Capture by Luca Rossato on Flickr
January
- Its boughs tangled in starlanes, Getting to know you less and less, A big red one coughed, and Undoing the deeds
– Star*Line 48.1 - Coin of the realm – dadakuku January 5, 2025
- Wandering through Sinai and Want or want-want? – Fevers of the Mind, January 21, 2025
- [diamonds underfoot], [Like a crooked bone], and [The old master reads scriptures] – Five Fleas, January 25, 2025
February
- From my perspective, Porcelain loss control, and The Earliest Known Representation of a Quantum Computer in Terrestrial Art - Dreams and Nightmares, issue 129
- Offspring of Obsidian (audio) - SFPA Valentines Day page
- [the mystic flight], [equivalence], and [glassy pond] – The Bamboo Hut, February 2025
- Hafez the Atman Thief – Bewildering Stories, Issue 1081
- [too young to marry] – password: Very Short Poetry 2.1
Public domain
October
- How we came to enter the thought hotel, The come to Noah moment, One part per ten billion, "[they left us nothing]", and Data plant – Star*Line 47.4
- Slow down why don’t you?, Our lady of a thousand beaches, and First-hand testimony – Lothlorien Poetry Journal Friday 4 October 2024
- Oxygen Way, Statement by the artist, and Hiram drops the plumb line – Eccentric Orbits 5
- "[fumbling at my front door]", "[train like hell]", and "[from their seafloor abbey]" – Five Fleas, October 22, 2024
November
December
Total number of pieces in print: 31
Total number of pieces online: 82
Capture by Pedro Ribeiro Simões on Flickr
During the first part of this last quarter I have been feeling as though my published pieces are coming along a tiny bit slower than the first two.
I do have some pieces slated to be published with long lead times, some of them into 2025.
There were a few journals in the last several months which had published some of my work but which are no longer taking new work.
I try to keep my eyes open for markets where I haven’t already sent poems before.
This is time consuming, but the only way I know to learn about different submission requirements and editorial standards.
Public domain
Halfway through the year I’ve been happy to continue with the run of surreal micropoetry month by month along with some longer pieces in Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, and Sein und Werden. Even better was to see my first piece to appear in Eternal Haunted Summer – a short prose piece with mythic resonances.
My poem [it is not] which appeared in the Heliosparrow Poetry Journal last January was awarded a Special Award for Micronarrative by their editors.
Capture by Klaus Stiefel on Flickr
The first three months of the year had the usual crop of surreal micropoetry and a few print and online publications of speculative poetry.
I also participated in an in-person event for a book launch for the Delaware Bards Anthology of 2023 where I read the mainstream poem included in the volume.
Capture by
Jonathan Cutrer on Flickr
I finished off the year with a whole bunch of poems online and in print.
Here are the ones which were published over the last three months of the year.
October
- I didn’t know the lights’d be so hot, Ode to aerogel, and Carcinisation – Star*Line 46.4
r- Ode to form rejection notes – Up Your Arse Poetica, ebook and print
- "[adapted neuroclaws]", "[I think she likes me]", and "[sea bottom]" – Five Fleas
- From the tongue of a witness – Penumbric vol vii, issue 3
- Chasing encaustics in the shallows – Dreams and Nightmares 125
November
December
- "[to breathe]", "[the there it is]", "[frozen in a rut]", and "[racing toward that last breath]" – Five Fleas, December 13, 2023
- "[in micropolished scales]", "[your eye color]", "[their first night]", "[the deep stone well]", – Heliosparrow Poetry Journal, December 13, 2023 11 10 9 8
- The Deal Is Off and Talk Market Crash – Call Me [brackets], Call me (out)
- People also ask – dadakuku December 20, 2023
- Klein Dog in Hunger Canyon: Light Speed – Chrome Baby, Bairn 128
There were 94 poetry submissions published on the web and 31 in printed form, each total a record for me.
On Duotrope my acceptance rate is 36.1% per batch of poems, and in terms of the individual works I sent out, my success rate came to 15.4% for the last year.
This is above average for their other subscribers submitting work to the publications I approached.
I am happy with this and feel as though this gives me a boost to continue following the same method I’ve worked out over the past few years.
Capture by terren in Virginia on Flickr
July
- It’s only vacuum out there, Bouquets for post-humanity ,Open House, and Spar - Star*Line 46.3
- Incoming message - Songs of Eretz
- Zoom reading, Arctic summer and Field of mustard, Sein und Werden, 1 July 2023
- Live reading, Like the one - Baycon 2023, Birds of a Feather: genre poetry session, 3 July 2023
- Tumbling from gravity - Five Fleas
- Message from your hive queen, - dadakuku
August
- *Get used to it" – Mobius: the Journal of Social Change Volume 34, Number 3
- Zoom reading of poems reprinted in the 2023 Dwarf Stars Anthology, August 4 and 5: "[long story short]", Most highly honored, and "[sawdust protected our torsos]".
