April 2018

The Lilac Years—One more week!

2018/04/09 — Leave a comment

My latest collection of poems, The Lilac Years, is just one week away!

Pre-ordering is available on 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

(9 April 2018)

National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 8

2018/04/08 — 5 Comments

Another detour from the prompt given by Napowrimo.net for Day 8. I’m not much interested in ‘mysterious and magical things’ in the traditional sense. However, lately I have been falling asleep to the American Splendor DVD, which has a looping menu featuring Harvey Pekar walking along an R. Crumb-drawn street. It is done really well, so the point where it loops back to the beginning is not obvious unless you’re paying attention. Anyway, this morning, as I woke up here and there to the loop still going, it was as though I were looking to see if something (my dream? uninterrupted sleep? something else?) had landed in just the right spot. I made that feeling the basis of this poem.

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 7

2018/04/07 — 1 Comment

I detoured somewhat from the Day 7 prompt given by Napowrimo.net. The idea of a conversation between different identities felt a little too similar to the other day’s prompt about different voices. I didn’t abandon it completely, though; I took my memory of a birthday party I went to (and left) about five years ago, and, with a few embellishments, recast it as a poem…

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National Poetry Writing Month 2018, Day 6

2018/04/06 — Leave a comment

The Day 6 prompt from Napowrimo.net felt sort of safe, and the examples of different types of line breaks didn’t seem all that unusual. Even the Amiri Baraka poem, while starting a new sentence at the very end of lines here and there, didn’t go as far as to make sentences span stanzas.

For a while towards the end of high school, and on into college (until I stopped writing for a few years), I used very short lines, with three words being my unofficial maximum per line. A couple of years ago, when I was exploring specific forms, I found that some forms led me to write very long lines. Most of the time, I try to break lines somewhat logically, based either on where one might mark the end of a phrase when diagramming linguistically (though I don’t consciously approach it that way), or on where I would otherwise use a comma or semi-colon.

For this poem, I opted to create an exaggerated contrast between long(ish) and short lines—with the short lines, going so far as to break at the ends of syllables…

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