Outside The Lines

A literary column

By Marcia Diane

Cake

Look, you
want it
you devour it
and then, then
good as it was
you realize
it wasn’t
what you
exactly
wanted
what you
wanted
exactly was
wanting

By Noah Eli Gordon

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

I thought I’d just start right out with the poem this column. It is so, oh stark. Here’s what the poet says about it:

Small as it is, this poem deals with the continually fleeting and bewildering conditions of desire, fulfillment, ambition, guilt, and happiness. There’s some ambiguity in the ending, which can be read as both the lack of a direction or the direction of that which is lacking. Sometimes poets get to have their cake and eat it too.”

Noah is assistant professor in the MFA program of creative writing at the University of Colorado Bolder. He has eight published works of poetry and his very own Wikipedia page.

An advocate of small press culture, he penned a column for five years on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: review of book, which I didn’t know when I picked him out of the line-up of my daily inbox delivery from Poetry.org.

See, getting published, er outside of Rocky Point Times, is trick…hence the increasing popularity of chapbooks and on-line journal publishing. When you think about it our options are actually broader today than ever.

So, if Noah Eli Gordon can and does encourage us, why not; plus then we’d be able to have our cake and eat it too.

Join us won’t you for our very own on-line writing group at: m.diane.writeon@gmail.com

We submit our original creative works second Friday of every month. And often times have fun chatter back and forth about one of our favorite poets or poems…and how to keep on keeping on writing.