All my life, poetry has been a foreign language to me. I’ve always been a decent writer, but the times I’ve been forced to try my hand at writing a poem, results have been disastrous. My English professor in college accused me of cheating… he was certain someone else had written my poetry assignment because it sucked so much compared to my prose. I tried to woo a lady once ages ago with stanzas instead of paragraphs that ended in mockery.
I’ve always shied away from poetry while running Apex. I published Brandy Schwan’s collection (and a subsequent chapbook), but that was after a great amount of worry, and getting the opinion of editors with an ear for quality telling me the collection was good. There’s an occasional poem in Apex Magazine, but those were published at the discretion of the editor-in-chief (Lynne/Cat).
As an editor, I’m keenly aware of a narrative’s rhythm. How does it sound when read aloud? Does the flow match the mood or scene. Word choice is important. Especially in short form.
Concepts that seems crucial to editing and understanding short fiction would seem to apply to poetry. If they do, I’m not able to grok them.
This leads me to the gist of the post (yay, five paragraphs in!). I want to introduce Katerina Stoykova-Klemer. She’s notable to me because she’s from Lexington. She also operates a successful literary poetry press named Accents Publishing.
How Accents has escaped my notice for this long befuddles me. I really need to get out more.
Katerina is an awesome person. She’s originally from Bulgaria and has a cool reading voice. Accents Publishing produces nice looking books. The poetry inside of them sounds great when read, and others give it praise (because my praise should not be trusted in this case). I hope you check out Accents.
Accents Website: http://www.accents-publishing.com/
Katerina’s Personal Website: http://www.katerinaklemer.com/
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