Tidal Echoes

That's the name of the literary Journal here at UAS. One of the students on campus came into our class the a few weeks ago encouraging us to submit our artwork or writing.
I've written two things in the past 3 years that I sincerely like and that I'm pretty confident in. I think I'm going to take the plunge and try to get them published in Tidal Echoes. I need to revise my creative non-fiction story, but that shouldn't take too long. The other piece I'm thinking about submitting is the poem I posted not too long ago called "Under the Weather". I know that I don't have a big following on my blog, but if you happen upon the poem let me know if you have any feed back. After all, I do not consider myself a poet by any means. Hell, maybe I'll actually take a few pictures in my photography class that I really like and I'll submit those too. I'm bound to get published if I submit to more than one genre, right?
Maybe not, but it's worth a try!

A New Way Of Looking At Poetry

Todd Boss is a new and successful poet from Wisconsin whose work I enjoy immensely. What I find most appealing about his writing is the everyday subjects that he uses in his poems. From trips to the super market to the simple observations of his children, his poems contain subjects that everyone can relate to. Even "Yellowrocket", the title of his new book of poetry, derives from a poem within the book about his family's old farm where he describes yellowrocket, a common weed that grows there. It's the perfect title for a book filled with everyday sort of poems. I encourage all of you to check out his book. He's very much like a present day Robert Frost, in my opinion.


I can continue to spend a whole entry discussing why I enjoy his poetry so much (which I could do without effort, I assure you), but that is not the point of this specific entry. Instead, I would like to bring to your attention a project that Todd and a few others have been working on for some time that has recently called upon some attention in the media. I've had the opportunity of sitting in on one of Todd's poetry readings on campus, and afterward he shared a few snippets of this project with the audience.

The project was designed to allow poetry to become more accessible to a wider audience via the internet. The original goal was to find a way to help solve the problem of individuals having to go out to buy a whole book or volume of poems to enjoy a poet's work. Todd and fellow designers of the project wanted to present the poems in a way that would be entertaining and enjoyable, rather than the usual "googleing" of a specific work that leads you to another website where you can read the poem word for word off of your computer screen. That's when they developed the idea to create a way for readers to listen to the poem, in addition to watching a complimentary visual. This was the basis of what is now known as "Motionpoems", short videos that include a visual set to a recorded reading of a specific poem by its author.

There was a release of twelve of these new Motionpoems in Minneapolis tonight, in hopes that Todd and other contributors would get some input from the general public on how to further improve the project.


Here is a link to an interview with Todd on
MPR

And one to his page on
Youtube
with some examples of Motionpoems.

If you're interested in his book, "Yellowrocket" or the author himself, I will provide a link to his homepage where you can also find his Motionpoems, reviews of his book, and information on the author.

Blame Your Parents.

It's the old nature -vs- nurture debate. Who do we blame for the way we behave?
Well, Philip Larkin may just have the answer, or so he thinks.

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.


Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Okay, okay. So it's a but cynical, but I happen to enjoy cynicism.

I'm back at home for the weekend. I have a short break, so I decided to come back home to visit the family and some friends. The ride home was absolutely beautiful; I really miss autumn. In Moorhead gets cold too quickly. The weather on this side of the state seems to miss the transition between summer and winter, and completely skips over the fall. This week it went from something like 80 degrees, and dropped down to 40 degrees, and it looks like it's going to stay that way. Not to mention there are barely enough trees in the city to notice the leaves change color and when they do they just turn yellowish-brown, and then fall off. It's really disappointing. The thick, colorful blanket of leaves that the trees leave on the ground here makes me want to rake up a huge pile to jump in.

Anyway, here are some pictures that look much like what I saw on the way back home. I apologize for them not being the real deal, but I haven't bought a camera and I wasn't able to borrow my sister's for the trip home.