[00:00:25] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to Small publishing in a big universe. I am your host, L. A. Jacob. This month, our poetry panel ponders the possibility of poetry and poets in the present and possible future.
Coming this month from Water Dragon Publishing rebirth on Zarbo by Diane de Pisa, the Illusion by Sue Eaton and Dragon Gems fall 2023. Stay tuned for our panel discussion, hosted by Vanessa McLaurin Ray.
And from Sleepy Fox studio comes into the glittering Dark by Kelly York.
Sagon Publishing comes tales that are a little darker than the cute dragon on the COVID Dragon Gems Fall 2023 contain some horror, dark fantasy, and not so happy endings of science fiction. From diverse authors from around the globe, stories about everything from man versus machine to man versus man.
All of these stories will definitely bring a chill to the bones, so make sure you have your hot cider with you. Dragon Gems Fall 2023 is available this month from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org. For more information, visit their
[email protected].
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I'm Vanessa McLaren Ray. I'm the guest host today on small publishing in a big universe. We're talking about poetry, and we've invited three very different poets to our workshop to talk with us about their roles in poetry and what they've learned and why you need to be excited about poetry right now in 2023. And with me I have Dr. Taylor Bias, author of the upcoming book of poetry. I'd done clicked my heels three times wendy Van Camp, who is the poet laureate of the city of Anaheim, California, and Corey Vance, the author of Poems About Aliens. We have got the spectrum of poetry covered as best we can with three people and one chatterbox, just for a warm up question. You know the old standby we have, we do this at Sci-Fi conventions where somebody walks around and says, is a hot dog a sandwich or not? You get, like, one line to answer. So are music lyrics poetry or not? I'm going to start with Corey.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: Music lyrics are poetry if they are poetry. And if they're not poetry, they're not poetry. If they do the thing that poetry is supposed to do, then they qualify.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: All right, Wendy, I would agree.
[00:03:43] Speaker D: Lyrics are poetry, and I don't really think there's any qualifications for that. I love the rhyming. They have form. And frankly, in ancient times, poets were known as bards who went around and sang and spread the news as journalists. And they would remember the stories via poems because it was easier for them to remember. So, yes, I would say music and lyrics are poetry.
[00:04:10] Speaker E: Okay. Taylor yeah, I think they are. I think lyrics attempt to do the same thing that poems attempt to do, which is to try to compress really big things into much smaller spaces and to kind of recreate that in a really brief but lyrical way.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Let's get into meteor questions, or at least more fun questions why you write poetry? I'm going to call on Taylor first.
[00:04:33] Speaker E: As the first thing that keeps me coming back to poetry is the fact poetry is really fun for me. Anytime I sit down to write a poem, it's kind of like solving a puzzle. And as someone who used to love doing puzzles as a kid, it feels like I'm healing my inner child every time I sit down to write a poem. I think the second reason is the feeling that you get when someone reads something that you've written and recognize as a part of themselves. And for me, that's mainly other black women or other black youth. I think as someone who wished that I could have recognized myself more in the things that I was reading when I was younger, I can't describe how it feels to now be doing that and creating that feeling for children and for other black readers. Those are two really important reasons why I continue to return to the page.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: That's a powerful, powerful feeling that you must get from that. Wendy, I'm going to put you on the spot. What has been keeping you writing poetry?
[00:05:29] Speaker D: I really became a poet by accident, truly. I was sitting at a con, it was a hot day, and I sat next to a sign that said, Sci-fi Coup Workshop. And I looked at the sign. I go, what the heck is that? I have not a clue. But it's cold in the room with the AC, and they have water. I think I'll go in. And I ended up taking the workshop. I was the only student, even though when I walked in the room, it had about eight or nine people in it. But when the instructor went to the front of the room, she looked at me and says, you will be my only student for the workshop. And I go, well, who are these other people? And she goes, oh, these are all publishers of national poetry magazines. They're here to support me. You don't mind, do you? And I kind of went, oh, my God. But I took the class, and at the end, she asked me to stand up and read my work to the quote unquote class.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: So I did.
[00:06:21] Speaker D: And when I read the poem and sat down, she started to do a critique of it. But as she did the critique, one of the publishers leaned over and whispered in my ear, I loved your poem. I want to publish it. I'll pay you. And that is the day I became a poet.
I love short form. For some reason, it just seems to click with me. Back in my days, when I was a coder, I used to love coding small spaces for the players to find, and I think this has carried over into my poetry as well. I like doing a lot with little, I think Sci-Fi coup or haiku style poetry seems to really just be my thing, and I'm now well known as a Sci-Fi coup poet.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Okay, Corey, what is it that brings you to poetry and keeps you at it?
