The Tule Review 2010 Summer Issue

I just got word that one of my poems has been selected to be included in the summer 2010 issue of The Tule Review, published by the Sacramento Poetry Center.

Just so you know, I’m not a poet.  I got lucky on this one.  I wrote it in my Structure and Style class at UCDavis Extension.  Our instructor, Kate Asche, asked us to do a 7-minute write on what mattered most to us at that moment.  I wrote fast, straight from the gut, and filled the page with twenty-one lines of prose.

“What matters most?  Writing, of course.  Why else would I drive into Sacramento on a night when they predict wind and rain and messy, slick roads?” 

Then Kate asked us to shape our prose into a poem.Using our textbook, The Making of a Poem:  A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, as a guide, I chose to write a Pantoum.  And what is a Pantoum?According to Norton’s Anthology:

1.  Each pantoum stanza must be four lines long.
2.  The length is unspecified but the pantoum must begin and end with the same line.
3.  The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third lines of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.
4.  The rhyming of each quatrain is abab.
5.  The final quatrain changes this pattern.
6.  In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as second and fourth lines.

Believe me, this sounds harder than it is.  Using lines plucked straight out of my prose, I completed this poem in less than twenty minutes.  And then I handed it in.

When Kate handed it back the following week, she suggested I send it to The Tule Review.

Yeah right, I thought.  But I did it anyway.  What could I lose?This poem grew out a quick, emotional response to a 7-minute writing assignment.  Emotion, I’ve heard, is where the reader and writer connect.  So I got lucky.But it feels nice to be recognized anyway.If you want to read my poem, you’ll have to wait until June, the expected publication date of The Tule Review’s summer 2010 issue.