And the second of today’s poem’s has now gone live. For reasons which I’ll explain in a moment, anyone who’s voting in this week’s round of the TWIWrite Zone should look away now. Page break coming up …
Right, here we go. I wrote this for the last round of a six-week challenge that’s going on at The Write Idea, called the TWIWrite Zone. Previous rounds have mandated different styles of writing (free verse, microfiction, non-fiction, form poetry and fiction), but there was no style set for this round, although there were – as usual – three prompts to pick from. Great, I thought. No problem. However, as the week wore on it became clear that I had no time to put anything together bigger than a poem. At eleven PM on Saturday, one hour before the deadline, I finally put “Oxygen” together and submitted it, using the prompt “Holding a breath”.
Given its topicality, I realised that if it was going to get published anywhere I’d have to move fast. So yesterday I sent it off to Ink, Sweat and Tears, renowned for its rapid turnaround times. Sure enough, a couple of hours later I received my acceptance and it’s up there today. It’s really nice to see myself described as a “regular IS&T contributor”, too, especially as my first poem was only published in September of last year – by IS&T as it happens.
I’m not entirely sure that “Poets Against Fascism” is going to have that much traction, mind.