Global Poemic

India-based poet/curator VK Sreelesh and U.S.-based poet/curator Betsy Andrews invite poets the world over to contribute to Global Poemic: Kindred Voices on the Era of COVID-19

In this unprecedented era of extremity under Covid-19, these poets share stories that differ across nations and other structures and create a web across the poetry world. Poets can bear witness and share what we witness. 

Their guidelines are simple.

1) Please email 1 – 5 previously unpublished poems and a brief bio to curators@globalpoemic.com. The curators may also solicit poems from poets. Poems are accepted and published on an ongoing basis.

2) For poems in languages other than English, please provide an English translation. Both the original and the translation will be published if accepted.

3) We are looking for poems of any form that engage with this era of a global pandemic. We welcome poems that recognize the multifarious, complicated, messy nature of the human condition. We do not welcome, and will not publish, poems that peddle hatred or bigotry of any kind.

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Prompt: Aubade

An aubade is a morning love poem/song, though it is sometimes about lovers separating at dawn. If you search for aubades online, you will find many using that as a title that do not follow the morning-lovers motif. Since there is no fixed meter or rhyme for the form, there is usually no way to identify a poem easily as an aubade.

This month's model poem is one that I found that follows that original definition. What I find interesting in Dore Kiesselbach's "Aubade" is that the loved ones are a mother and child.

Aubade is a French word meaning "dawn serenade" that first appears in English in the 1670s. In English, it came to be used for a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn, and later it came to refer to songs sung in the morning hours. Today, we think of a serenade as a song sung in the evening, so a "morning serenade" is a bit of an oxymoron.

In earlier centuries, the aubade had an even narrower definition of being a lyric sung, said or addressed to a sleeping lover by the departing lover. That may be an idea for your own aubade this month.

We will be strict with our prompt and ask that you write a poem set in the morning and related to leaving a loved one - "leaving" and "loved one" are open to interpretations.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 31, 2020

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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