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2014 April PAD Challenge

As many of you know, I’ve been featuring interviews with the poets who wrote poems in my Top 25 list for the 2013 April PAD Challenge. Unfortunately, there were two interviews that I never received, but I still want to share the Top 25 poems.

So here they are:

In Case of Death, by Ashley Marie Egan

The message was clear,
Yet quite controversial,
Written in red ink,
In bold sharp letters,
“In case of death:
Feed me to sharks.”

Hold That Football, by Diana Terrill Clark

I’m trusting you here, Lucy.
And you’ve let me down before.
But I really think you’ll do it:
Hold the football on the floor.

I’m almost sure you’re honest
and truthful when you say
you’ll hold that football steady
and you won’t pull it away.

And now I’m getting ready
to run and kick that ball.
I’ll kick it to the moon, I will!
I’ll kick it through the wall!

I’ll kick that football higher
than its ever been kicked before!
And now I’m running at it,
…

…

…

And you’ve let me down once more.

And I lay here in the gravel
and I look up and hear you say
that I never should have trusted you
and then you walk away.

“Augh!” is all I mutter as
I lie there in my pain.
And then I think of trusting.
And then it starts to rain.

And all that I can ponder
in the grass, soaked to the bone,
is that it’s better to be trusting
than to have a heart of stone.

*****

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Robert Lee Brewer

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

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Find more poetic fun here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 260

2014 April PAD Challenge

Tracy Davidson lives in Warwickshire, England, and enjoys writing poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies, including: Mslexia, Modern Haiku, Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds, The Right-Eyed Deer and Notes from the Gean. Apart from writing, Tracy enjoys reading crime novels, entering competitions, photography and travel.

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

The Morning After, by Tracy Davidson

she wakes to find
a strange bed, a strange man
and a set of handcuffs

she remembers
the double vodkas, the line of coke
and a questionable kebab

her husband standing at the window

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Where are you located?

In a quiet village near Stratford-on-Avon, England.

Who are your favorite poets?

Apart from everyone on the Poetic Asides blog (and your good self) you mean?! I don’t really have favourites to be honest. Poets whose collections I’ve enjoyed reading recently include Simon Armitage, Sophie Hannah and Billy Collins.

And I still have a soft spot for a childhood favourite–Pam Ayres, who may not be familiar to those of you in the US. Her poems are not what you would call great literature, but they’re good fun. I saw her give a live performance once and she was brilliant.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I’m a little old-fashioned I guess, and I still like to read good rhyming poems. Even though the majority of what I write is free verse. I like straightforward language, not flowery or pretentious stuff. And I’m fond of short Japanese forms, such as haiku and tanka, which can say an awful lot in just a few words.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

To post something every day. A goal which failed in the very first week! Life kind of got in the way. Including losing my beloved dog, Jasper, which left me moping about instead of writing.

What’s next for you?

The November PAD Chapbook Challenge! I’ve been joining in for the past 3 Novembers, but have yet to submit a chapbook entry. Hopefully this time I will get one done.

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Publish your poetry!

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Robert Lee Brewer

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

*****

Find more poetic fun here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 260

2014 April PAD Challenge

Deborah Purdy lives in Pennsylvania where she writes poetry and creates fiber art. Originally from Virginia, she earned BA and MA degrees from Hollins University. She also has an MSLS from Clarion University. She has been a research scientist and a reference librarian. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River & South Review, Apeiron Review, The Milo Review, and The Found Poetry Review.

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

Holding, by Deborah Purdy

hold that ghost
like a bird
in your hand,
let your fingers
form the fleeting
wall between
now and then
beginnings and
endings,
hold lightly
like a tentative
thought but
closer than a
transient breath
then breathe
again
and let it
go

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Where are you located?

Pennsylvania.

Who are your favorite poets?

Mary Oliver, Joyce Sutphen, Linda Pastan, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among others.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

The imaginative use of language and being able to relate to what I am reading.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

I wanted to develop the habit of writing every day, and hopefully, in the process, generate a few finished poems.

