Our poem of the week was worthy of an honorable mention in 3rd Wednesday’s annual poetry contest. It’s from Vol. XII, No. 2.
Tag: Writing
Working Outside
Marfa, Texas is a small desert town known as an oasis of the arts. It was the filming location of James Dean’s final film, Giant, and figures prominantly in the Ed Graczyk play and Robert Altman film, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. It’s also the home of a U.F.O. phenomenon, The Marfa Lights. Marfa poet, Daryl Scroggins, whom Third Wednesday has featured a number of times, now has produced a U.L.O. (Unidentified Literary Object). Is it a poem, a prose poem, a bit flash fiction? Does it matter how we label it? What Daryl does give us is a glimpse into the mind of an adolescent boy – a strange and dangerous place.
Insta Poets and Haiga
Instagram Poetry has elements derivative of classical Japanese Haiga, the difference being the poor quality of both the poems and the artwork. There is a similar phenomenon happening in music with electronically created “beats” replacing skillfully played instruments, and simplistic repetitive lyrics. My theory is that there is a yearning to create without the price of years spent developing craft and a medium (the internet) to spread it. Anyone can do it.
– David Jibson, Co-Editor – Third Wednesday Magazine
Today again it can be seen 
Today again I see it –
Mount Fuji.
– Inoue Shiro
Misty haze is
the blackness of the pines
on a moonlight night
– Nakajima Kaho
His Words Are Lost In Noise
This elegantly written little poem is like a photograph. Close your eyes and you can see, not only the details the poet chose, but the scene beyond, especially if you’ve been in a fishing village anywhere in The Caribbean.
Ed Note: Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken by about 200,000 people, mainly in coastal areas of Honduras, Belize, Guatamala and Nicaragua. It originated on the island of St. Vincent in the Antilies.
Ohio Blue Tip
Our “Poem of the Week” comes from the winter issue of Third Wednesday. It’s a single sentence from former Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser.
With an Army at Our Gates
Self-publishers as Your Personal Printer
Well, you’ve got a book’s worth of poems and you’re not ready (so you think) to jump into the swamp of publishing or even to self-publish a book. What do you do with them? Maybe you just want to get them organized or you’d like to be able to finally show your poetry to friends or family but not put yourself out there to the general public. A self-publishing website like Lulu may be an answer.
Having your poems bound and printed is not the same as publishing. If you’ve written a lot, you’ve got poems in notebooks, journals and on scraps of paper shoved into drawers. If you’re the organized type, maybe you’ve even managed to put them together in a loose leaf binder. If you have, congratulations on at least getting that far, but it’s cumbersome to lug a binder around to open mics and other places you might want your poems at hand, and you probably have only that one precious copy. What if something awful were to happen to it or, worse, you should lose it?
Wouldn’t it be great if you had your poems in a small package with multiple copies so that you could always have them with you, would have copies to give away and so that you could never loose the only copy?
Most of the places we think of as self-publishing resources are little more than glorified, 
highly automated on-demand printers that can print and bind a 6 by 9 inch trade paperback for less than the cost you can print your poems at home, considering the high cost of ink cartridges. Assuming you do your own layout using the templates they provide, most such places can print a book of between 50 and 100 pages for around five or six dollars per copy and, for that price, you even get a glossy cover of your own design.
The example I cited, Lulu Publishing, has options for not assigning an ISBN code to your book and for archiving your book privately so that only you can order copies. There is no minimum number of copies when you do order, no “initial print run”. You’re free to order one copy, or two, or five, or ten.
The template handles the complications like setting margins, paginating, page numbering and even automates the table of contents as long as you follow the page by page instructions that are embedded in the template. There is a separate online cover design module that allows you to upload a cover photo if you want one and choose fonts, background colors and patterns. Once you’re satisfied with everything, your .docx file will be converted to the PDF file that the printer requires and you can download a copy that shows you exactly how the cover and the interior pages of your book will look.
Once you approve the PDF, it’s time to print. You’ll have a hard “proof copy” in about ten days. Once you approve that, you can order as many or as few copies as you want any time you want at a price you can afford.
– David Jibson, 3rd Wednesday Magazine
It’s Just Chips
Guinotte Wise has been featured often in the pages of Third Wednesday. He is a sculptor as well as a poet. You can see some of his work at http://www.wisesculpture.com/ . Here is our poem of the week.
Autumn 2017 by Bruce Pemberton
Our congratulations to Bruce Pemberton whose first published poem has been chosen for national distribution by American Life in Poetry.
It was first published in Third Wednesday.
Special Soap
Bellingham, Washington is a hotbed of poetry judging by the quality of the submissions Third Wednesday receives from there. We almost always find something worthy of publication. This one, by Sarah Murphy-Kangas, is a prime example. It’s Third Wednesday’s poem of the week.
Third Wednesday Magazine 