Content Tagged ‘valentine’s day’

For Ecotone’s fall 2019 Love Issue, on our fourteenth anniversary, we’re looking for fine poems in fourteen-line forms: sonnets of all kinds, rondels prime (aka rondels supreme), and brefs double. We’ll be open to poetry submissions all day on Valentine’s Day, on which date we will consider poems in these fourteen-line forms only.

We’d like to see meter well used—which is to say, legible and smart and messed with, sometimes—and not just iambs, for we see a paucity of trochees and triple meters and accentual work around here. The full call for work for the Love Issue is here: ecotonemagazine.org/submissions/upcoming-issues/ —and our complete guidelines are here: ecotonemagazine.org/submissions/

Please send us your best of these, and help us spread the word!

Rondel prime (or supreme)

The rondel prime is a plain old rondel (though what rondel is plain old?) with an added final line. It goes like this—

ABba abAB abbaAB

—where initial-capped letters are refrain lines and lower-case letters are rhymes. Most meters work well for a rondel, we reckon.

Bref double

The bref double consists of three quatrains and a final couplet, much like a Shakespearean sonnet. There are three rhymes, noted a, b, and c. The a and b rhymes each appear twice in each of the first three stanzas—not necessarily, per Lewis Turco’s A Book of Forms, at the end of a line—and once each in the final couplet. The last line of each quatrain ends with a c rhyme. Lines should be of (roughly) equal length, but there’s no set meter for the bref double.

Sonnet

The card shown above gives the basics for Petrarchan—often abba abba cdecde—and Shakespearean—abab cdcd efef gg—sonnets. There are so many resources for sonnet-writing that we won’t say more here, except that two sonnets we’ve loved recently are this one, from Anna Maria Hong, and this one, from Cortney Lamar Charleston; we are interested in terza rima sonnets, Sicilian sonnets, etc., along with the more usual varieties; and we’d love to read sonnets in any meter. Also, we sure would like to see a crown or two.

A note

As always, we read submitted work with all upcoming issues in mind—so if you submit work with this theme issue in mind, if we love it but can’t fit it in Love, we’ll be in touch about publishing it in another of our upcoming issues.

Quatorzains forever!

Whether you’re spending the day with people or books–or both–we hope it’s full of loving.

Last week I did an exercise in the poetry class I teach: we came up with ten lists of ten words that could fall under the category of love. In the first column, we started with some familiar images, like “heart-shaped boxes of chocolates” and “roses,” but by the tenth column we had images like “garlic” and “spider webs.” In the wake of Valentine’s Day, I thought it would be useful for my students to remember that love can be “butterflies” or “light,” but it can also extend into stranger, more complex notions, ranging from “cold potato soup” to “stretch marks” (their suggestions, not mine).

When I think of uniquely expressed love, I think of Robert Olen Butler’s short story, “At The Cultural Ephemera Association National Conference.” The story explores the familiar concept of love, but does so in an unfamiliar way. Butler details the meeting of the two main characters, Bill and Cleo, alternating between their voices to create a complete narrative. Each character is at the conference referred to in the title to present on a piece of paper ephemera—Bill’s is an advertising card featuring a caricature of nineteenth-century actress Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Cleo’s is a Bourneville cocoa trading card depicting the Titanic. Upon my first reading, I was immediately struck by how the story made the delicate moment of connecting with another person so personal, yet accessible. The language, characters, and emotional impact are spot-on, and while it’s technically fiction, this four-and-a-half-page piece has the linguistic punch of a finely tuned poem.

No one writes love poems like the incomparable poet John Rybicki, author of When All the World Is Old. Today only, we’re offering John’s collection for $10. Just enter LOVE as the promotional code on the payment methods screen.

Why Everything Is a Poem

There’s my ashen girl in the stands
with a scarf over her soft to steel-wool head.
She’s there like some buoy next to a friend
she calls sister, who has been riding
a separate current now for years.

It has been too much for too long and we know it
is time to take hold of the lightning and let it kill her,
or fill her—doctor or angel or nurse—
like some new balloon and set her glancing
across the rooftops with her dancing slippers.

Write them a beautiful line, like John Rybicki. (Hey, it won’t cost you anything!)

(Type treatment by Lookout intern Eric Tran)

In the second part of our literary Valentine’s Day series, we’re suggesting taking your loved ones out on a literary date. The North Castle Public Library’s Olde Firehouse book club is meeting tonight in Upstate New York to talk about “the dilemmas of Jewish love stories.”

But in case you can’t get there by tonight, find a local reading. You can find a calendar at Poets & Writers, your library, community centers, colleges, and city listings.

We at Lookout Books get it. We’re writers, readers, students, and teachers in addition to being boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, lovers, ‘just friends.’ Finding time for finding Valentine’s Day gifts is hard. So we’re here to help with a multi-part guide to literary gifts of love.

First up, introducing ‘Writs of Passion,’ a collection of stories by Lookout author Steve Almond. The stories unabashedly feature sex (Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto) and, for a limited time, are available in a six-book series. The covers line up to form a larger risque image, below.

In their recommendation of the series, About.com says, “I can’t think of anyone who writes about mostly heterosexual people having sex better than he does. It’s funny, weird, unexpected, with just enough four letter words ending in hard consonants to create tingly feelings from the inside out.”

To order Writs of Passion, follow instructions here.

(And while you’re at it, check out Almond’s book of short stories, God Bless America.)

image courtesy The Rumpus