Five Out of Seven Poems Score With Cthulhu Haiku II

October 25, 2013 in Horror, Poetry
Tags: Cthulhu, Haiku, Horror, Poetry, Popcorn Press, Shadorma

So that’s one more than the games needed to win the World Series, but it was an almost last-minute thing — and this in spite of a guidelines admonition that it would be a good thing to submit early.  But that’s how it goes.  And none of the poems were haiku either (there was one shadorma), but they don’t have to be, the constraint being only that submissions be short poems or prose less than 1000 words.  And for more than that, well, check out posts here for the original CTHULHU HAIKU with my story “The Farmer in the Well” (cf. December 4, October 7 2012).

So anyhow Popcorn Press has decided to do it again and, at the last minute (procrastination, procrastination), I got together seven poems and sent them in and, just the day after, Editor/Publisher Lester Smith accepted four — and asked if I might rewrite the last line of a fifth and send it back in!  The fifth was the shadorma, a six-line, syllable-counted form somewhat like a lune smushed into a haiku, titled “Bad Vacation,” and this afternoon (deadline day) it was accepted too.  The other four are all free verse of varying lengths, two of which are reprints from PROSPECTIVE JOURNAL’s CTHULHU A LOVE STORY titled “Slow-Motion” and “It Must Have Been that New Fish Food” (see January 10 2013, September 21 2012), and two new poems, “The Vampiress Dreams of an Evening in Innsmouth” and “With the Economy What It Is, Maybe We’ll Take Any Job We Can Get.”

Popcorn Press is a fun little outfit that’s used work of mine in two other books too, HALLOWEEN HAIKU (see November 22 2011) and THE HUNGRY DEAD (December 30 2010), and I fully expect CTHULHU HAIKU II will be fun as well — regardless of whether the final line in “Bad Vacation (A Shadorma)” works for you or not.  More information will be found here as soon as I get it.