CSC professor’s poem published
CHADRON -- The potential misfortune of accidentally driving into a snowbank provided inspiration for a poem by Chadron State College English and Humanities Professor Dr. Thomas Deane Tucker that was published in the most recent edition of the Cider Press Review, a prestigious journal of contemporary poetry.
Tucker’s poem, The Other Side, is one of 21 poems in the journal’s first quarterly issue of 2024. Although it describes an incident familiar to many who drive the region’s highways in winter, the poem comes from a totally imagined experience, Tucker said.
The author of two books on academic subjects and editor of a third, Tucker has also been writing poetry for nearly 30 years. In contrast to the lengthy and tedious research for academic books, he said poetry can come spontaneously.
Writing poetry is a way of breaking out of logical, rational thinking and becoming fully present, Tucker said.
“It’s a form of meditation. A poem creates a new world which, paradoxically, has been there all along,” he said.
This isn’t the first of Tucker’s poetic efforts to appear in literary publications. He won a prize for a poem published in Ice magazine in the early 1990s and in 2019 was finalist for a Best of the Net award for a work published in 805Lit + Art.
Being selected for publication in a literary journal isn’t easy. The California-based Cider Press Review publishes only about 11 percent of submissions it receives, according to Duotrope, a website that tracks the information for writers.
Tucker said he uses another website, poets.org, to submit finished pieces that he thinks have a chance to win approval from literary journal editors, but frequently comes up empty-handed.
“I could paper the walls in my entire kitchen with rejection letters,” he said.
The contemporary flourishing of poetry, reflected in the hundreds of literary magazines that now accept online submissions for publication, comes from the way poems help people see the world and themselves in a different way, according to Tucker.
“Poetry is a form of communication that resonates with our emotions,” he said. “It is a form of connection both back to ourselves and to humanity in general.”
Tucker’s poem and the other pieces in Volume 25, Issue 6 of the Cider Press Review can be found at ciderpressreview.com.
Category: Campus News