Publication News: “Stoned Soul Picnic”

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Arts & Culture, Music, Publication News, Writing

My cento, “Stoned-Soul Picnic,” has been published in Thriving An Anthology from Exolutas Press. The publisher, Rhonda Rosenheck, chose the topic and has collected poems that explore thriving in all its glory and forms, often in the aftermath of grave challenges.This poem takes its title from the 1968 song written by Laura Nyro and popularized by The Fifth Dimension…

 
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Writing in Form: The Prose Poem

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Poetic Form, Publication News, Writing

I started my creative writing journey in the wilds of prose, specifically fiction. My SUNY-Binghamton graduate school classes concentrated on fiction; my master’s thesis was a novel-in-progress. Even when I started making the shift to writing more poetry, I still dabbled in the prose poem—it felt familiar and doable to me. According to the Poetry Foundation, a prose poem is “a prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.”

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Publication News: “A Month of Sundays”

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

“A Month of Sundays” is a freewheeling, leaping, highly experimental poem that glories in sonics and sound. In it, I took the English names for every month of the calendar year, fractured them into syllables then refashioned them into the language used in a dozen quatrains, beginning and ending with the month of July. I remember it was fun to write

 
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Writing in Form: The Elegy

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

Grief. Sadness. Loss. All of these emotions lend themselves to expression in poetry even as we find ourselves desperately searching for words. Often such an occasion calls for the somber, elevated language of the elegy. This elegy has an important epigraph giving context as to the reason for this Buddhist funeral ceremony in northern Thailand of a dear, dear friend…

 
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Published but Uncollected: “Sara’s Eyes”

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

Somewhere I know I still have the photograph, clipped from a New York Times print edition all those years ago, the years we were bombing men, women, and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. For a while, it was pinned to the cork bulletin board above my writing desk in our house in the woods outside Corvallis, Oregon…

 
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Poems Can Also Be Short!

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Poetic Form, Publication News, Writing, Writing Contests

My husband and I are avid gardeners. Every year, our community garden plot near the Woodlawn Elementary School is 400 square feet of asparagus, beets, carrots, delicata squash, leeks, peas, peppers, pole beans, potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, green and yellow wax bush beans, and some years even zucchini. Often we grow heirloom varieties…

 
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