Tag Archives: “Searching the Parking Lot for a Poem”

Stripping It Bare,   Concerning “Searching for the Parking Lot for a Poem”

This poem was published in Sulphur River Review. And the publisher of Sulphur River Review submitted it for a contest, without telling me, and it was chosen for an anthology published in Dallas named Best Texas Writing. This poem and Found Things are the two that have gotten the best attention. [I find it important to note that the notice they have received is pretty tiny compared to great American poems or even good contemporary poems, but I am grateful anyway. And these kinds of things keep me wanting to write better.] The story of the poem is simply that I was in a failing marriage and a woman was in an unhappy marriage and we met. I read my poems at an event and she attended and when the event was over I walked her to her car. She went to her home and I went to mine. About two months later I wrote this poem.   The first line came from the fact that I had not written a poem for about a year since “Found Things.” “Though I’ve been silent several months” sounds better than “Though I haven’t been writing poems for a year.” Continue reading