[00:07:11] Speaker C: I've been writing poetry for 19 years. It's something that I love, and it's something I have a lot of fun with. My work is very imaginative, surreal. It gives me an avenue to let my imagination run wild, but also connect with very real world, very human experiences. And that's satisfying in terms of doing the hard work of poetry. And that's really where we kind of take it from writing poetry as a hobby to writing more professionally. I may be a little bit of a perfectionist, so I find it very satisfying to go through multiple drafts, 50 drafts, 80 drafts, 100 drafts of a poem and get every word in line just right. The initial creation is a lot of fun. The hard work of it is satisfying, and I do enjoy giving myself an avenue to connect the wild thoughts with the real world emotions.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: That's wonderful to hear when you were talking about the joy of revising. It's not all fun, and it's not all satisfaction. And there are challenges to being a poet in the modern day. Can we talk a little bit about the kinds of challenges that poets face nowadays that maybe weren't there 20 years ago or 100 years ago? Wendy okay.
[00:08:27] Speaker D: In some ways, this is a golden age for poetry. Never has poets been able to reach the public the way they can now as opposed to before. In the past, there were gatekeepers publishers that decided who could speak and who could not. But today, if you have access to social media, like an Instagram account podcasting, you can get the word out of your work. And with independent publishing, you can independently publish your book and get it out there. However, I do want one caveat on that. As a poet, if you self publish, you do lose access to a lot of the awards and contests that are out there that could initially boost you as a poet. Many of them do require for you to be traditionally published. So if you are thinking of doing a first volume of poetry, I would not rush to do it. I would take your time, get it as good as you can, and then I would shop it around to various contests and awards, because there are a lot of moneyed things that you can do with a first volume of poetry after you've published your first one. That's kind of it. You limit yourself that way, too. But if you have your first book ready to go, it actually behooves you to shop it around and find a traditional publisher. And that could be a small press. It doesn't have to be like a big five or something like that. It could be a nice small press that will sponsor you. In that way, it might be a little more difficult because we still kind of have the gatekeepers there. But if you don't care about things like that, there's still plenty of awards that you can submit your book to and there's still plenty of venues to sell your book at if you do it that way. In a way, it's a great age to be a poet. Attention spans are shrinking and poetry is becoming more and more acceptable because it is a short form of entertainment. And of course, there are open mics popping up all over the world that you can access virtually.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Corey, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you're self published, right?
[00:10:36] Speaker C: I am.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: So why don't you talk a little bit about the challenges that you've endured? Bring your book to publication on your own.
[00:10:43] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say it was a decision I wrestled with the decision whether to a traditional route or to self publish. At the end of the day, I felt confident I would find someone to publish it. I publish regularly enough in terms of individual pieces and have some connections, but that said, it's going to be a grind. My first rule of writing is strive to write things that people want to read. I think that if you do that, most other challenges can be overcome.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Well, let's talk a little bit about the work, the forms and shapes and styles of poetry that you find engaging and that you find that audiences are still interested in doing.
[00:11:20] Speaker E: I am a huge formalist. I love poetic form. I think what's so exciting for form about me and I think form really gives us those containers to really sort through what's kind of going on internally. Form is often just a means of organizing. But I also think that we all have our writing ticks, we have our comfort zones, we have our things, our language, our images that we lean on, rely on and return to. And when you get into form, you often have these restraints that are working against you and that ultimately force you to find and create possibility elsewhere and in other ways that you probably wouldn't be thinking about if you were just coming to the page, writing your regular reverse poems. That I also love form because for me, it's always pushing me to surprise myself. And if I'm surprising myself, then I feel pretty confidently that I'm going to surprise a reader who is not in my head and who is not in my mind. And so those are some of the reasons that I adore form, that I think people are kind of returning to them and getting excited about them again.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: I'm going to flip this to Wendy.
[00:12:25] Speaker D: A lot of what Taylor said I agree with. Form can often help you limit your ideas down until you get to that purest sense. Haiku is the poetry poem about a single moment in time. There's a lot of rules, and I'm not going to go into them. But I love having that structure to work with, because I know what I need for each part of the poem. I know to look for that in my idea and then pop it in where it belongs. I would say out on the open mic circuit form poetry is not very popular these days, and if you rhyme, heaven forbid, because people will laugh you out of the open mic. If you start rhyming, it's become that passe. I would think most of the people that do open mic are actually reading what I would call flash fiction or essays. They're not necessarily poetry, as I would call it, or in other words, being in a structured form. But that's okay. I mean, it's valid, it's free verse, and they are speaking to their own emotions, their own circumstances, their own culture, and that's all good. It is a style for today. Styles come and go. I have a feeling form poetry is going to return. And I do notice there are some poets out there developing new form of their own that are catching on with others. And I think that's great too. Poetry is not something that should be coming from the university on down, as maybe people think of it. It really is from the street, because the stuff we see out there in the open mics and at the events is from the heart. It's from people who are just speaking their minds, speaking what they see, their pain, their joy. And that is what poetry truly is about.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: But Corey, you've done a lot of performance poetry. Do you want to speak to this topic of structure and form and lack thereof?