- Ashes are what we own - Uppagus Issue 58
- "[down the line]", "[twenty paces behind]", "[online storefront]", "[peepholes in my teeth]", and "[under]" – Five Fleas
- Everyone shops at Opthalmo-Mart and Scoured, – Chrome Baby 125
- Nature needs to shut up, – dadakuku 125
September
- "[tick]", "[the offspring’s weight in rice]", and "[they like to dance]" – Five Fleas
- 1, 3, 7-trimethylxanthine – dadakuku
- I regret almost all of it and Past this world – Borrowed Solace, Twilight Zone
- Force against force – Abyss and Apex Issue 88
Capture by oatsy40 on Flickr
April
- when the gotchaberries bloom again, - dadakuku
- True vacuum, Flying the Carboniferous, and Countup - Star*Line 46.2
- "[Century 31]" ,"[triangles for lunch]", "[curtsies to Dalmatia]", and "[egoless at last]" Five Fleas
- Sarafina’s Sparklicious Adventure, - Bewildering Stories 993
- Finger guns salute, On your equipment, and Your color palette, 2011, Chrome Baby, Bairn 121
- "[true true true]", and "[stacks of stolen kisses]" Five Fleas
- Rations rejected by angels, The sport of technocrats, London forgives the flaws in the telling, The mirror-backed cabinet in oak, A visit to Wernicke’s ineffable land, Location, location, location, and Cendrillon la belle, - otoliths
May
- An American ballad, Mobius: the Journal of Social Change, May 2023
- Venus of Arrokoth, Merger, The original error renews itself, Concentrated States of Being, and What I think about, - Danse Macabre 150
- the shackles of illusion, dadakuku, May 6
- "[slicing through]", "[I won’t]", and "[progress bar]", Five Fleas
June
My poems “long story short” and “sawdust protected our torsos” which appeared in Five Fleas in 2022 have been nominated as eligible for the 2023 Dwarf Stars award and are appearing in this year’s print anthology. Also, The closest traitor was nominated to the longlist for the 2023 Rhysling Award in the short category.
Capture by ken_mayer on Flickr
I’m starting the new year off at a modest, steady rate but I know of a bunch more pieces which are due to come out in the next few months as well, so I’ll be announcing those soon.
January
- "[she rises from the sea]," - Heliosparrow
- “by foxfire splints”, - dadakuku, 5 January 2023
- “Project Primate Uplift” and Those before times, - Star*Line 46.1
February
March
- "[the crust bends]," “[when these shackles],” “Dry lab,” - - Five Fleas
- “The 8192 names of Fatima, - Contemporary Haibun Online, April 2023
Capture by Dietmar Down Under on Flickr
I've been doing my best to close out the calendar year strong with this set of poems in print, some of which I had been awaiting for over twelve months.October
- Vacation postcards, The Mechanics of Silica Under Tension, Is Not-Is, Cataphract, and The doornail - Danse Macabre, 145
- The Mothersong of Dame Polonia - Bewildering Stories, Issue 968
- Cortege - Liquid Imagination, Issue 52
- As We Creep Back Into the World - Stranged Writing: A Literary Taxonomy, an anthology by The Gravity of the Thing
- "[clockwork bloodhound]", "[recognizing]", and "[A violin]" - Five Fleas
- Winter root steeple - Right Hand Pointing 149
- Specular reflections, 1000 radiant cranes, A is not A, Digamma variant, Floor of the Deep, and What it was like there isn’t what they say - otoliths, Southern Summer, 2022
November
December
Publishing was a little slower during the rest of the summer into the beginning of Fall, though I am optimistic about a bunch of new pieces which will come out in the next few months.
July
August
September
Here is the next group of my published work this year, another thirty titles online, in print, and even streaming audio.
As in the last set, for the ones which appear between covers along with other items of fantastic poetry and prose, I’ve put up some images of how those volumes look.
In among the fantasy and science fiction and surrealism there are a few mainstream pieces there, maybe on the edge of speculation.
Some are short micropoems and some are long pieces split up into stanzas, and there a few prose poems in the mix also.
I decided to write about some numbers about receiving rejections after I saw this tweet:
I don’t have any problem showing how many rejections I get for the poems I’m submitting to journals, drawing on statistics I have available through Duotrope.
