Here are some recent poetry-related pieces I've recently stumbled upon:

• Poetry at the 2012 Olympics?
• Colorado searching for a new Poet Laureate
• The role of poetry?
• I Do Not Submit!

Watch for a new poetry prompt tomorrow morning.

I used to love that Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck would argue over rabbit and duck season until Bugs fooled Daffy into saying, "It's duck season. Duck season!" And then, he'd get shot, and say something like, "I hate you," to Bugs--who's so smart, yet always (always) takes a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Anyway, I'm not concerned with rabbit or duck season in this post. Instead, I'm focused on submission season, especially for college-run literary journals.

19 literary journals are listed below by the date that they re-open their submission periods (after taking the summer off). Remember: This is only a short list of possible places to get your poetry published. WritersMarket.com lists more than 200 literary journals, and Poet's Market offers more than 1,600 poetic listings. So if you want comprehensive, go to those resources; in the meantime, check out this list.

August 1

• Crab Orchard Review
• Oyez Review
• Ploughshares

August 15

• Alaska Quarterly Review

August 16

• Georgia Review

August 31

• Subtropics

September 1

• AGNI Magazine
• American Poetry Journal
• Cincinnati Review
• Gettysburg Review
• Hotel Amerika
• New England Review
• Notre Dame Review
• The Paris Review
• Shenandoah

September 2

• Antioch Review
• Indiana Review
• Virginia Quarterly Review

September 15

• Bellingham Review

I've just got a few random links today, including a poetic form shared from a Poetic Asides reader and other stuff.

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The poetic form is from Salvatore Buttaci for a poem he calls The Aragman. He provided me a link to the article he wrote on the form at http://www.alongstoryshort.net/PoetCraft.html.

It's a little involved, but it looks like fun--and it provides the link for a cool anagram finder site.

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Then, there's this cool article about America's busiest poet--who is, of course, the Poet Laureate. What I like most about this piece is that several Poets Laureate are interviewed about their experiences in the position.

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Also, I found this article on spoken word poet Jon Goode from Atlanta. The piece interested me for two reasons: 1. I'm still not as well-versed in the spoken word scene as I'd like to be; and 2. I'm planning a move to Atlanta later this year. So, this may be a piece that only interests me, but just in case.

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Finally, here's a neat little piece on animated poetry, including an appeal to animators to create more poetic cartoons. I totally agree!

The Academy of American Poets is getting into its bag of poetic tricks again (always in a good way). After offering up a poem-a-day by well known poets through April, they're now allowing poets to download an 11-track CD, recorded last month during their National Poetry Month reading series--completely free.

To download it, visit: www.poets.org/freecd

My first experience with Julianna Baggott was on my first edition as editor of Writer's Market (Writer's Digest Books). I asked her to write a diary style piece on how she published her first and best-selling novel, Girl Talk (Washington Square Press). It was my first risk as an editor, and Julianna made me look like a genius, because she turned in a great story.

At the time, she mentioned she also wrote poetry and stories for "the younger set" under the pen name N.E. Bode. So Julianna was one of the first poets I thought to ask for an interview when I decided to do these poet interviews on the blog. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a procrastinator at times, and put it off for awhile. After finally getting a hold of her, I then took forever sending her the questions. Fortunately, she's always quick to get things turned around (and she never gives me a hard time about how long I'm taking on my end).

Baggott is the author of three collections of poetry: This Country of Mothers and Lizzie Borden in Love (both published by Southern Illinois University Press, 2001 and 2006 respectively), as well as Compulsions of Silk Worms & Bees (Pleiades Press, 2007). The words in her poems are often funny, at times confrontational, and always immediate. Working in several different writing genres seems to give Baggott an especially keen sense of what makes great poetry.

Here's a favorite passage of mine from Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees from the poem "1. Poetry Addresses Her Sister, the Novel":

You need to learn to whittle soap
                                            to a narrow bone, to live in steam
so the wool shrinks to a toughened swatch,
not a sweater, not a mitten, something otherworldly.
                    Why do you want so much?
I say little, but my memory is stained so deeply
                                                                    it glitters.

