After a bit of a hiatus, I am pleased to report that my poem, “Fish Are Smarter Than We Thought, but We Can Still Fool Them,” has been accepted for issue 56 of Alien Buddha Zine, due in November. I am sadly behind in my reading of this zine, and I need to renew my subscription. But every time I do open an issue, I find it chock full of wonderful and wonderfully varied poetry and prose. I’m honored to be included in another issue.
I am blaming Victor Hugo for my lapse in reading other authors. One of the Korean students I teach literature to selected Les Misérables (in English) to study, so I am reading it for the first time. I love it, but I am being super conscientious about looking things up–the old edition I am using is not annotated at all, and even leaves many words and whole songs untranslated. This has taken a toll on my time; on the other hand, I have become much more familiar with many members of the House of Bourbon, the principal thinkers, writers, and actors of the French Revolution, the royalist and Ultra-Royalist opposition to republicanism, the officers of Napoleon’s army, the history and meaning of criminal argot in France, and the history of Paris’ sewer system. I also wrote a poem inspired by the novel.
Actually, despite the demands of music, reading and writing lessons, and friends and family, I have been writing, but the screenplay I completed was overdue for this year’s deadline and must now wait for the contest to reopen. As for the poem inspired by Les Mis, it is part of four ghazals I wrote because Rattle is having a ghazal issue (take note, poets). I had never written a ghazal before, but I like the ones I have read, and since I have never yet been a part of any of the groups singled out to be featured in an issue of Rattle, I thought I might as well learn a new form and take advantage of this specialized call to submit to a highly-respected publication. I have done this, but don’t expect to hear very soon. So it’s extra-nice to have gotten something accepted with all this waiting going on. Many thanks to Red at Alien Buddha Press.
You are now caught up. Namaste.
Word Music 