2 new poems on the Puritan

The Puritan is the hip online mag for young Toronto literary types. I mean, Spencer Gordon, respected biographer of Matthew McConaughey, is intrinsically involved, so there you go. But somehow they let a geriatric like me in.

I'm really pleased to have two poems in the current issue. "Poem Beginning with a Line by James Tate" and "Poem Beginning with a Line by Gillian Jerome" are poems I'm proud of. When I do my Poetry Boot Camps, I always have about a hundred poetry books scattered about on the table we sit around. One of the projects I often inflict on the workshop participants is to choose a book from the table, find a line that resonates with them, and then use that as a first line in a poem entitled "Poem Beginning with a Line by ——————."

It's a neat way of sort of collaborating with a poet whose lines you admire, and a neat way of experimenting with a tone/structure/vocabulary you might not otherwise work with. There was something blunt and noirish about the Tate line, so I wrote a little pulp novel beneath it. I can't recall if Gillian's poem was about pregnancy, but I enjoyed imagining being pregnant.

Now that I have been published in The Puritan, I will become ace and sell tens of thousands of books.

Over and out.