Welcome to The Word Ocean, a blog for Southern poets and poetry. I have long wanted to start this blog, to showcase poets that are southern and want a place to be heard.
The South today is not the quaint rural place my grandparents were born into more than a hundred years ago. It's an eclectic mixture of old and new, urban and rural, homegrown southerners and wide-eyed newcomers.
I live in Atlanta. I can drive downtown in 20-30 minutes and see skyscrapers to rival those in New York and Chicago, and the 1996 Olympic Torch, which is enormous and overlooks the expressway. I can also stop and eat at The Varsity, where my dad romanced my mom in 1957 with chili dogs and Frosted Oranges.
I can then get back in my car and head out of town, and within less than an hour be in downtown Newnan, a small southern town so emblematic of a small town that it's a popular spot for filming movies and TV shows.
The South today bears a resemblance to the South my parents and grandparents knew, certainly, but there are also many urban spots and tourist meccas [Atlanta, Asheville, Savannah] that are evolving into places they would scarcely recognize.
In my opinion, that's not necessarily bad.
I decided to create The Word Ocean as a place to showcase my friends and others who are Southern, and write poetry, and who are interested in getting their voices heard. Nobody has to ape Faulkner or Welty or write about sweet tea or porch swings. The content is up to each poet.
What I want to see are poets who are honest and authetic and real. Sentiment is fine if it's not cloying or cliched. I will read everything I get, and try to feature new poets as well as established ones.
I should mention here that I am a freelance writer and I have been writing poetry since I was a kid. I currently write website materials and blogs for attorneys, play reviews, a website for parents, several personal blogs, and poetry.
My first poem was published in a national magazine when I was 14. My master's thesis [Boats Against the Current] is a collection of original poetry, on file at the University of Tennessee library. I still write poetry, occasionally go to readings, and I have friends who are published poets.
Poetry is what I write when I cannot stop myself. Unlike prose, my poetry is not pretty or measured or neat; it just helps me deal with the chaos sometimes.
I also blog daily over at my personal blog The Crab Chronicles.
Y'all are on the honor system. If you are born in any of these states* or if you spent most of your childhood in one of them, tell me so in a 50-75 word biography, and send me no more than 5 of your best poems. I will let you know probably within a week if I decide to publish them, and when that will happen.
Thanks!
Dee Thompson
Editor [[email protected]]
*Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Virginia, West Virginia