December’s Theme: Tracking Mud through the House

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving/weekend. I spent much of my long weekend in the mountains, where we had temperatures from bitter cold to chilly-but-nice. That’s the Appalachians for you. My mini vacation gave me some inspiration for our next monthly theme, but we’ll get to that.

November featured our regular contributors again, with a galumphing theme which carried the symbolic depth I had hoped it would. Continue reading “December’s Theme: Tracking Mud through the House”

November Theme: Galumphing Returns!

So kind of a dead month for the October poetry theme, huh? After rolling through various themes with a few submissions each, October featured a grand total of two submissions for the charity theme. Maybe I’ll just have to start spamming all of your message boards with poetry requests!

Or maybe the theme just wasn’t all that interesting, which is understandable, considering the last time we featured a non-sins/virtues theme was way back in June. (I agree, the charity theme was a bit lackluster, but do yourself a favor and go back and read through some of those previous sins/virtues poems from our writers. There were a lot of fascinating submissions.) Continue reading “November Theme: Galumphing Returns!”

Theme for October – the Virtue of Giving

Okay, so I realize that I promised to get this up yesterday, and that totally did not happen. But at least we have a whole month to write these poems! Oh right, unless you read my post on Tuesday, you probably don’t know that Schizophrenic Summers is changing to a month-long submission period.

Our last round of poems featured chastity as the theme, and produced one poem about holding women to certain standards (ideals?) and one about holding love to no standards at all.

Theme: Charity

Structure: Free verse Continue reading “Theme for October – the Virtue of Giving”

New Plans for Schizophrenic Summers

For those of you who have been keeping tabs on Red Strings in recent weeks, you may have noticed that the well has been… drier than usual. This can be attributed to numerous reasons: vacations, weddings, new jobs, crashing computers, more weddings; our writers have had a busy August and September. Continue reading “New Plans for Schizophrenic Summers”

Theme for September 23rd – Chastity – and you thought it was simple!

The virtue of temperance has historically encompassed a wide range of activities – after all, it “simply” means moderation via personal restraint or will. Although associated in modern parlance with food and drink, in particular alcohol, last week’s poems decided to look at temperance as it applies to less calorie-laden subjects: in speech and in modifying self-doubt
 
Chastity is another virtue that has been reduced to a sound bite in the modern day, but was historically much more complex. Chastity today seems to revolve around sexual activity, and if the news is any indication, contemporary conversations about chastity focus on teenagers and pre-marital sex.
 

Continue reading “Theme for September 23rd – Chastity – and you thought it was simple!”

Theme for August 26, 2014: Cruel to be Kind in the Right Measure

“We dig up diamonds by the score; A thousand rubies, sometimes more; But we don’t know what we dig ’em for; We dig dig dig a-dig dig…” Diligence in the digging of dwarfs. I think I saw Snow White for the first time when I was about seven and this catchy song was stuck in my head for days afterward. It took awhile to really appreciate how much work this virtue actually is, be it in the try, try again perseverance it necessitates or in the acceptance of its time consuming nature and perhaps fruitless outcome. But for now, on to the next one: Continue reading “Theme for August 26, 2014: Cruel to be Kind in the Right Measure”