What to do when a typo might conceivably make your poem more interesting? There's a typo in "The Numbers are Not In" as it appears on Verse Daily:
The world is filled with those who want
someone else, just as the world
is split in halves, or hemispheres
if we want the world that says it
with a measure of beauty.
Now, as I wrote it, and as it appears in Passages North, world is "word." But I kind of like the tweak here, though three worlds in four lines is pushing it. I can't decide if it adds anything, or if it's inconsequential overall. Opine for me.
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Email today from a publisher in Belgium doing a daily desk calendar of poems, asking to reprint my poem "These Arms of Mine." Which is out in American Literary Review, though I haven't received my copies yet. Amazing how these little scribblings circulate throught, well, the world, I guess.
I said yes. Names like Pinsky, Collins, Dove, etc., appeared in last year's edition. Why not me? Wait, don't answer that.
***
Secret project created yesterday.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
6 comments:
The one time I had a poem in Ploughshares it ended up with a typo: instead of "beside" it said "besides." Nobody really noticed, perhaps because it was a rather folksy turn.
Kudos on the desk calendar pub!
Thanks, Mary.
I saved a friend of mine from a typo in Ploughshares a few years back. Nobody had noticed it.
Congrats on the calendar! Wish you could've been at AWP. Next year, perhaps?
Next year is a go. Atlanta is practically in my backyard.
Hey, Paul. This is Chad Parmenter, occasional commenter on your blog, constant Paul fan. I think I got an e-mail from the same Belgian company last spring, asking for one of my poems, and I looked for them on the web and just found one site, that seemed more or less legit. They said they'd send me a complimentary copy, but I never heard anything else from them.
But, then, what kind of scam could they pull? It's poetry, so they can't be after our money.
I found the site too. I figured there's no downside to including the poem, so why not?
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