What’s next for you?

In addition to continuing to write and to submit for publication, I’d like to put together a collection of poems.

*****

Get your poetry published!

Click here to learn how

*****

Robert Lee Brewer

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and the author of Solving the World’s Problems

*****

Find more poetic fun here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

2014 April PAD Challenge countdown: 5. We’re getting so very close to the beginning of this year’s challenge. I hope your pencils are sharpened, your paper is uncrumpled, and your mind is open to the world around you–or something like that (I have 5 kids; so I know it’s not always that idyllic).

Sally Valentine

Sally Valentine is a native of Rochester, NY. After teaching math for 25 years in the Rochester City School District, she is now off on a tangent of writing. Her love for kids, books, and Rochester led her to write a series of novels for intermediate grade kids which are each set in a different Rochester landmark. Her latest work is There Are No Buffalo in Buffalo, a collection of poetry for kids. Each poem is about a different place in New York State. This collection just won first prize in the Middle-Grade/Young Adult Books category of the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. When not writing, she can be found reading, solving puzzles of all kinds, or walking around beautiful western New York. She lives in Walworth, NY with her husband, Gary. Her grandchildren, Evan and Molly, are her newest source of inspiration.

Sally also included an aside to me, which I want to share with the group, “William Preston

Here’s Sally’s Top 25 poem:

Broke, by Sally Valentine

He wanted to break her
like his daddy broke horses.
Free reign at first, then tighter, tighter.

She wanted to break him,
of speeding cars, careless spending,
thoughts of other women.

Their break-up was inevitable.

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Who are your favorite poets?

My favorite poets are e.e. cummings and Billy Collins.

As a reader, what do you like in poems?

I like poems with simple words that make me see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

What was your goal for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

My number one goal for the 2013 PAD Challenge was to finish with 30 poems. Secondly, I hoped that I’d be able to use some of them to start a new collection for kids about the 20th century. I was very pleased to have six that fit that category.

What’s next for you?

What’s next for me is adding more poems to that collection. I want to have one poem for each year.

*****

Workshop your poetry!

Beginning in May, poets will have the opportunity to put their poems through a workshop environment with an online mentor.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

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Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

2014 April PAD Challenge

Linda Simoni-Wastila

Linda Simoni-Wastila writes from Baltimore, where she also professes, mothers, and gives a damn. You can find her poems and prose at Smokelong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Scissors and Spackle, MiCrow, The Sun, Blue Five Notebook, The Poet’s Market 2013, Hoot, Connotation Press, Baker’s Dozen, Camroc Press Review, Right Hand Pointing, Every Day Poetry, Every Day Fiction, Tattoo Highway, and Nanoism, among others. Senior Fiction Editor at JMWW, she slogs one word at a time towards her MA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins and her current novel-in-progress. In between sentences, when she can’t sleep, she blogs at http://linda-leftbrainwrite.blogspot

Here is Linda’s Top 25 poem:

Hotdogs on the Grill, by Linda Simoni-Wastila

When I saw you
by the hundred year oak
talking to her
your hands lively
the air filled
with smoke
a thread
kindled thin
beneath my ribs.

I turned the hotdogs
on the grill,
charred.

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Where are you located?

Geographically, I write from the greater Baltimore area, but my heart belongs to New England and, sometimes, when I miss the warmth, North Carolina. These are the places I came of age, the places that formed who I am today. The essence of place figures in much of my work, and the settings, culture, and people of New England and the South provide rich context. That said, Maryland is growing on me, especially Baltimore—the city’s grittiness and grime, and even its graces, provide great fodder for my poems and stories.

Writing-wise, I write many genres. Poetry is only one facet of my writing life. Most of my writing time focuses on novels—there is something about creating characters and putting them into motion in unique worlds that captivates me. I also write short fictions, many of which are sketches or ideas for novels. April is the month prose gets put aside and I focus on the poem. April is a special time for my writing life.

Who are your favorite poets?