When I tweet or post on Facebook about something of mine making it all the way to publication, it probably sounds as though I can just do anything and have an editor take it, just the way the tweet I quoted above says.
I went through my submission records going back three years to produce some graphs to give you an idea of what things are like.
Over this time I made 841 submissions (of course most pieces of writing were submitted multiple times) and had 117 of them accepted, either online or in print.
All of the acceptances were first-time publications (nothing was reprinted).
Last year was my most active year when it came to having poetry appear in print. I was not sure whether I was going to keep up the pace this year, given the many distractions the world has been throwing at me, but as I look back at January through March, I can see that the results are actually coming in even faster. I have 28 pieces either online or in print which is more than half of my total for last year (51). So, instead of waiting until the end of the year like I did then, I thought I’d start putting up a post every quarter with links to where these things can be found. Again, I’ve marked the items which would be eligible for a Rhysling Award next year with a little star for those who might be interested in nominating them for SFPA awards.
I had a good year getting my poetry published both online and in print, and I wanted to have a full list up summarizing what is out there for anyone interested. For those interested, I will start out by sharing a little bit of my experience producing poetry and having people read it.
I was going to say that I don’t have any training in this, but in fact I did take one course in college from a young instructor where we learned about English poetic forms and turned in assignments based on what we found out. I was a senior then and didn’t need this course to satisfy my requirements, wary of anything that might adversely affect my grade point average, so I was taking this course “Pass/No-Pass” just out of interest. We started with blank verse reading Milton, then heroic couplets with Dryden, and by the time I handed in my quatrain assignment the instructor spoke to me in confidence saying that I really ought to switch my registration to take the course for a grade. That was my first editorial interaction and might be the most important one for me, because I think it this is the main payoff when I hear back about poems I’ve sent off. The money up till now is meager, the fame is mostly self-deception, but the bits of praise from people who I never expected to make that kind of connection with is like a drug.
I thought I’d put out another collection of tidbits I ran across that give me ideas of things I might want to do or create.
There are lots of other preoccupations in my mind besides these, but I prefer to collect the ones worth keeping around
Here is where you can find where I published my speculative poetry in 2020.
Solo poems
Collaborative poems
- Five poems in Live Encounters Poetry and Writing: eczema nations, orgasm software, nebular gates, pumice velocities, and pastel sabbath
- Four poems in otoliths: zohar punk, in lieu of flowers, whitepigs trot sky, and talibanshee wail, also available as print on demand
- Three poems in Danse Macabre: fat burns off, verdigris, and white matter chambers
- Three poems in bones journal 20: protean jihad, omelette padme hum, and saltpetre the cat
- Under the Basho 2020: yes no urge
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This is the third year I engaged in the discipline of writing and posting a poem on the Yahoo groups Scifaiku list I’ve been a member of for a dozen years or so.
In past years I maintained a scifaiku writing timetable.
One year, I wrote a new poem every single day for the entire year to see how much of a challenge that would be for me.
Two other years, I kept a five month long, twice weekly schedule on the mailing list, which I repeated in much the same form this year, from January till the end of May.
In the end, I had generated a total of forty-four stripped-down verses, either a single nine syllable lines or a three-line stanza of twelve syllables.
Additionally, the verses portrayed some topic drawn from either science fiction, fantasy, or horror.
On our Yahoo list, the members adhere to the Japanese renga convention of posting answering verses linked to the preceding one and yet shifting the emphasis to a greater or lesser extent.
True to our haiku roots, the verses we write are as short as possible, forcing the writer to omit anything unnecessary while still trying to remain intelligible.
With each linked contribution, the thread as a whole is apt to veer quite a ways away from the idea that sparked things in the first place.
Plus, the vagaries of email communication with its unpredictable delays can also bring about forks in the chain which can co-exist side by side following sometimes very different paths.
For a number of years
Michael Dylan Welch
has been organizing National Haiku
Writing Month, more commonly known as
NaHaiWriMo during the month of February where
anyone can post their minimalistic poetic contributions every day. There would
be a prompt for each day the participants could, if they wanted, use as a
theme for that day’s installment. I had fun
participating this year and would like to present a selection of what I came up with.
I think I should explain the title of this blog in case you’re wondering. I’ll
do this beauty pageant style.
Coming in third, purely in my subjective opinion, was the title Like Breadths
of Topaz which comes from Emily Dickinson’s poem
‘304’.
As you’ll begin to understand in a moment, I really like her work.
I think this line would make a fantastic name for a blog, particularly one which
talks about beautiful things. This might not be precisely where my main
interests will lie in this blog, so I passed.