Of course, Baggott then offers a great response in the very next poem "2. The Novel Responds to Her Sister, Poetry":

It isn't as easy as you'd think
to take the reader's hand, hang his hat
on the rack, to offer a seat.
Manners. I pass around tea and cakes.
Have you ever allowed these comforts?
You let them wander rooms, disoriented.

Hopefully, I'm not disorienting you by jumping straight into the interview.

What have you been up to recently? Do you have anything coming up soon that people should be looking out for?

The last two years have been heavy on poetry what with the publications of Lizzie Borden in Love and Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees. I've been writing sonettos -- odd ones -- but my books of poems take a few years and this new one isn't fully fleshed. I have two novels coming out next year, though. One for adults called My Husband's Sweethearts (under pen name Bridget Asher) and a novel for kids and Red Sox fans The Prince of Fenway Park. 

Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees was selected for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series and Lizzie Borden in Love was selected by the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. What do you think helps make a winning collection of poetry? Good solitary poems? Great connective tissue between poems? Something else entirely?

Readers you trust. I handed both books over to other poets I deeply trusted -- namely Frank Giampietro, whose first book Begin Anywhere (Alice James Books) comes out this fall, and Jennifer McClanahan a wonderful young poet. They came back to me differently imagined and I needed someone else's eyes.

In Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees, you assembled a collection of poems about poems, poetry and the craft of writing. Writing about the process of writing can be dangerous territory, but you seem to weave through it with a tense dance of serious humor. Do you try to hit certain benchmarks when writing your poetry? If so, what?

I'm not sure why it's dangerous territory. I always miss the memos on stuff like this. Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life. I don't know how not to write about it. And so I do, without any notions of benchmarks.

Are there things you absolutely try to avoid in your poetry? Explain.

Being a lazy fiction writer. I have an outlet for prose -- I write it. So what I don't want is to shove what should just be prose into the poetic form.

It seems you often put yourself in the skin of another to write your poems, whether you are Mary Cassatt or Poetry addressing her sister, the Novel. What do you feel are the benefits of writing from within another person or thing? Explain.

Now this is from my fiction roots, I suppose. I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself. And so I still do that. Of course, I've found that it's much easier to reveal yourself when you think you're revealing someone else.

Have you been reading any specific poets recently? If so, who and what do you like (or, I guess, even dislike) about their work?

Yes, yes. New poets. I always love new poets. I oversee the Southeast Review's Online Companion (www.southeastreview.org) and get to read tons of interviews and those names pack much of this list: Frank Giampietro, I mentioned above -- Begin Anywhere. Martha Silano -- Blue Positive. Charlotte Matthews' second book -- Still Enough to be Dreaming. Erin Murphy's third book -- Dislocation. Norman Minnick -- To Taste the Water. And we recently ran an interview with Rick Campbell who's a poet who deserves a much wider audience. His latest, Dixmont, is incredible.

When you're not writing award-winning poetry, you're writing bestselling fiction or writing novels for younger readers under the pseudonym N.E. Bode. I've also read that you've written screenplays based off your novels. How do you decide what goes where? That is, when do you know you're working on a poem instead of a short story?

I don't always know. I sometimes pick my poems up and put them into my fiction. I sometimes write a poem and then realize that it's a story. I have a story in the anthology Surreal South that began as a poem and took on a different, unexpected life in fiction. I'm toughest on the poems, though. The white gathered around a poem on the page, like a held breath, demands it.

If you could only impart one nugget of wisdom to another poet, what would it be?

Drown yourself in it -- all of it. Read like mad -- at least ten books of poems a week. Don't love everything. Hating certain types of poetry helps define your own aesthetic. Be daily. (Check out the Southeast Review's Daily Writing Regimen for a shove -- http://southeastreview.org/regimen.php.) Go forth boldly.

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Check out Julianna Baggott's Web site at www.juliannabaggott.com.

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Here are some links to some of her poems (for further reading):

* "Blurbs"

* "Nights in Tijuana"

* "What Poets Could Have Been"

* "Q and A: Do you have any tips? Answer #2"

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Check out other Poet Interviews here.