Sharon Olds has an amazing capacity to render the ugly into something beautiful. She writes a lot of pain—physical and emotional—and those are the domains I tend to write about. Her sense of word choice, her ability to find the telling detail, astounds me. I learn so much from reading her work. William Carlos Williams is a huge influence on my work—the sparse form, the repetition, and, again, the telling detail. There are amazing poets who participate in the April PAD and the November Challenge who I enjoy and learn from. And yourself, of course—your poems capture nuances of family life that I appreciate.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like lean poems, ones that use few words well. I also like poems with endings that make me pause, make me wonder, make me read back to the beginning and go ‘ah.’ Most of all, a poem must be elegant and have an armature, be it meter or rhythm or structure, invisible at the surface but noticed when read. This is not to say I prefer poems with ‘hard’ structures, such as sonnets, rondeaus, or villanelles–because I don’t. But great poems feel complete, feel contained, have an innate musicality to them. Hard to describe, but when the container is missing, I know it.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

This past April was a tough time for me. I had a lot going on, not good stuff, and many mornings I could not focus on much beyond getting out of bed and going through the motions of the day. My goal in April was to write a poem a day—nothing more, nothing less. That was my only goal. Writing the daily poem pretty much kept me sane, kept me tethered.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on my third novel and hope to have a first draft finished in the next six months or so. Another project is a chapbook of short prose and poems, Love, Life, and Other Devastations. For this, I’m reading through the 150-plus poems I have written over the past five April PAD Challenges for suitable material. It’s fun to see my growth as a poet, and to revisit—and revise—poems that feel like old friends.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

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Find more poetic posts here:

• Jane Shlensky: Poet Interview

2014 April PAD Challenge

George Smith

George Smith was born in the small southeastern New York town of Queens, and quickly whisked below the Mason-Dixon. He’s the son of a Southern Methodist Naval and airline aviator father from Montgomery and an Irish Catholic mother from Philadelphia… So, naturally, he was raised Presbyterian in Miami… He eventually moved to NW Georgia with his brother and sister when he was a teenager, and has lived there since. George is a husband and the father of four boys. His wife and youngest son live in a ca.1838 farmhouse in formerly rural south Fulton County, Georgia, a short drive southwest of Atlanta. He considers himself a poet and country/bluegrass/blues songwriter/lyricist with a day-job in health care design and construction.

George has been writing since his mid-teens, starting with poety, and moving into songwriting along the way. He’s cowritten with musical artists from Nashville to Norfolk to Nacogdoches and recently been priviledged to have two songs placed on the CW TV show, Hart of Dixie… Hear some demo recordings on ReverbNation at:
www.reverbnation.com/gcsmith

Here is his Top 25 poem:

Oakland Dawn, by George Smith

Blue on blue;
Obelisk in silhouette,
Cardinals dart and pirouette.
Angels trapped in shadowed stone,
Guard and plead in tone on tone.

No stars.
No moon.
The sun hints it is coming soon.
The faintest glow above the wall,
Below the trees.
Birdsongs call,

There is no breeze.
Blue fades into blue,
Blue fades into blue.
Blue fades…

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Where are you located?

I live in Fairburn, Georgia, just southwest of Atlanta, with my wife and youngest son (and three dogs/two cats), in a small farmhouse that’s been in my wife’s family since it was built in the 1830′s…

Who are your favorite poets?

In no particular order: Poets: Richard Brautigan, Robert Frost, Robert W. Service, Ogden Nash, and Dr. Seuss. And songwriters with a poetic voice, Guy Clark, Verlon Thompson, Paul Simon, and Robert Hunter.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like a feeling of “naturalness” – a flow and structure that doesn’t seem forced or pretentious (unless that’s the theme), that paints a picture or tells a story (or both), where every word counts and reinforces the next word
Perhaps this comes from songwriting…

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

Beyond writing something for each day by the end of each day…I’ve used each April’s challenge as a potential first spark for songwriting – sometimes to better effect than others – but also as a way to explore other forms and formats of poetic expression – often using a form posted on the Poetic Asides blog.

