end of summer

Our first attempt at a theme-based meeting was qualitatively quite good but quantitatively poor - out of 6 people who signed up, only 3 showed: Jim, Kazue, Leena.

We were able to spend as much time as needed on each poem and still ended at 12:15 so we talked about publishing, poetry magazines and other general poetry stuff... as a result, I'll post poetry related urls to the twitter poetswanted account.

For future events, we decided that I'll post an optional theme so that people don't feel pressured to create a brand new poem on a specific topic and can workshop existing pieces instead. Next month's theme: happiness.

Also, my friend Kazue has agreed to be an Assistant Organizer so prepare to see more varieties of events!

Good Show

This was one of our best meetings with SEVEN poets showing up! We were able to critique everyone's poetry and finished at 12:58pm, 2 minutes before the planned finish time.

All the poems had a unique voice but some shared common sentiments. I enjoyed every single poem.

Afterwords, my friend Kazue (one of the poets at the meeting) suggested that we try writing on a shared theme. So, for the next meeting I'm asking everyone to write about "End of Summer".

Today's Workshop

Before and after critiquing our poems,we had a provocative discussion on the choice to follow traditional rules of writing poems vs. the choice to innovate the style and content. I will not even attempt to offer a synopsis of the conversation becuase it'd be too difficult to capture the nuances but I'd love to hear comments from YOU, the readers of this blog...

What's this about?

For the last 2+ years, I've been meeting once-a-month with other San Francisco Bay Area poets to work together to fine-tune our poems. I was published for the first time last year in SOMA Literary Review - The City Is Always Cold At Night and have had other publishing success as well. I'm also writing a lot more poetry these days.

The poetry group "Poets Wanted" is the force behind the success of my poetic endeavors so I'd like to expand the group and encourage people to form similar groups in their own community.