I have some idea of which things I've written are publish-worthy and which are not, but it's not much of a science. I usually have a pretty good idea when I've written a stinker and I can't say I'm surprised at any of the three that have been accepted, but I still think I've got about five poems that could be accepted if the timing and the publisher were right. One of the good things I've learned about publishing is that it's a lot like the weather in Michigan--if you don't like it, just wait a while, because change is coming. So even if the poems can't land a home right now, in a few years all the editors will have moved on to different jobs and I can send them all again!