In Print

I learned just now that today is National Poetry Day, and I decided to take advantage of that to share with you some news which I think is pretty cool (but then, I would). Apparently, National Poetry Day has a theme which, this year, is water, but I'm not massively interested in that. Sorry.

In May last year, I blogged here about the idea of using SL to create 'creative responses' - essentially, creating images or videos using Second Life that were inspired by, or helped to illustrate in some way, a poem or a piece of prose or a song. For someone like me who cannot draw, having a compliant model and an effectively limitless space to design and decorate and light are invaluable resources. My own creative response, written about in the same post, came about almost by accident: when trawling through my inventory trying to put an outfit together, I realised that what I was creating was a character I had been writing about for a while. I posted the latest piece about her, a poem, alongside pictures of Kitti, and ta-dah! My very first serious creative response. I think I described the situation a little better in the original post itself, but shh (I'll post a link to it at the bottom of this post). 

The news I wish to share is that just last week, that same poem appeared in print in a real life poetry anthology. It's called 'Neo Cassandra', and was published by Forward Poetry in their book 'The World at War'. Periodically, Forward Poetry run competitions, inviting the world and his wife to submit poems about a specific theme, then they pick the ones they like the best, and publish them (with your permission, of course). I was thrilled to be selected for the anthology, especially since I had submitted the poem months ago on a whim and a sense that I had nothing to lose. This is the fourth of my poems to be published by this company, though the other three were published almost ten years ago now. Jeez, that makes me feel old.

I'm not earning any money from the publication whatsoever, and the book is (in my opinion) really expensive, so I have no qualms about saying that if you wish to read my poem (and my original blog post about creative responses, as mentioned above), you may do so by clicking here - here!

Headed west

Some other related things: other creative responses / Sian Pearl does National Poetry Day / SLart for SLart's sake