[00:14:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that there is a distinction between structure itself, where a piece of writing a poem incorporates things like rhythm and rhyme, strictly or loosely, to some form, whether it's a written form or not. And then there are the traditional forms that are more rigid that more or less you hold to if you want to write something that's a haiku or a sonnet. In terms of the different kinds of poetry, I tend to break poets into three camps right now. We have the literary poets, do we have the spoken word artists, and then we have what I call the instagram poets, generally unstructured short form. I think that a lot of the traditional forms don't always work as well on the stage. They don't always work as well auditorially as they do in the written form. And I think that might be part of where some of the incredulity towards form comes from. But that doesn't mean that people don't find the aesthetic qualities of structure satisfying. I have a lot of structure in my work. I don't write in any traditional forms, at least not often, but I do incorporate a lot of I'm forgetting the technical term for it now, but when a poet creates their own structure that they adhere to I write a lot of poems like that. I rely heavily on tools like rhyme and asonance and alliteration. A lot of what I do as a poet tends to be geared toward people who aren't normally into poetry, and I try to bring them in and almost trick them into enjoying something that they might be afraid of at first. So I might do a lot of inline rhyme instead of inline rhyme that somebody can read and get that aesthetic pleasure without realizing they're getting it. So I do a lot of things like that. But I think in general, people enjoy structure because poetry, if you boil it down to two things, it's the aesthetic quality of language, and it's the sense of connection that you get from enjoying it. I think that people will always enjoy the structure of poetry. I always find it very sad when publishers open mics communities turn their nose up at the structure of poetry. I think that they're doing a disservice to the art form, and I wish they would stop.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: What can we do as writers and poets and consumers of literature to bring poetry more into everyday life so that people aren't afraid of it, that they continue to gain comfort in using it to make it very simple?
[00:16:52] Speaker D: Wendy well, I know myself. I am an illustrator, and I illustrate my poems, and I sell them as artwork at various science fiction conventions because, of course, I write Sci-Fi coup and astro poetry. So it's very natural market for me. But I really enjoy putting poetry into my art. There's so many opportunities to incorporate it into things like mugs and T shirts and all these kind of things, and especially if you write short form poetry, because it fits well on items. I was an artist before I became a poet and writer, and I remember seeing all the little snippets of quotes and poems that artists would just kind of glenn and put into their items to sell to the public. This is something that you can do as a poet to supplement your income. It's very easy to set up shops to do this kind of thing. You can go out as an artist, as I did with the ten x ten tent, and have your wares out, but there's a lot you can do with poetry other than just putting it in a book or publishing it in a magazine. It can be recycled into many different mediums and connect with people that way.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Taylor, what are your thoughts on getting poetry into more places?
[00:18:10] Speaker E: I think what's been really helpful for me is changing the way that poetry is taught. I think a big reason why poetry feels so scary to people is the way that they've encountered it in our education system. And how oftentimes our introduction to poetry are these very old, not living poets who are writing about things that we can't relate to and are writing about them and using language that we can hardly understand. And so I think people kind of go forward with this idea that poetry isn't accessible, it's difficult, et cetera, et cetera. I think reframing that making spaces to learn about poetry. Start with poets that are here and that are writing in the same time that we're living and are experiencing the things that they're experiencing, which I think goes a long way in giving people the permission that I think they need to write about the things that are important to them. Just shifting the way that I'm teaching it the way that it's being taught, and the sort of access that people have to those spaces has been really, I think, imperative to changing the way people feel about it.
[00:19:15] Speaker C: Corey I would love to see poetry in more entertainment fields. I think that we don't always think of poetry as entertainment. Sometimes poets think a little higher of themselves than maybe they should. We think that we're elevated and profound and all of this. But poetry is entertainment as much as it is anything else. And I think that it's always great to see it incorporated into other things where there's already a wide audience and we can capture people who maybe before they saw this thing, they didn't know that they would enjoy poetry. I primarily write speculative poetry. I create a speculative world different from our own. I assume that in that world, like our worlds, there are poets, and then I write poetry from a perspective within that world, and that's how I tend to do it. That can happen in any piece of fiction. It doesn't have to be a book of poems. You can say, hey, in this fantasy world that we built, there are bound to be poets. What would they be writing? Write the poem and then find a way of incorporating it into the narrative. I write fiction as well, and I do that in my fiction. I don't think there's a limit to the possibilities, but I think that I would love to see it in the entertainment realm more prominently. And I think that would be a great way to introduce new audiences to this art form.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: I'm going to close with a chance for everybody to pitch something.
