When subscribing you receive one poem per week as text with a photograph by me
Or one of my original mail art pieces front and back
ALONG WITH…
A VOICE-OVER AUDIO ENBED of me reading the featured
poem with a few additional un-rehearsed thoughts/BRIEF ramblings.
I love to cook and invite friends over for a meal at The Hit and Miss Cafe’. Expect the same here. Poetry is personal to the reader with each reader extracting something of their own from it, is either fed by it or not, and possibly curious enough to explore the next poem.
What has formed my writing? Well, I’m a military brat, high school drop-out GED degreed, first to complete college, youngest of three. My parents, thankfully, had a sense of humor. Both from the Boston area; atheist father who taught me to question everything, liked his bourbon and B52 Bombers and a lighthearted mother who loved the father, ironed fatigues wearing lipstick and smoking menthols.
I wrote early on sporadically then earnestly in journals when overwhelmed by life. Art/Psychology major, mostly clay, some painting, ended up side-lined by a major health challenge out of college, multiple surgeries equaling home-bound years. This is to share that I’ve lived my life a little backwards, old when young and young when older.
I’m forever grateful to have studied with a few wonderful poets who write, teach, perform and publish broadly.
The profoundly ecstatic poet, teacher, and publisher Judyth Hill author of Wage Peace poem, numerous books and Muse On The Move Adventures!
World traveler lyrical cross genre’ poet collaborative performer Cecilia Wolloch author of TSIGAN: The Gypsy Poem.
Nadia Colburn poet and teacher at Align Your Story.
I continue to delve into craft essays by poets I want to understand more at the Poetry Foundation. Study of poetry is lifelong. Any craft or precision I’ve gained is only made possible through live writers I’ve had the pleasure of learning from and the sacred lineage of all poets throughout history.
Once a poem is made, it’s life-winged which brings me to the reason I place some work on Substack. I’ve been a lazy submitter to journals etc.. I work hardest under pressure. So, I created PINTAIL POETRY on Substack to challenge myself to show up
go through my folders of finished waiting pieces or a new piece. Either way, it gets another edit here. Somehow seeing it on the screen is helping me to organize
my chapbook projects. Yay! and pushing me to submit. Yes, that means putting it into my non-routine routine. Stick with me and what we’ll soon have is a little link to some real poems bound and in print!
You have gifted me by your response in subscribing, reading, liking and commenting when you feel it. THANK YOU, to all my readers from the first friends and family to subscribers who found me through other generous Substack writers, to everyone finding me in this realm of screen where we work to connect.
To honor submission guidelines of small presses and journals, I don’t cross post poems on Instagram or Facebook. Publishing on Substack is okay by some because it is subscription only.
I practice the craft of making and reading other’s poetry as a way in and through, as antidote, to ignite, sustain, to alchemize what is hard, exquisite, and all the in-betweens, as secular sustenance, a place of intermission, a tie of belonging made from what poetry has always been made of, human experience collaged as salve, smelling salt, mirrors, doors, all of it! To un-barrier love, de-weaponize from the core outward.
When nothing makes sense or makes sense in ways I cannot face directly, I work in the garden, my wild square room where I turn to the earth for solace, beauty and direction.
If there were no birds, the shape-note singers, would there be language?
I’m challenged by the discomfort between my knowing and my doing. Where to put my hands?
From human's first creative mark, the arts thrive as a necessary impulse in attempts of sensemaking, our sustaining bridge, our psychological myth making sacred vehicle to recognize sameness.
I long to exhilarate more often in this exquisitely limited existence. For me, clarity comes from nature-- wonder's instrument.
I believe in unassigned goodness, the need to belong, to be and to bear witness of one another.
I believe to best save/serve the earth and everyone-everything on it is to recognize we are the species creating history.
Nature, its constant messaging, sings or cries all the directions needed. Our sacred duty clear. Interdependence.
Transformation is witnessed in our inborn love and in the growing things, the elements we are all new cousins to.
PINTAIL POETRY is a reader supported publication. If you feel moved to subscribe for free or any level, I will show up for you. In this precious life, choices of time spent as a reader are endless. I’m wrapping you in a sincere warm blanket of THANK YOUs for stopping in, I sure hope you are rewarded by our time together and possibly gain connection to one another in the process.
Love, Kristen
A weekly poem - something in your inbox that doesn’t take up space!
+ bonus ears up track now and then
"we should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you." ~Slyvia Plath