Additionally, I forward to friends and other poets (and songwriters) I know, including the blog’s e-dress and web-link, to reinforce April being National Poetry Month.

What’s next for you?

I want to keep writing and honing what I do…every day… just like it’s April…

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Workshop your poetry!

Learn more

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

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Find more poetic posts here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 259

2014 April PAD Challenge countdown: 8. I’m always surprised by just how close we all are–often without knowing it. For instance, I drive up and down I-75 at least once a month, often stopping at the Richmond, Kentucky, exit 87. Little did I know, one of our Top 25 poets actually lives there.

Deri Ross Pryor

Deri Ross Pryor is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She has been creating stories since she first learned the power of words, long before she knew how to read or write. Born in New York and raised in Florida, she now calls Kentucky home. She is a recent graduate from Eastern Kentucky University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing and is now working on her MA in English at the same university. Deri has won several college-level writing contests and has been published in Eastern’s Aurora Journal, Pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, Kudzu Literary Journal, and Still: The Journal. To pay the bills, she works as a copywriter and journal editor for a non-profit trade association. Deri lives in Richmond with her two beagles and inadvertent cat. Learn more at: www.deri-ross.com

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

The Farmer’s Wife, by Deri Pryor

He sits in somber twilight,
the flickering television glow
his best company now.

He fingers a tiny gold circle
in calloused and cracked hands,
ached with work and waiting.

Under the elm trees, flowers grow over the gentle mound.

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Where are you located?

Richmond, Kentucky.

Who are your favorite poets?

I love so many it is hard to nail down. When I discover a new poet I have not read before I immediately declare I have found my favorite – until the next discovery. Poetry has not always been such a passion for me as it is now, so I arrived “late to the party” so to speak, so I am still learning and discovering new favorite poets and poems all the time.

I was recently introduced to the amazing poetry of Ruth Stone, who I am in awe of. I love the musical and poignant style of Nikky Finney, 2011’s National Book Award winner for Head Off and Split (and who I’ve had the honor of studying with). There are so many amazing poets from Kentucky that I’m in love with: George Ella Lyon, Frank X Walker, James Still…the list goes on.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like poems that are straightforward but with strong subtext — but not so mysterious that a clear theme or message is impossible to decipher. I like poems that are not afraid to stare the darkest part of humanity in the face, poems that can be slightly disturbing in a way that makes the reader step outside their own comfort zone and think.

One of the most startling poems I’ve read is “Child Beater” by Ai. It was an instant favorite. Another one is “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke. Some find those types of poems are hard to swallow, but I feel they are important.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

First of all, to write every single day. I’ve done the challenge in the past and fell into the habit of letting a few days go by and try to catch up. Since I work and go to college full time, it is hard to find time, but I think not writing every day defeats the point of the challenge (to me personally) of making time to write every day, to be serious enough about the craft that I’m willing to forgo that favorite TV show or a that extra hour of sleep.

Secondly, I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone. I tend to pull back a little, dance around things that are painful to me or that I worry will be too disturbing to others, but, again, I think that also is not in keeping with my personal challenge of writing as my true self.  I once remarked to a friend that my poetry, actually my writing in general, leans towards the dark and sad. She replied with the old adage “you write what you know.” I had to think about that for a while.

While I am not necessarily a dark and sad person (well, mostly), I have suffered through difficult situations, and have seen others experience pain and loss such as what I refer to in “The Farmer’s Wife.” Many of the poems I wrote in the challenge were unlike anything I had written before. It was quite liberating, actually.

What’s next for you?

I am in the process of revising a number of my poems that deal with the cycle of dysfunctional relationships in the hopes of having a chapbook published in the next year or so. I am working on my MA in English and then plan to go on to do an MFA in creative writing.

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Get your poetry published!

Learn more

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

2014 April PAD Challenge countdown: 9. I don’t know about you, but I love learning about other poets, especially the poets who hang out at the Poetic Asides blog.