[00:20:35] Speaker C: Absolutely. This is my book, Poems About Aliens would love it if you would consider picking up a copy. You can find it anywhere. You can buy books, you can search Poems about Aliens. It'll come up. Or you can go to my website, Coreyvance.com Koryvance.com and all of the links for purchasing the book are there. I think that you will love it. In terms of advice for a new poetry reader or somebody who's interested in reading more poetry, I say just don't overthink it. Remember, it's supposed to be fun and enjoyable. It could be challenging. And things like that in terms of emotionally challenging or relatable, but don't overthink it. Don't think that you have to be qualified to read it or enjoy it. Poetry is for everybody. Just relax into it more than anything.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Wendy, you're up.
[00:21:25] Speaker D: My first poetry collection, The Planets, which was nominated for the Elgin Award twice. The Elgin is for best speculative poetry book of the year. And I was nominated in 2000 and 22,021. I am currently starting out a newsletter, and it features kind of a ramble of myself. I write an essay about writing tips for authors, and I feature my poem of the month. And of course, all my appearances, podcasts, and publishing clips are on the bottom. I also narrate it as a podcast. Not the data stuff, just the essays and all that. So if you're into podcasts and my voice hasn't put you off from the show, you're welcome to listen along on my newsletter. You can find it at Nowastedinc substack.com. And if you just want to find me on the Internet, you can find me at Wendyvancamp. Wendyvancamp.com. I have many things up in the works. Generally, I am putting together events for my city. I am the coordinator and sponsor for Indie Author Day in November of 2023, where we are hosting a mini writing conference. We're hosting workshop instructors, we're having a book fair, and we're having our authors come and read excerpts of their books. And I am hosting a poetry tent for some of our well published poets in the area as well. Should be fun. Last year was a complete blowout. I'm hoping for the same this year. And this will be at the Anaheim Central Library. If you happen to be local, please come on down. It'll be Sunday, November 5, but otherwise you can find me at various conventions all over the United States. I teach poetry workshops, panelists, and of course, I do poetry readings there.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: All right, Taylor, can you bring us home with a plug for yourself and a little advice for going forward?
[00:23:30] Speaker E: So, yeah, my debut full length poetry collection. I clicked my heels three times. It's coming out August 22, so it'll already be out in the world by the time you're hearing me talk about it. So have a copy, please. Go get one if you're interested. And for writers who are just starting out in trying to figure out the whole poetry thing. I think a common thing we do when we're first starting out is we gather up all of our favorite writers and the people that are doing things that we love, and oftentimes we're like, man, I wish I could write a poem like that, and those sorts of things. And I just want to encourage the people that are just starting out and the youth that are writing to remember that it is the fact that no one else on this planet can write a poem the way that you can write a poem that makes it special, and that makes it yours. And if we were all out here writing poems the same way, none of this would be exciting. So lean into what makes you you and what makes you different. And this is, I guess, me giving you the permission to write about that you care about and write about what makes you feel good and what makes you keep coming back to the page.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: I want to thank everybody for joining me for so long and taking time out of your busy days for coming and joining us on small publishing in a big universe. It was such a treat to get to meet and hang out with all of you today. Thank you so much.
[00:24:53] Speaker D: Thank you. Thank you, Vanessa.
[00:24:55] Speaker E: Thank you.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Rebirth on Zarbo by Diane de Pisa is a genre bending science fiction tale that takes place on several planets and through two lifetimes rife with psychic magic as well as insights from psychology and physics. A couple's quest for destiny leads to far flung planets, one occupied by the disembodied brains of human astronauts, another by soulless clones as the reincarnated pair find themselves on separate planets and following divergent paths. Hints of Star Trek and Ramdas combine odly with eroticism and mysticism in this epic tale of personal evolution.
Rebirth on Zarbo by Diane de Pisa is available this month from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstore by ordering it through bookshop.org. For more information, visit their
[email protected].
Thanks again to our guests. We plan on publishing new episodes every second Wednesday of the month. Watch for new episodes around that time. Theme music is provided by Melody Loops. Other music is found for free on the Web. If you want to know more about small publishing in a big universe, visit our website at SPbU Podcast.com. Tweet us at SPbU podcast and like us on Facebook at SPbU podcast. This podcast was recorded and edited by yours truly, L. A. Jacob. Executive Producer is Stephen Radecki. Transcription Services provided by Sleepy Fox Studio this month's episode was sponsored by Paper, Angel Press and its imprints Water Dragon Publishing and Unruly Voices. You can hear our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most of your favorite podcast services.
Thank you very much for listening and talk to you sooner.
