An Open Letter to Vocal Media
Stanzas require spaces
Dear Vocal Media,
Yes, it’s me again. I know I have been harassing you and that this is the fourth time I have written about my poem that I submitted for your Color is Pride Challenge. The problem is still not resolved — and the contest done and dusted.
I worked hard to create my personal contribution to meet the requirements of your inspiring contest. You asked for it to be about what makes me unique, diverse, and amazing while addressing the subject of equal rights within the LGBTQ community.
Well, you didn’t exactly say that last part but one would have to be a moron not to include some reference to gay pride. You clearly outlined that Moleskine was sponsoring the challenge and dishing out fifteen $2K prizes and part of the winners’ obligations was to work with them in their Pride month campaign.
The other guidelines were pretty clear and reasonable:
We’re looking for poems that use an innovative structure or traditional poetic form and creative use of language, evoke a response, and use the concept of color effectively.
And this is where my problem lies. My poem, as it appears on your platform, does not represent the structure that I intended. Despite giving it back to me three times to correct, and making some suggestions — like using ellipses and dashes to break up the stanzas — it is still not right.
Frustratingly, when I look at it in my drafts, it is perfectly fine. I even added unwanted periods at the end of each stanza to fix the issue but — sigh — it is still glaringly wrong.
What concerns me more, however, is that you host a platform for submitting poetry and admit that it does not support writing a stanza.
Vocal’s editor is not compatible with breaking poems up into stanzas by using spaces.
I find this rather strange given the meaning of the word stanza and how to actually accomplish writing one.
Stanzas in poetry are like paragraphs in prose. Both stanzas and paragraphs include connected thoughts, and are set off by a space… The pattern of a stanza is determined by the number of feet in each line, and by its metrical or rhyming scheme. Source.
Offset by a space. Hmmm.
Perhaps your platform was trying to tell me something; that my rhyming poem needed some revamping from the traditional four-line stanza? That throwing in a twelve-liner and following it up with an eight was meeting the innovation requirement? After all, you managed to separate the ‘yellow’ and ‘green’ verses.
Or perhaps you — or worse, the judges — think I have completely lost the plot and can’t even structure a stanza let alone write a poem? Maybe they were turned off by the structure, instead of being illuminated by the content.
No, this is not sour grapes or a whine about not winning 2K. My heartiest of congratulations to all the successful poets!
I hope you can fix the stanza glitch before I write another poem that requires spaces. I’d hate to put you through my whining again.
