Rhyme Time

[Bill Crider]

There's an article in the new issue of Mystery Scene about crime writers who started out to be poets. Sadly, my name isn't mentioned, though my first publications were poems. I published in several "little" magazines, and I even got paid for poems published in The Runner and Grit. I still write a poem now and then.

So 'fess up, now. How many poets are there among us? I know, for example, that Donna Moore has a poem coming up in next month's EQMM.

[Bill Crider]

So, for that matter, did Chandler and Hammett. In fact, I believe that Hammett published early pieces under a pen name because he wanted to reserve his real name for his poetry.

[Jude Hardin]

I wrote poetry in college, won some awards and had some published. I had the good fortune to work with Maxine Kumin (Pulitzer winner), Stephen Spender (Auden's pal), and Jon Silken (a wonderful English poet and all-around fun guy) during my college years. Here's the poem I started my blog with last year.

My favorite poet is still good old Robert Frost. :)

[Karyn J. Powers]

Jude, that was a great tribute! Thanks for the link.

[Jude Hardin]

Thank you, Karyn.

[Bill Crider]

Frost is a favorite of mine too. That's a fine poem.

[Jude Hardin]

Thanks, Bill!

[Gerald So]

Language/word choice has always fascinated me, but when I first had to decide what I wanted to write, prose seemed safer footing than poetry. In the middle of my first teaching stint, I handled the HTML coding for the faculty poetry site and inadvertently honed my ear. Around the same time, I was showing my fiction to a colleague who graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and she kept saying, "I can tell you're a poet," even though I had purposely focused on prose..

Now I can't help but write both. As Karyn wrote, one is almost part of my process for the other.

[Robin Burcell]

Looking back, all my first works were poems. I loved the rhythm, and I especially loved the challenge of finding a rhyming word for those poems meant to rhyme. I have to wonder if many of us didn't start off that way, one, because we loved to read, two, because the writer in us was itching to write, and poems seemed like an "easy" start. Three, when we tackled our first poems, we were challenged by the discovery that it wasn't so easy.

In many respects, writing a novel is a lot like writing poems, finding the cadence, the flow of the words so that they sound right to the ear. (I guess this would be the author's voice, no?)

The only published poem I can lay claim to is the one that appears in one of my books. Never had one published before that, never tried.

[Bill Crider]

Pretty clever to work that poem into the book. I believe there are a lot of writers who have done that.