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Accents Craft Series

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After a successful launch, we continue offering The Accents Craft Series. We intend for these to deliver brief but powerful bursts of energy and inspiration on interesting topics. You can attend in person and/or online.

Topics:
1/20/2020 6:00pm-7:15pm Chapbooks vs full-length poetry books – purpose, differences, expectations.
1/27/2020 6:00pm-7:15pm Revising and editing your poems – techniques, ideas, best practices.
2/3/2020 6:00pm-7:15pm Marketing your poetry book – todos before and after publication; transforming from a writer into an author.
2/10/2020 6:00pm-7:15pm Ghazals – history, examples, rules and in-class writing exercise.
2/17/2020 6:00pm-7:15pm Villanelles – history, examples, rules and in-class writing exercise.

The sessions are accessible to anyone with a device such as a computer or smartphone and an internet connection. The Accents Craft Series are taught by Katerina Stoykova, owner and senior editor of Accents Publishing. Every Monday 6:00-7:15pm,. Sign up a-la-carte for $25.00 a session, or all 5 for $20 each. Write to accents.publishing@gmail.com if you have questions or to reserve your spot.

Accents on Books: Dear Youngstown: A Love Letter Home

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Dear Youngstown: A Love Letter Home

The poems in Karen Schubert’s Dear Youngstown are deeply rooted in a sense of place, and brimming with animated detail: they might be stamped on the city’s concrete sidewalks, leading the reader on a guided tour of its neighborhoods and landmarks.

Through the poet’s plain-spoken narratives, we enter the atmosphere of the Old Ward Bakery with its “filmy windows stuck shut;” every sense responds to “rat-tail beets, blueberries, basil, muffins and tie-dye” mingled with “jazz, sultry” and banter at “Farmer’s Market.” 

The poet’s affection and concern for her adopted  hometown resonate throughout. We raise a glass at Cedars in “Closing the Bar,” pass an abandoned house with “swayback porch roof/gutters choke and hatch saplings,” in a row of homes slated for razing in “kitty corner from the empty high school.” 

Dear Youngstown is a wonderfully crafted love letter to the beautiful grit of a city on its knees, but rising.

DEAR YOUNGSTOWN
41 pps
retail price $15.00
ISBN #978-1-64092-999-9
Night Ballet Press, February, 2019

 

Barbara Sabol

Barbara Sabol is the author of the poetry collection, Solitary Spin, and two chapbooks, Original Ruse and The distance Between Blues. Barbara’s awards include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council and the Mary Jean Irion Poetry Prize. She reviews poetry books for the blog, Poetry Matters.

ACCENTS POETRY CRAFT SERIES

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ACCENTS POETRY CRAFT SERIES

We’re very happy to start offering live online craft sessions. We intend for these to deliver brief but powerful bursts of energy and inspiration on interesting topics. The sessions are accessible to anyone with a device such as a computer or smartphone and an internet connection.

The sessions are taught by Katerina Stoykova, owner and senior editor of Accents Publishing.

Every Monday 6:00-7:15pm
Sign up a-la-carte for $25.00 a session, or all 5 for $20 each.

Topics:
11/11 Developing a brilliant voice
11/18 Writing very short poems
11/25 Quotes, conversations and scenes in poetry
12/2 Arranging and titling a poetry manuscript
12/9 Submitting your work — pitfalls and strategies

Write to accents.publishing@gmail.com to reserve your spot.

Depending on interest/requests, local people may meet face-to-face.

Online Workshop Opportunity

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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

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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.