Southwest News Hearld Poetry

Way back in the early to mid 90’s, I sent in about six or so submissions to the Southwest News-Hearld‘s poetry section Thoughts In Verse.

Although the poetry here is not the best in the world and I am pretty sure the editorial standards for choosing which poetry got published was no more complicated then making sure the same poet did not run in subsequent issues, it was the first thing I ever wrote with the intention of making it public.

Luckily, although I no longer have physical copies of the newspapers I was in, I do have pictures and scans of the poems themselves, cut out from an extra copy I bought at the time and pasted in a notebook.

Recently I bought a new PC and I was going through all my files and figured it would be an easy and fun thing to put back out there.

I have no clue which order these were published in, beyond knowing that The Old Green Chair was the first. It also is the only one I can remember writing. It was based on a (wait for it) old green chair we had in the house I grew up in.

I imagined that the chair was hundreds of years old and made up fictional people that sat in it through the ages…

That poem was submitted about the same time as My Chance and Life is an Eagle. The rest are either about the same time or a couple of years later.

The paper itself still exists, and despite the quality of the poetry it is nice to know I have been part of that publications history in a small way.

 

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