Definition Poems + Housekeeping

Hello~

I wanted to share a fun poetic form I learned about during my MFA, the definition poem! I know that these are often advertised to teachers of young children to get their students interested in writing, but I've found these fun to try out as an adult as well.

Let's check out a few examples of definition poems to give you an idea of what I'm talking about! "from" by A. Van Jordan

"in • cho • ate" by A. Van Jordan

Both of these poems are from his M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A: Poems collection.

Also, some poems wer accepted by 45th Parallel and 3Elements this past week! Woo! So that's three more poems accepted for publication this month, so far. I'm very excited about that but it does make me wonder if I need to be investing less time in literary mags and more time in chapbook creation. With that said, not shiiiiit has happened in the realm of chapbooks for this human. I've been going through this not so motivated phase the past few weeks, so getting my submissions out and editing my novel took all the motivation I had.

I've got two in my collection that I've sent out to agents and I think they work really nicely to add meaning to a collection of work. Some words I've played with include placebo, broken, silence, wanderer, fugitive, innocence. I've got a list going on of interesting words I want to play with. What's great is that you aren't shoehorned into a frigid style with these poems. You could make it a prose piece with many evolving examples of the word being used, you could include synonyms, antonyms, word stress, various changes in word form... It's really all up to you as the writer.

I'm not able to give you an idea of the publishability of these poem types at the moment, as none of my definition poems have been accepted for publication (yet), but I do think they're fun and a good exercise to keep you writing, especially if you're someone who likes to take notes of interesting words throughout the day.

Personally, I find these poems to breathe new life into poetry sometimes, particularly after playing with sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, etc..

Hopefully I'll share one here after I get one published!

Now, onward and forwards. I did some shit, finally!

So, it had been on my to-do list to edit my novel (which only makes me want to scratch my own skin off at this point), and I did! I finally made it to 150 edited pages, please and fucking thank you very fucking much.

Only about... 50-70 more pages to go! (The extra twenty pages come from the fact that I know I need to fill in some details in the last couple chapters.)

And I even managed to create two new poems, and type up some poem ideas I have had sitting in my notebook for a few weeks.

Also, some poems were accepted by 45th Parallel and 3Elements this past week! Woo! So that's three more poems accepted for publication this month, so far. I'm very excited about that but it does make me wonder if I need to be investing less time in literary mags and more time in chapbook creation. With that said, not shiiiiit has happened in the realm of chapbooks for this human. I've been going through this not so motivated phase the past few weeks, so getting my submissions out and editing my novel took all the motivation I had.

That also means that... my sci-fi novella, novel, thing was unable to receive adequate care, HOWEVER, I have made a plan for some other stories and by plan I mean the ideas sit typed up and awaiting life. When life might come is anyone's guess. My writing plan for this week:

-(Finish?!) Editing my novel

-Submit to places to get back to 30 subs

-Finish this poetry workshop I started

And that's it. I think I officially need to finish this round of editing on this novel before I can start another giant project. I do have some ideas as to what my next big projects are, but there's no point in splitting my attention up any further than this or else I'll just drive myself insane. I do think I want to do some research on publishing in multiple genres. From what I've heard, you basically have to create pen names for when you do work in different genres, like my poetry and memoir could be Mea Andrews, but then sci-fi might have to be a different name, etc..

But then does that mean I need to have that many social media pages and websites?? Hmmmm... Maybe we'll talk about that next time. Bye~