Welcome to Poetry Month

(And a Poetry Passion Challenge)

April is coming fast! And along with April comes Poetry Month.

Poetry has a lot of opinions about it, some people think it drips with sap and emotions, other people think it’s the voice that our hearts and souls use to speak to the world… still others think it’s all dirty limericks and silly rhymes.

I once set out to write what I called, ‘the worst poetry in the world’. I was pretty happy with it the first couple of times I read it out. I made sure to put in lots of vampires and ‘blood dripped from her jellied…’ something or other I can’t remember now.

The problem was that it was actually pretty good poetry. I think the problem was that I was passionate in my desire to write bad poetry and that passion created really GOOD bad poetry. I was swimming in a sea of cliches and stabs at ineptitude, but I was so creative in my attempt to be a bad writer that I swam gracefully around the cliches and each sharp blade in the murky water that should have stabbed me? instead I danced on those blades and the turgid waters became a glimmering pool of mystery and with far more depth than if I had dove into the pool without attempting to make bad poetry. I had made poetry so bad that it was good.

Why do I bring this up?

I think it’s important as we all start to think about poetry month to think about the nature of poetry. It’s something that is almost impossible to make a mess out of, so long as whatever you’re writing about (and here’s the big secret), you truly and honestly are passionate about the subject. Passion is a strange game to play at. You can play it in so many different arena: at the race track, in sporting events of all kinds, in competitions, in debates, for a religion, for a country, to destroy a country in a war, to destroy yourself in a war, for your family, for yourself, for, best of all, for love.

But passion can make us blind, selfish, foolish, stupid and wrong in almost every single one of these arenas unless we listen very carefully to our hearts and a little bit to our heads.

This is the true joy of poetry, it is passion.

In every poem, be in that poem. Taste it, feel it, smell it, SEE it, hear it, these are our passions! Does it make your heart quicken? Does it make you angry? Does it make a tear form, just so, at the corner of your eye? Or does it make you collapse when you realize all that you’ve lost and what a fool you’ve been? Even the most simple of poems in a prophecy to the right reader at the right time.

This April, I dare you to submit to poetry month. Write a poem a day without a plan. At the end of April, StarkLight Press will open submissions to a brand new poetry anthology. We will be accepts writers filled with passion as well as a limited number of artists for cover design and internal art.

We may select all thirty of your poems, or we may select only one. Poets will be paid $5 a poem. Poems must be new publications written April 2022. Rights to your poetry will be returned to you for July 17, 2022. You are free to publish them again but please site that they were originally published with StarkLight Press. Poetry only has to be written in April 2022 to qualify, you do not have to write or submit all thirty poems for poetry month to enter!

Stay tuned, as always for more events, contests and new books at StarkLight Press. You saw it here first: Black, White and Read all over

Deadline for entries is May 15, 2022. Please edit your poetry before sending it in, we hprefer your best work! Click on CONTACT US to find out how to submit if you’re a newbie to StarkLight Press.