Conversant, too?: April 2013

About Me

Name: Rose

Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

Rose M. Smith is a shy, quiet poet who's lived most of her life in Columbus, Ohio--a conversational voice heavily informed by human situations and emotion. Voted "poet most unlike herself at the mic," she has been known to silence an unruly room when her poems begin to speak. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, The Iconoclast, Good Foot, Pavement Saw, Concrete Wolf, Boston Literary Magazine, The Examined Life, Main Street Rag, and The Pedestal Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Rose reads throughout the midwest--she'll make a jaunt cross country if she's needed (you pay for it). She has been called "a quiet visionary spanning the worlds of performance poetry and literary print! challenging and enriching the norms of both. She is an associate editor at Pudding House Publications and author of Shooting the Strays (Pavement Saw Press, 2003) and A Woman You Know (Pudding House Publications, 2005) and is featured in the Poets' Greatest Hits collection now managed bt Kattywampus Press. Rose is a Cave Canem Fellow.

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

30-30 Challenge?

We are nine days into April, 2013 and already I am running to keep up with my fellow poets who seem able to turn out fresh poems on a daily basis every time National Poetry Month rolls around. Oh, to be so prolific! There should be a solution for those of us from whom poems spring only at the unction of a muse: The 30-30 phrase a day challenge, perhaps.

So here's to those of you who fail at 30-30 challenges year after year. Let's settle. Settle for one rich phrase a day, recorded in a "carry-with" notebook. That 10-second seed of inspiration that might later become poem. Let's grab those as they pass. All day long. All month long. Maybe all year long. And be satisfied that the poet inside was listening. And be fertile ground when the seed begins to sprout and take shape.

Today's phrase: "...but for beginnings, I would yet be nestled inside myself, curled in a fetal shell, afraid of light."