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Welcome to But Does it Rhyme?
We're a small, but hopefully growing, band of poets who like to talk about our craft and share what we've written. We'll highlight favorite poets, review new books, and explore the process of writing poetry from inspiration to conclusion. (We might venture into essays and short fiction, too.) We hope you'll like our blog — and contribute your own thought and poems.

Sally Zakariya, Poetry Editor
Richer Resources Publications

Charan Sue Wollard (LivermoreLit)
Kevin Taylor (Poet-ch'i)
Sherry Weaver Smith
(SherrysKnowledgeQuest)

books
Richer Resources Publications

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Call for Submissions

We’re planning an anthology of poems about food and eating, to be published in 2015. We’re defining the theme loosely and welcome a chance to read poems on everything from the sublime to the delicious. Here’s the drill:

• Send up to 3 original poems to poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere. Previously published poems are fine too—we’ll credit the original publisher.
• Please give your full contact info, plus the titles of your poems and a brief (50-75 word) bio, in the body of the email.
• Attach your submission to the email as a .doc, docx, or .rtf document, one poem per page, with your name and email address on each page. No fancy formatting, please!
• We will review submissions as expeditiously as possible, so please don’t query us unless you haven’t heard from us in two months.
• Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2014

We’re looking forward to your poems.  

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This Writing Life

Haven’t we all felt it? The frustration of staring at a page where the words refuse to take their right places or, worse, take any place at all. Poet Brent Scott puts it well:

Frustration
Brent Scott

I destroyed a notebook.
Threw it across the room.
The papers
Fluttered around the spiral.
Ripped free.
Until the cardboard covers creased.
It hit against the wall.
I put my hand to my head.
Poems scattered on the floor.
They cowered as I approached.
One swallowed. Asked,
"What have we done?"
"Nothing.
I'm sorry.
It's me."

Brent Scott recently completed an MFA in Screenwriting at the University of New Orleans and just finished a year of teaching English in Korea. He spends a lot of his free time in the kitchen, creating new recipes.

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Women of a Certain Age

Persimmon Tree has people like me in mind. Billed as “An Online Magazine of the Arts for Women Over Sixty,” Persimmon Tree publishes fiction, nonfiction, art, and, yes, poetry. A piece of mine made it into the summer issue’s collection of poems from the southern states:

On Seeing an Unfamiliar Bird at the Feeder
Sally Zakariya

Was it you, dickcissel, with your finch
beak outside on the feeder today?

What I noticed was your slender grace
the gentle bob of your head as you pecked

the perfect seed, the flourish when you raised
your pale bill, seed displayed, prize among prizes.

How much of your small spirit you expend
each day, seed by hopeful seed, feeding

your heart, your beating wings. Was
it you, strayed off course, or your spirit

that stopped by here on your way
from one unknown to another?

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'Vibrant Words'

Vibrant—isn’t that what we poets want all our words to be? We’d like to think our personal muse delivers splendid poems ready made, but the truth is, we often have to reach for words that are elusive if not downright recalcitrant.

Luckily, help is at hand in a new book, Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for poets, by Erica Goss. The widely published Goss, who is poet laureate of Los Gatos, California, has collected a rich trove of poem-starting ideas and strategies. As an inveterate collector of found poetry, I particularly like this prompt:

 One Word

I found the word “languish” on the sidewalk a few weeks ago. As a poet, I’m always on the hunt for that special word, the one that will trigger some kind of response in poetry. I could hardly believe my luck in finding “languish.” It made me remember the “one-word prompt,” a writing exercise that I use often. Find a word that moves you in some way. Now look it up in the dictionary and write down all of its meanings. “Languish” has these: 1. Be neglected or deprived; 2. Become less successful; 3. Pine. Aha! I see that “pine,” both a verb and a noun, has possibilities. I start to wonder about the etymology of “pine,” a word that signifies a tree and an emotional/physical state of suffering. Look for a word that moves you in some way. Look up its various meanings, in both a dictionary and thesaurus. Look it up in a foreign language dictionary and see how it’s defined in another language. Ponder its associations. Write.© Erica Goss, 2014

Other suggestions are equally compelling, as are the poems (some her own) that Goss includes in the book. Vibrant Words, published by PushPen Press, can give you a much-needed nudge when you’re staring at that blank piece of paper.

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Poems for Every Occasion                       

What? You haven’t already written the perfect poem for Father’s Day? Not to worry. The Academy of American Poets has a number to choose from—and not just for Father’s Day, but for plenty of other occasions. On the Academy’s newly relaunched website www.poets.org, you can search for suitable poems in a surprising batch of categories, from Afterlife to Writing. (I think a poem lurks in those two words …) Go here to get started on your search, and Happy Father’s Day.

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Speaking of Occasions …

The funeral of a neighbor last year sparked the following poem, which was published in the Winter 2013 issue of Emerge Literary Journal, available from Amazon:

Funeral

Sally Zakariya

It's a grand send-off the Catholics give you
with their candles and incense and the constant
up and down of the prayers and also the
calm certainty of the priest's homily.

Around me everyone knows the words
and when to kneel and I’m fairly sure
the man in the coffin knew the words
to all the hymns and all the prayers as well.

He was a good man and a good neighbor
says the priest and Jesus will be waiting
for him on the other side of the bridge.
I can’t conjure up that bridge in my

skeptic’s mind but I can see the divine
origami of the ceiling with its manifold
angles within angles peaks within peaks
and then the geometry of the leaded windows

marking out

a straight path

upward

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What Are You Writing?

Why should we get all the bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if the poem is accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of an e-mail message to:

            poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com