Alana Sherman

Alana Sherman, poet and teacher, lives in Woodbourne, NY, with her husband and dogs in an 1834 farmhouse, under constant renovation (sort of like her poems). She belongs to a group of poets who meet once a month to share their work. The Alchemy Poetry Workshop has been in existence since the 1940s and is the oldest extant poetry workshop in Sullivan County (maybe even in NY State!). Alana writes essays, poems and children’s books. In addition to her writing, she is a community developer, working to preserve The Old Stone House of Hasbrouck.

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

Dying Sea Bird, by Alana Sherman

Legs splayed behind
feathers bedraggled
its beak in the sand

the only thing
keeping his head erect
Like others I stop

to assess the obvious

Two men discuss
if anything can be done
The tide is going out

the sea at its edges
lavender and aqua
A woman circles

shaking her head

down the beach a couple
getting married
a small girl running

her arms askew
as other birds scatter into the air
the rest of us are concerned

but powerless when I come back

the bird’s head
is at an angle
only death can achieve

all that remains
is for the tide to do
what all of us are wishing for

and take the sandy lump away

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Where are you located?

I live in upstate New York on an old farm, it’s pretty rural.

Who are your favorite poets?

My favorite poets are Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass, and Stanley Plumly. These days I am re-reading Richard Wilbur and Gertrude Schnackenberg for their incredible skills at rhyming. I can’t forget Robert Frost. If I could achieve his simplicity and ability to just move people with meaning as he does in one of my poems I’d be happy as a poet. I probably could list at least five more poets.

As a reader, what do you like in poetry?

When I read I look for the clear expression of ideas through beautiful language, beautiful images. I want a poem to make me say YES,  to enhance my experience of the world and life and to connect me to the writer and what he or she was thinking and feeling. ( A part of me always wants to feel a little envious of the poem and to wish that I’d written it.) That’s a tall order but really good poetry has always done that for me.

What did you hope to get out of the April PAD Challenge?

I keep a journal and I’m always writing down ideas. As a result I tend to have a lot of the stuff of poems. I use the April PAD to help me crystallize my  work. It’s a chance to make real poems out of all that rough material. My goal is to come out of the challenge with some poems worthy of being called poems.

What’s next for you?

To take the poems I have and revise them into a collection that hangs together. That’s why I look forward every year to the November Chapbook challenge. It forces me to re-think and revise.

*****

Get your poetry published!

Learn more

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

Jane Shlensky likely doesn’t need an introduction on the Poetic Asides blog, but I’m going to give her one anyway, because she deserves it. Not only is Jane a fine poet (read her Top 10 sijo here

Jane Shlensky

Jane is also part of a faction of poets I like to refer to as the “Hickory Poets” (of North Carolina), along with the likes of Nancy Posey, Scott Owens, Helen Losse, Jessie Carty, and others. I’ve seen her read in person, and it made me appreciate her poetry even more.

Without further ado, here’s her Top 25 poem from the 2013 April PAD Challenge:

Storm-taught, by Jane Shlensky

A streak of yellow sky laid under
blue-black clouds, distant thunder,
and high wind bodes a reckoning.

Whatever tender plant or flower
newly born but for an hour
faces a beating April sting.

Old women learn to read such skies
like three-day bruises, alibis
for mischief loosed across the earth.

They think to harbor things they love
from hail and downpours from above,
knowing the scars from one outburst

can wreck a garden’s trust in good.
Old women know it’s understood
that heaven will have its way below.

Whatever power we think we own
is blasted by skies hard as stone.
We’re humbled by what we can’t know.

Bullying clouds with angry fists
prove some old women optimists
searching for spectrums arced in blue.

Old women know that broken plants
survive the direst circumstance.
Storms break, and sun shines through.

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Where are you located?

I live in a village a few miles north of Durham, NC

Who are your favorite poets?

