Paddling Along

 

A blast from our recently hotter past. Paddler has generously published a poem of mine: "Late August News" in their latest issue (number 6), hot off the press in Peterborough, Canada

Some Virtual Housekeeping

My short story, Delusions of Failure is up at the Purple Wall. You can still vote for it to be your favorite versus the other story by that other guy. 

These Lines contains these lines by me, look for the poem "Some Virtual Housekeeping"

Beliveau Books in Stratford, Ontario (city hall pictured) has put out another issue of the Beliveu Review, and I'm in it with a poem called Easy to Ignite.

Plus, a reminder another reminder to read and vote for my short story Delusions of Failure

Brown Bagging Some Poetry

The first issue of Brown Bag is out and there is a poem in there from me. Scroll down to find my work, which is called "Rat Park." The title is taken from the famous experiment on addiction. Structure-wise, I formed the sentences using a random Facebook status generator, which created new statuses for me based on ones I've previously posted. It's part of a series I wrote back in 2015. They were inspired by my time working at the Arlington Court House. I wanted to create a form of poetry that resembled the legal documents I read. Since I was taking on a legal structure, the topic of the poems took on a similar theme, essentially putting an alter-ego of myself on trial. In the end, my work resulted in a book length collection that's still unpublished as a whole.

This particular poem is a success story about endurance in publishing. I've submitted Rat Park over the past couple of years to dozens of journals, reviews, and web pages. In total, something like a hundred total venues. Every time I got a rejection. But that's the writing life. If you're not ready to deal with rejection, you're not ready to deal with submission. I suppose that's really what the submission is, giving up one's attachment and allowing an editor free reign over the piece. Anyway, after so many submissions and so many rejections, I finally got it accepted. Of course, in between the rejections I tweaked my poem here and there, and made a couple of edits. Every ten rejections or so I think you should look over your lines. I even chopped up the poem into something new and released it under a different title: Rat Spark, which was published by Nauseated Drive. 

So poets of America, keep reaching for that rainbow!

4 POEMS by Ben Nardolilli

Nauseated Drive has published 4 POEMS by me. I say POEMS because that's how they chose to title the section about my works. I guess one by itself is still a poem but taken together they are POEMS. So head on over and read them.

Your Word for the Day is Synaeresis

Synaeresis is either the contraction of two vowels into a diphthong or a long vowel, or the separating out of the liquid from a gel.

It is also a publication from Canada.

Synaeresis : arts + poetry Issue 11 has now been published, featuring my poem "America's Fightingest General"

Links to Australia and Toronto

Here's an interesting article I found about Ernest Hemingway's time in Toronto. As you can imagine, the city and the writer did not get along.

I am breaking into the Australian poetry scene with a post here.

When you get done with all that, check out another poem of mine from Crisis Chronicles.

Cheers to Smarch, March, and Spring

The weather continues with its chaos and I continue to let my publishing credits roll. Even though it is March, the April Reader is already up and displaying my work. Look up north to One Title, a Canadian magazine, my poem is under the section labeled "the Bad" (out of the Good, the Bad, and the Sublime). The blog for the Circus Book, an anthology of sorts, has my work up as well.

An interesting article over at the New York Times by Colin McGinn. He asks if philosophers should take a step back from calling their field of inquiry "philosophy" and embrace a name which reflects (in his opinion) what the field is currently about.  His suggestion is "Ontics." Personally I think the piece shows an extreme bias against any non-analytic school of thought (why doesn't he want to use Ontology instead of Ontics?) and commits the etymological fallacy of focusing too much on the original definition of "philosophy" as the love of wisdom. Food for thought nonetheless. Pretty much indicative of why I quit trying to major in philosophy in college.

Also, if anybody wants to share with me things to post such as calls for submissions, new poems, links to websites, just let me know. Leave me a comment or contact me via Facebook.