Tag: poetry

Friday Five: Q&A with poet and ‘Sparks of Calliope’ editor Randal Burd

‘I try to make poetic observations that tie in to our common humanity.’

Randal Burd

On this, the first Friday of National Poetry Month, I’m pleased to introduce readers to Randal Burd, a fellow Missourian whose second book of poetry, Memoirs of a Witness Tree, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. His first book of poetry is a self-published work titled Leaving Home: Discoveries and Reflections of a Once-Sheltered Heart. An educator, freelance editor and writer, and genealogist, he also is the creator of the “journal of poetic observations,” Sparks of Calliope. His poetry appears in numerous print and online journals (partial listing). Learn more about Randal and his writing on his website, The Edge of Memory.

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Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
  • “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
  • Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
  • “Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
  • Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash