Online Workshop Opportunity

Accents Publishing is offering a two-hour online workshop taught by owner and Senior Editor Katerina Stoykova. The topic is “Developing Your Poetry Collection: From Concept to Publication”. Description below.

Sunday, 10th of November, 2-4pm.
$40.00
Write to accents.publishing@gmail.com to reserve your spot.

Before you get up in front of an audience and read from your book, both you and your manuscript go through various stages. This workshop is designed to provide an insight to the considerations and skills necessary to successfully complete each stage and move on to the next. Be ready to learn what to expect, and hear tips on how not to get stuck, how to recognize if you’re making progress, how to make sure you’re focusing on what you have control over, how to keep yourself motivated through all this, and more.

“Ars Poetica” by Patty Paine

The dark beyond the window is
not the same as the dark inside

a piano, a dark you can’t know,
just as your body, sitting there

beside the piano, is an enclosure
with its own unknowable dark.

This is metaphor
for nothing. Just as a bird is not

a conceit, no matter how hard we want
to feel wings open

across our backs, taste flight
on our tongues. Even in death

a bird is not a blade that cuts
to the quick of our loss, it’s just

a splayed thing, something to be
stepped around, for decomposition to have

its efficient way, I don’t mean
to be cynical, but there are days

when language is heavy
furniture you push around

a house made of nothing
but hallways. I’m not feeling

sorry for myself, if that’s what
you’re thinking. I just want

you to be careful, because
sometimes a poem can lie.

It can make you think darkness
is a curtain that can be swept

back to reveal a sky gilded in light,
where wing beats fall

into a rhythm of hope, hope, hope.

-Patty Paine,
The Sounding Machine, 2012 © Accents Publishing

Patty PainePatty Paine is the author of Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and many other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is assistant director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.