Dawn Colclasure's Blog

Author and poet Dawn Colclasure

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

A very poetic month of April

April is National Poetry Month! I always try to do something special for National Poetry Month, but it seems like I ended up doing more than one thing.

This particular month was a very “poetic” month for me. I was reading and writing poetry every day! And I also did some MAJOR book work for poetry books.

I am subscribed to a “poem a day” mailing list, so every day I was treated to a variety of poems.

I also read 4 poetry books: A collection called Animal Poetry that was published by National Geographic; Every Thing On It by Shel Silverstein (one of my favorite poets); a poetry chapbook called Perfect Mistakes by D.H. Bleything; and another poetry book called The Wizard’s Broom by Sarah Patton. I read each book for each week of this month.

I also featured a few of my poetry books on my blog this month. The poetry book I co-wrote with my daughter, Jennifer, Dogs Forever: Poems for the Dog Person got quite a bit of publicity elsewhere during the first week of April (in addition to a nice review at Night Owl Reviews) so I did not feature it here but spent time promoting it where it was being talked about. Then, for each week, I featured some others: Follow That Dream, Love is Like a Rainbow: Poems of Love and Devotion, and Songs of the Dead. I was a little late for the last one because that was the week I was sick but still got it up there.

As to my own poetry books, I once again performed a bit of surgery on the poetry book, Wandering Soul. I turned it into a themed collection of poems. The others in that manuscript which did not fall under this theme went into another poetry book that I’ll be publishing this year called Touched by Fire. This one will be my “magnum opus” poetry book. It contains 150 poems! I actually finished putting it together today. Woot!

I also wrote a new poetry book in honor of this being National Poetry Month. My plan was to write at least one poem every day this month for this particular book. Every poem I wrote this month went into that manuscript. Now, the plan would have worked fine if I had not gotten sick. Ugh! There were days I was just too sick to write. But after I got better, I went back to work on this book and I wrote enough poems to make up for the days I missed. I finished this book today and the final count is 35 poems for this book. Woo-hoo! I am scheduling publication for this one next April, mainly because there is a poem in there that I wrote about the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as the Texas explosion, so I want the book to be out in time for the one-year anniversary of those sad days.

So it was a good “poetry month” for me. I am still going to finish putting together the new Wandering Soul manuscript and I’m also writing poems for yet another poetry book (as yet untitled). I hope everyone who loves and enjoys poetry got a chance to celebrate poetry in some way this month – but of course those of us who really love poetry tend to indulge in reading it all year long.

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