An Invitation to Participate in the Virtual Poetorium for April 27th, 2021…

Dear Readers,

I am very pleased to announce that this month, my co-host Ron Whittle and I will be producing our ninth edition of the Virtual Poetorium (the tenth, if you count our special holiday Ho-hoetorium last December) with the one and only Eugenie Steinman (author of Persimmon: Poems and Recipes and popular host of the call-in radio program Radio Jail) as our featured poet. Like we did last month, I’d like to  once again open up this April’s Virtual Poetorium for anyone who would like to participate and invite all my fellow bloggers and faithful readers (or just anyone just happening to read this) to be a part of our unique online poetry gathering in print.

To be part of our virtual open mic, please send us one of your own original poems or stories (under 2000 words please) either in a Word document file or pasted in the body of an email along with your name, any opening remarks you care to make, and where your poem has appeared if it was previously published to poetorium@mail.com  by Friday, April 23rd. Also if you like, you can send us a photo of yourself to be posted above your poem, but that is totally optional.

Once again, we also need contributions to this month’s Poetorium Group poem, but to keep it fresh, we are changing it up a bit. To participate this month, please send us three separate lines with each starting with the phrase “A Poem Is… “.  The end word of each line also must rhyme with the words ” tea” or “fee”.  The reason we are requesting three separate lines is in case we receive duplicate or very similar lines and we need to make substitutions, but be assured at least one of your lines (if not all three) will be compiled and included in this month’s Virtual Poem. As always, all contributions will remain anonymous (unless otherwise requested). Like in the open mic, the deadline for submissions is the night of Friday, April 23rd.

We will also be continuing our monthly writing challenge in which we invite you to write in a different flash fiction or poetic form each month. This month’s challenge is to write some New-Style Twitterature, which are short stories written in 280 characters or less (this includes letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, but not spaces) – the same limit length of the most recent version of a tweet (as an alternative, you can also write Old-Style Twitterature which are just 140 characters or less  which was the length of a tweet before Twitter changed the rules). Please send us your best efforts by Friday, April 23rd to be included in this month’s Virtual Poetorium.

If you have any questions about submitting to the virtual open mic, the group Poetorium poem, the writing challenge, or anything else about the Virtual Poetorium itself, please leave them in the comments of this post, and I will try to answer them right away.

Thank you so very much for reading, my friends! I really appreciate everyone’s continued support of this blog, and hope to hear from you soon with your contributions to this month’s edition of the Virtual Poetorium!