LouAnn Muhm just sent me details of this call for submissions. If you’re like me, and have gradually accumulated a lot of bird poems, it might be up your street, although you’ll have to move fast because the deadline is Friday. I’m going to have a go, I think.
Even if it isn’t, though, they look like really beautifully produced chapbooks.
15 comments:
Thanks for the tip, Matt. I sent in five poems with/about birds.
Good stuff Andrew. I sent four today too.
What did you say your favorite bird was? I said it was the Swift.
Which it is, most days. Sometimes I am partial to the Oystercatcher, though.
And some time with a Red Kite or a Black Kite is always special.
I said Curlew, but like you it changes from day to day. Red Kites are definitely up there too, with Lapwings, Ravens and any wild geese. And I always have a soft spot for kestrels, because they're what first got me interested.
I love Swifts too - there's a pair nesting under the eaves of the house just along from me, so they're back and forth non-stop at the moment.
Thanks Matt,
Think I got my submission in just about in time, given the time difference.
Hope you enjoy the Lowdham Festival - I wanted to go to the Staple launch (I'm in the new issue, I think) but have other commitments.
Tony
Curlews, Lapwings, Kestrels: beautiful birds with beautiful names.
Yes, I think a lot of the appeal that birds have for poets has to do with the names, both the standard ones and the dialect variations.
Thanks to a friend, I can give you a link to a site with the collective nouns for birds:
Rather disappointed that ravens, with whom I've often communed in the Scottish mountains, are treated disparagingly as "an unkindness of ravens". There ought to be a law!
Oops. the href vanished.
http://palomaraudubon.org/collective.html
Thanks Colin. I love collective nouns.
Agree with you about the ravens, though. They're just beginning to breed again round where I live, and they're great birds. They switch from menace to real playfulness with such ease.
I sent one poem. I realised, looking through my stuff, that most of my bird-poems featured dead birds!
I found two with live birds. One of them was about a dead man and it was already submitted elsewhere. The other was rubbish.
So I sent a poem, death-themed, containing the "suggestion" of birds.
I have no chance!
Now Rob's poem will get published and the rest of us will be shut out. :-)
Whatever happens, the editor is going to wonder why they've had a sudden deluge of last-minute submissions from Europe!
They'll never suspect it all traces back to Minnesota, somehow...
(sorry about the deleted comment--didn't mean to post from my "teacher" account)
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