Welcome to MountainWord. I’m Vic Burkhammer. If you’d like to read one of your unpublished poems over the phone, just call me at (304) 348-5184 and wait for the voicemail to kick in, leave your name and number for verification and then read away.

I may feature your poem on MountainWord. To send poems, mp3 demos or poetry-related news, click my e-mail link here. Here’s what I’m looking for this time around: poems of under 30 well-written lines. Nothing sentimental or old-fashioned, just lots of precision, strong imagery. The tone can run the gamut from humorous to serious.

If you call in or send poems, be sure to add a phone number and a brief bio of yourself. Your number will not be used for any other purpose and will be deleted.

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If this is your first visit to MountainWord, please click on earlier posts archived by month.

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Zimbabwe: Poetry chronicles history of suffering: Check out this AllAfrica article. It calls to mind Greek poet Yannis Ristos, who said in 1970 that the poet should be political in his role as the “first citizen.” … It’s a report on the situation in Zimbabwe where some poets have dug into political issues — suffering in this case.

Read the Zimbabwe article 

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For all those lost in thin thematic gruel of the personal — and sometimes I think I’ve always been there, in a sense — try a poem about community issues. Try honing in on the kind of country you live in or want to live in. In poems, we can imagine the birds flying upsidedown, people dead years back wanting to be alive again — all kinds of wild things.

Robert Bly said in an interview in the April 2000 edition of the Paris Review:

“Most of the English teachers in the universities hated our doing ‘political poems,’ as they were called. That still happens. When I’m at a reception at a university these days, an English professor may come up to me and ask: ‘How do you feel now about those poems you wrote during the War?’ They want me to disown the poems. I say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write more of them.’ ”

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.