Newsletter: Fiddleheads & Floss Would Like Your 2 Cents

Would you like to play Curator today?

I would like to invite you to read some of my latest work, but with a bit of your input. It’s easy and won’t take too much of your time — and you get to throw in your 2 cents.

Here are a few poems from the last two months: I’d like to know if you would have chosen them for distribution?

If you are a reader of Medium work, but aren’t necessarily familiar with what “selection for distribution” means, here’s a brief explanation:

Medium Curators are a team of professionals that work for the platform. Every day they comb through thousands of Medium submissions and choose quality posts to “distribute.” This means they are assigned a category or categories and then they are distributed out in emails, placed on the home page, and circulated more widely for Medium readers to see them, click, and read. It is a stamp of approval on the work and one that is highly regarded among Medium writers.

Here’s the catch: poetry is rarely chosen. And there are thousands of poetry submissions each day. SO many. As a poet here on the Medium platform, my work falls into a very widely competitive genre and it is very hard to get my poetic works seen by the many readers that come here every day to read quality pieces. In the past 2 months I have written 12 poems and 2 of them were selected for distribution.

I’d like to know your thoughts. What makes a good poem to you? What kinds of poetry do you enjoy reading? Here are a few of mine, if you’d like to read them and comment whether or not you think they should have been chosen as quality poetry to be distributed.

Take a look:

The first one, These Shared Walls was selected, the others I’ve listed here were not. And I’d like to know your humble opinion. Feel like pretending to be a Curator today?

Prose poem Morning Blooms in Birdsong is a wilderness morning greeting over coffee. You’ll want to come along! Another prose poem is the opposite — a bitter look at impoverished urban living in The Abstract is Absent Here. Etch Me Upon the Glass is an emotive poem about feeling displaced after a breakup and the fear of being forgotten. The Morning Alights is a poem in form, the Pantoum.

Thank you, dear reader, for showing up each day to support the literary work of writers and poets. I especially thank you for reading my work and for any comments, claps, shares, and highlights that let me know you appreciate my work. It means everything.

Until next time,

Christina