Poets and Poems: Marjorie Maddox Hafer Publishes 2 Poetry Collections

I’ve known of poets who’ve published two poetry collections in a year. Marjorie Maddox Hafer has published two poetry collection in two days. On Monday, Hafer published Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, a collection of 16 poems, each accompanied by a photograph by Karen Elias. Today is the publication date for Begin with a Question, a collection of 74 poems. The two collections have different publishers, different themes, and different poems, and yet they are joined together.  

Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For is a beautiful volume of ekphrastic poetry, that is, poetry, inspired by an artwork. Or it may be a volume of ekphrastic photographs, each inspired by a poem. The poems and the photographs fit remarkably well together, and it’s clear that considerable thought and care went into pairing and developing them.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poems and Photos: Kelly Belmonte, Tom Darin Liskey, and “Transit”

You might say I was there at almost the creation of Transit by Kelly Belmonte and Tom Darin Liskey. 

Well more than a year ago, I was pulled into a Facebook conversation between Belmonte and Liskey. They had been talking for some time about a collaborative effort. Belmonte is a poet, a blogger, and a management consultant specializing in non-profit organizational development.  Liskey is a poet, author, and photographer and photojournalist. If you read Belmonte’s poems and study Liskey’s photographs, a collaborative effort is a no-brainer. 

 

At the time, they were talking the basics of collaboration: what to include and exclude, how large a work, what publishing venues should be explored, layout and design, and related questions. Fascinated, I listened and offered only a word or two. The collaborators had this project well in hand.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Old photographs

The photographs are old,

some faded, spent flowers,

forgotten, left in a shoe box left

in a closet smelling of mothballs

and cedar, sisters in form-fitting

dresses, bobbed hair, smiling

at the photographer. I know them

but I know them thirty years later

as they were careening to old age

but smiling, always smiling

at the photographer. They knew me,

thirty year later, and we all smiled

at the photographer.

Photograph: WPA Artists, 1930s, Michigan Department of Natural Resources.