My tastes in poetry are eclectic, a sort of revolving favoritism based on whoever has my attention at the moment. (You might be interested to know I’ve been Solving the World’s Problems

I read widely and so appreciate widely. Teaching poetry and literature for so many years helped me read with an ear for form but a heart for truth. Reading fellow writers on my favorite blogs and in magazines has added to my list of poets to watch.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like beautiful language that is at once precise, clear, meaningful, and jagged—words that in their utter simplicity are dazzling and touching, that ring true to human experience. I want a phrase or line to snag me like a good fish hook, make me read again, make me wish I’d written that.

Sometimes, I feel compelled to say, “Damn, that’s a good poem” because it is. Naturally, what I love in poetry is not necessarily what I do every time, but poems that get my attention and reel me in are good models to consider as I write.

What were your goals for 2013 Poetry Challenge?

On blogs like Poetic Asides, I’ve paid heed to what my fellows find worthwhile in my poetry. Southerner to the bone, I cannot avoid story. I’ve been encouraged by comments about my narrative work, a particular character, event, or slice of life that engaged me.

During the April challenge, I decided to see if it would be possible to write mostly narrative poems, to explore a character’s plight using the prompts. While I was not always able to do that well, I did manage 27 days to do so, some days writing more than one poem for a prompt. I have a growing village of narrative poems, like Robinson’s Tilbury Town or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

What is next for you?

My mother believed that whatever a person learned was to be used for the benefit of others. With writing as well as with playing piano, she would chide me if I wanted to learn a thing just for myself. I guess I could say I’ve been raised to find a use for things, including the poems I write every day.

Words are written to be read, so I’m tinkering with a collection, still sending out a few poems to magazines now and then, entering challenges and contests sometimes. Maybe all these little narrative lives will coalesce into a volume.

Nancy Posey and I are flirting with a joint project we’ve discussed for a while.

What’s next? Like West Side Story’s song, “Something’s Coming,” “…I don’t know what it is but it is gonna be great.”  Or, at least, I hope so.

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To read a little more about Jane, check out this Poetic Creative Bloomings interview

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Write better poetry!

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

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Here are some more poetic posts:

• WD Poetic Form Challenge: Sijo Winner

The next poet in the Top 25 series from the 2013 April PAD Challenge has made herself known so well that I feel she doesn’t need an introduction. But here’s the thing: Taylor Graham is not a person who talks much about herself; rather, she just writes incredible poems. In addition to making the Top 25 list, she is the current co-champion of the 2013 November PAD Chapbook Challenge

Taylor Graham and her dogs.

For almost 40 years, Taylor has trained her German Shepherds for search-and-rescue, in Alaska, Virginia, and California, and she’s responded as a volunteer to hundreds of searches for missing people. Her poems appear widely online and in print, and she’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor

Here’s the poem I chose for the Top 25:

Lexicographer’s Daughter, by Taylor Graham

Angle brackets. Binomials of exotic
species. Boldface colons: how he spends
his days, and then files it all away.

She sneaks past the capitalizing labels
of his books; riffles pages; spreads
young (also called curious) angel wings.

She’s outgrown every pair of shoes.

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Where are you located?

I live outside Placerville, California, in the Sierra foothills with my husband, two German Shepherds we train for search-and-rescue, and six sheep.

Who are your favorite poets?

In high school, I fell in love with Gerard Manley Hopkins, e.e. cummings, and Dylan Thomas, and they’re still my favorites, along with A.E. Stallings, Mary Oliver, James Wright, and Billy Collins.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like to be shown something new, or see it in a different light – leaps of thought and language to transform the world. If a poet writes in form and handles the form very well, that’s an added pleasure. I like a poem to perform some sort of magic for me.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

To get out of my rational “this and therefore that” frame of mind, to let in some playfulness, serendipity, adventure; to see things from a different point of view; to end up somewhere I didn’t expect.

What’s next for you?

I’ve been writing a lot of dog poems over the past year and a half, bringing up old adventures I’ve had, mostly from search-and-rescue. I have a book-length collection due out from Lummox Press toward the end of 2013 or early 2014, titled What the Wind Says

Beyond that, I can’t seem to stop writing about dogs and what I learn from them; some of the poems are taking mythic turns. So I’ll just see where this leads.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines