writer | teacher | artist
I wrote this poem in 2019, revised it last year, submitted it a few places with no luck, and then just kind of gave up on it. It's basically a play-by-play of the shortest day of the year in Alaska, but I think it's the longest poem I've ever written!
Continuing the tradition of last year's summary in poems, I present to you the 2021 edition. This year was actually even more difficult for me, emotionally, than 2020, but equally productive in terms of writing, apparently.
Poetry Postcard Fest is an annual event facilitated by what is now known as Cascadia Poetics Lab, which I learned about from founder Paul E. Nelson. Basically, you pay $15 to be put into a group of 30 other people around the world who have agreed to write a poem a day for a month and mail each one on a postcard. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it was, but once again, it seems my expectations exceeded reality.
It’s not like I remember it, this planet. The blues and greens that painted me as a child have been replaced with browns and grays, the color of dry bones. Crouched here among these windowed walls, roofless with decay, I long for my youth. What winter could devastate me then, having known only a few silent snows, spectral with belonging?
To focus on the positives of 2020, I have compiled a list of poems to exemplify my writing successes this year.
Jamie wasn’t like other guys. Other people, really. He was happy. And I mean, always happy. No one’s always happy.
People say "necessity is the mother of invention," but did I need to create a new poetic form?Maybe. In any case, I'd like to share with you a form I came up with called the "Jubilee."
[Silence]
was violent.
[Still is.]
I was five when that song came out, / and too young to realize how / important it was.
In light of the recent pandemic, I think it would be remiss of me to not write a poem about the coronavirus. Or in this case, a parody of the Kinks', "My Sharona" (which, apparently, "was going too far" for Weird Al, according to the New York Post. However, many others have taken up the… Continue reading “Why, Corona?” A parody
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 