San Pedro River Review: 2021 or Kerouac's Highway Gone Wrong
DO NOT SUBMIT OUTSIDE THE FOLLOWING TWO SUBMISSION WINDOWS:
January 1st to January 31st, 2021 NOTE: We are also interested in international equivalents and takes on this theme:
Kerouac’s Highway Gone Wrong. What we look for is a sense of ragged travel, breakdowns in the hunger for elsewhere: give us your urban and rural grit, the highway noise -- its heat and stench, the frontage road’s silence; Richard Hugo’s “far empty town”; skipping town, travel by any means gone awry involving lost dreams, trains and buses someone boarded by mistake or delusion; love that went wrong in some distant place, bad dates, bad weather, failed romance. And found along the way: taverns, bars, dives, brothels, roadhouses, moonshiners, diners, truckers, trains, runaways, a motel to redefine “seedy”, the shuttered factory, carnivals and traveling circuses, gas stations and their snacks and bathrooms; bad coffee, hitchhikers, mongrel dogs, feral hogs, failing farms and ghost towns, cemeteries without keepers, the cigarette and whisky-throttled voices, sleet and snow, dust storms and dust devils. As Proust wrote, imagination bears upon absent, distant places.
FOOTNOTE ON THE THEME: The description above does not mean that we only seek poems reflecting downcast or hopeless situations. Resolution and redemption may emerge in poems reflecting the theme; Cormac McCarthy's "Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost" (Suttree).
Submit 1-3 poems
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Like finding shells on the beach, I love doing market research! And what I find, I love to share! I write in a variety of genres including children's, Christian, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, so these post follow along those lines. Check out my web site: www.sallyclark.info, for more about me.