Poetry’s dead, man.
No one wants to read it.
Chill. I’m kidding.
I don’t know. Some people may argue poetry, like rock-n-roll, is dead; on it’s way to a recycle or scrap yard like newspapers.
As an poet alone, the truth remains–unless by some magical knowledge you know of and I don’t–that books of poetry rarely sale. As poets and authors, we can divide ourselves into different categories if we choose of: authors who want to sale books, authors who focus on self-publishing, or those who focus on the art. I am a mix of options one and three because I value the art of poetry, and I continue to put an effort into a book I hope to publish via the traditional route.
The world of writers, like moral dilemmas, are no black and white. We all have shades of gray.
The poetry feeds off the book, my memoir: A Messed Up Kind of Beautiful. This memoir parallels my childhood with my son’s with the sometimes heartbreaking challenges of anxiety, depression, and autism.
I decided to do something different this week because there is a chapbook contest into which I really want to enter my collection. The challenge is my chapbook, Tall Tales of Luska Road and Other Forgotten Carolina Towns, includes chapters of poetry. This collection will stop between 120 to 130 pages with well-written and connected poems spanning my journalism career and time on the fictionally named “Luska Road.”
I took out a segment of the poems, which deal only with the Luska Road, so this smaller collection does not surpass 28 pages. I’m calling the shorter collection simply, Luska Road. The contest requires entries be no longer than 24-28 pages without the title page. (See the hyperlink in the previous paragraph.)
If you’re a fiction, non-fiction writer, or poet with any kind of larger collection or novel; I believe it is good to select some of your best pieces from it. Form it into a smaller collection for a contest or smaller publication.
Corrie's Season 