Oh boy! I've been very busy and absolutely remiss in blogging about my writing and narrating! It's been 3 months! In those three months I've written quite a bit. Not quite the once-a-week blog post that I was hoping to do, but still! I'll start with the most recent and work my way back in time in separate posts. Get used to hearing from me every day or so....
My most recent post on Amazing Stories Magazine is a review of John Philip Johnson's recently Kickstarter-funded Graphic Poetry Comic Book "Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town", with artwork by 6 different artists of various renown (Bob Hall of Spider-Man perhaps the most famous). My review includes one poem in audio and links-a-plenty, including to the full-package experience of listening to me read the title poem while following along with the Graphic Poem!
Graphic Poetry Review - Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town
If you're still around, here's a little teaser:
I’m not sure if this is the very first genre graphic poetry book, but it sure seems like it might be. I haven’t been able to find much else available for purchase (although I have found the odd graphic poem in various out-of-print publications). John Philip Johnson has taken 5 of his most successful poems over the past few years and had them made into little mini-graphic novels. Each line of the poetry has its own panel, and each poem is a couple of pages long. Each poem is illustrated by a different cartoonist/artist/illustrator—and some very successful ones, at that.
John Philip Johnson is a member of the SFPA and a poet with whom I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding mostly on poetic topics but also other things. We have similar tastes and ideas and he hired me to be the voice of his poetry on two occasions, for which I am very grateful....
You'll have to follow the link above to read the rest!
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My newest edition of Poetry Planet will has come out on StarShipSofa No. 309 today! This is another contest winner's showcase and the third year running for the Rhysling Award Showcase. You'll hear 6 of the 7 poems that placed in the top three (You'll hear the 7th next week). They are:
1st place:
Short: “The
Cat Star” by Terry Garey, Lady Poetesses from Hell, ed. Bag Person Press Collective (Bag Person Press)
Long: “Into Flight” by Andrew Robert
Sutton from the online magazine Silver Blade 14
Terry A.Garey's poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies, including
Dodeca, Uranus, Star*Line, Asimov's, Weird Tales, The Magazine of Speculative
Poetry, Raw Sacks, Paper Bag Writer, Dreams and Nightmares, Women en Large, and
Burning With A Vision. She has edited poetry for Janus, Tales of the
Unanticipated, and is the editor (with Eleanor Arnason) of Time Gum, and also
Time Frames: an anthology of speculative poetry. She lives in Minneapolis, MN
with a librarian, two cats, and more books than she can count. She is a
founding member of Lady Poetesses From Hell.
Andrew
Robert Sutton was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He attended Michigan
State University where he studied both telecommunications and the written word.
His heart has been torn between his love of cutting-edge technologies and
traditional art forms ever since. His articles on the history of technology and
its impact on business have appeared in over forty publications, including
newspapers, magazines, and numerous blogs. "Into Flight" is his first
foray into poetry.
2nd Place:
Short: “Futurity’s
Shoelaces” by Marge Simon found in the Balticon 2012 Program Book.
Long: “String Theory” by John Philip Johnson in James Gunn’s (online journal) Ad Astra 1.
MargeSimon's works appear in publications such as Bête Noire, Niteblade, Daily SF
Magazine, Silver Blade, and Dreams & Nightmares. She edits a column for the
HWA Newsletter and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She has won the
Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, twice the Bram Stoker Award™, the
Rhysling Award and the Dwarf Stars Award. She has published several collections
including Like Birds in the Rain, Unearthly Delights, The Mad Hattery,
Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls, and Dangerous Dreams. Her poem, "The
Gods, Fallen" is up at Liquid Imagination.
John Philip Johnson has had work in, or forthcoming in, Dreams & Nightmares, Mythic
Delirium, Strange Horizons, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and Daily Science
Fiction, among other places, besides James Gunn's Ad Astra where this poem
first appeared. He reviews for Star*Line and elsewhere, and just recently
earned a master's degree in English, with a thesis of science fictional poetry,
from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His astro-engineering work at Raytheon
is still classified, but let's just say...His poem "Stairs Appear In a Hole Outside of Town" can be read (and eventually listened to - narration by yours truly - Diane) at Rattle.
3rd Place:
Short:
“Sister Philomela Heard the Voices of Angels”, by Megan Arkenberg,
Strange Horizons- 8/7/12
Long (tie): “The Time Traveler’s Weekend” by Adele Gardner
- Liquid Imagination
Long (tie): "The Necromantic Wine” by Wade German Avatars of Wizardry, edited by Charles Lovecraft (P'rea Press)
Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her work has recently
appeared in Asimov's, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and The Best Horror of the
Year, Volume 5, and has tried for best short story of 2012 in the Asimov's
Readers' Award. Her poem "The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead
Languages" won the Rhysling Award for best long poem of 2012. Megan
procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance. She also has recent
poetry publications in the September issue of Asimov's and the Fall issue of
Star*Line.
Adele Gardner's
poetry collection, Dreaming of Days in Astophel, is available from Sam's Dot
Publishing. Her stories and poems have appeared in Daily Science Fiction,
Legends of the Pendragon, The Doom of Camelot, Penumbra, Scheherazade's Façade,
Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, and New Myths, among others.
In 2012, she chaired the Rhysling Awards for the Science Fiction Poetry
Association. Currently cataloging librarian for a public library, she's also
literary executor for her father, Delbert R. Gardner.
I will provide biographical and link information for Wade German and her poem next week. Her fantastic poem "The Necromantic Wine" is epic in length and would have burst the seams of this week's StarShipSofa. And I'd like you all to be fresh when you hear it!
Wade German's poems have appeared internationally in numerous journals and anthologies, including Dark
Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Midnight
Echo, Mythic Delirium, Nameless, Phantom Drift, Space and Time,
Star*Line, Strange Sorcery and Weird Fiction Review. Barbarian is a recent poem appearing on Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
"The Necromantic Wine" was inspired by George Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry" and Clark Ashton Smith's "The Hashish-Eater," two poems which I have read again and again with a never ending fascination. Both are replete with bizarre, hallucinatory imagery and ideas sprung from the dark fantastic imagination. But for the most part, they are very different poems, with perhaps the exception that both convey a sense of voyaging into the unfamiliar, of questing for the unknown. It was that sense of voyage and quest that I was after when I wrote "The Necromantic Wine."
