National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 23

2018/04/23 — Leave a comment

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 23 posed a bit of a challenge for me, since I spend a lot of time alone. So, as I have done a few times these last few weeks, I turned to the movie American Splendor for inspiration. I borrowed a couple of lines from the film, but mainly I adopted some of the speech patterns from both the film and the comic, and combined them with things I have either thought or said…

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 21

2018/04/21 — 3 Comments

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 21 is one of those I’m not really keen on. The idea is to base the poem on the myth of Narcissus. I made the protagonist of my poem the opposite of Narcissus. The form of my poem is a modified rimas dissolutas. Normally, the corresponding line of each stanza rhymes (though the stanzas themselves do not); here, the first lines do not rhyme.

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The Lilac Years—Ebook coming April 30!

2018/04/20 — Leave a comment

My latest collection of poems, The Lilac Years, will be available in ePub and Kindle formats on April 30!

The Smashwords edition will be available in your choice of ePub or Kindle format:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/818400. This is the version that will also be available from Apple, Barnes & Noble, and so on.

The Kindle edition available from Amazon will be available only from Amazon—but you can get it for free when you purchase a copy of the print edition (details below). (If you are a Kindle person, I recommend this version, as it preserves the formatting more faithfully than the Smashwords edition does.) I will update this post with the link once I have it.

As for the print edition, you may recall from a few days ago:

You can get it from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or you can check IndieBound for a bookstore in your area to order it from.

The Lilac Years
Kevin J. O’Conner
216 pp., softcover (5.5″ x 8.5″)
Alarm Cat Press
ISBN: 978-0-9988781-4-0

Gotta use that tax refund for something…

(20 April 2018)

April’s not so bad (a poem)

2018/04/20 — Leave a comment

Bonus round—because I have heard three or four references to ‘April is the cruellest month’ in the last 22 hours. Not being familiar with the work of T. S. Eliot (even though I of course know the name), I had to look it up to find out where it came from. That’s really beside the point, though, since it was the cluster of references that I am responding to. Here is my poem:

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 20

2018/04/20 — 3 Comments

The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 20 is ‘to write a poem that involves rebellion in some way.’ Since part of my writing practice is to regularly find ways to rebel against my own natural tendencies, this required some extra thought.

What I came up with is to take a poem I recently wrote (but haven’t posted anywhere) and simply list all its words in alphabetical order, with each new letter of the alphabet starting on a new line. I’m referring to this version of the poem (in this case, Bookstore Poem #220) as the ‘build-it-yourself’ version—but really you can approach it in a couple of different ways. One is on its own merits (as such) as an oddball poem that may or may not make sense. The other is to treat it as though it were a piece of build-it-yourself furniture, with all the available parts (words) listed; from those parts (words), you can build your own poem.

Let the weirdness begin!

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