Squinting, the balding author demonstrates a recent literary magazine his poetry appears in, a magazine that paid him 30 bucks for his three poems. Also, continuing a streak that began late last year, a poem in the 8 line lüshi format has been accepted by Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine.
Today, I'll continue to rewrite and submit rejected poems, and I may put a chapbook of 30 lüshi together and submit it to contests along with a recent chapbook of cancer poems I'm submitting called What You Think About When You're Dying.
Odd thing about the cancer chapbook. I began writing it almost as soon as my prostate cancer was diagnosed. At the time, I didn't know it would be fatal. Thus, much of the poetry is rather lighthearted. I seem unable to write a poem that includes the frightful sense I'm actually dying of prostate cancer. I guess I'm going to go "gentle into that good night" rather than "burn and rave at close of day: Rage, rage against the dying of the light" as Dylan Thomas suggests. Odd too... I have sometime thought of my father as being too passive in his life. Now it turns out I'm also rather passive in death.
