The Words of a Physicist, Part 1 poem collection
And my take on Bookleaf Publishing's #WriteAngle challenge
Hello guys, Dylan is back with another blast from the past (along with some poetry for you guys to read, for free!).
Going back three years ago, I was in the middle of a poetry writing challenge hosted by Bookleaf Publishing. Bookleaf is a small publishing firm out of India, which hosts two challenges - a reading challenge and a writing challenge. The latter of the two is the one that I partook in.
This challenge was known as the #WriteAngle challenge. The premise of this is the following - you pay a chunk of money (50 dollars at the time I did the challenge) and then on the day the challenge starts, you write one poem each day for 20 days. At the conclusion of the 20 day period, your poems would be collated together into a small book which one can buy on a variety of storefronts. Depending on the amount of books sold, you would get paid money. Some editions of this challenge included a guest judge that would look at the various submissions and then a certain number of people were chosen1.
There are no restrictions to the type of poetry you could put in, which for me is both a blessing, and a curse. I do like having some sort of structure, for example, a prompt to which I can build off of, but at the same time, having complete freedom to write whatever could allow me to produce my best work.
During this submission period, which ran from June 9-28, 2021, I wrote 24 poems, focused on a variety of topics. This meant that 4 of them would not see the light of day in the book… until now.
After the submission period it took quite a while to get the book published. It was not until the end of the year (in fact, it was New Year’s Eve) that the book finally made to online storefronts.
So now you might be thinking “Cool! I want to buy a copy!” Unfortunately, you can’t. The links to buy the book are dead, so I can only presume the book is out of print.
“But I still want to read them!” Well, thankfully I still have the poems in hand.
Recently on Threads an account by the name “readingwithallyjade” asked poets to post their poetry books so others can see it. I responded saying that I have a book out, but it’s out of print, and I should post the poems in it at some point.
Well, here you guys go:
To those who purchased the original version of the book: thank you. This version has some additional poems that didn’t make the cut, has titles for all the poems written, as well as attributions to inspiration sources. To those who have not - I hope you enjoy these poems as much as I did making them.
As for the challenge itself - while the premise is certainly strong, that a book will be published, it is a bit pricy to join it. Also, if you lose motivation it can be hard to catch back up, and if you can’t it’s a waste of money. The time it takes to get to market is also a factor, and so it might not be worth it if you want more content out quickly.
My take? If you want to do the challenge, go for it, but don’t expect to get your money back from taking part.
Feel free to share the poetry book around - it’s free (as in beer)! Also, feel free to subscribe. I might have more writing stuff soon.
I did do one of these challenges which were judged, but sadly, I was not selected. I still think the poems I wrote for that should see the light of day at some point.
Hey Dylan,
Curious, why did you choose to share your poetry as a PDF on Substack?
Best regards!