This is the main canoe poems page.
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Good Poems about Canoeing |
Wonderful poetry. (Newfoundland Canoeing Association)
Great stuff (Carrying Place Canoe Works)
Excellent. (U.S. Canoe Association)
Excellent Poems (Westlane Outers Club)
"Read joyfully."
"Read them over and over!"
"The cat's pajamas, the bees knees, the real McCoy of both writing and illustration." (Nancy Osborne)
I enjoy them very much. (Valley Ventures)
Much appreciated (Adventure Guide)
read joyfully (Sawyer Canoe Company)
Your work is just great (Voyageur Canoe Company)
"I look forward to the poems.""Your poetic calendar is pinned prominently over my desk."
"Do you wish to receive a credit note when we publish any poems?"
"Thank you for continuing to send us canoeing poems. We post in a very busy place (the men's room) so they are read by many. Several customers have commented that they look forward to each month's poem."
"I think your work is great - but how can you do this?"
"I especially liked the one you sent for last June. In fact, I liked it so much
that I carried it around with me and lost it. Could you send another?"
"Excellent. May we place them in our canoe news magazine?"
Wonderful poems! We have enjoyed them and shared them very much. Read them over and over! (Florida Canoeing and Kayaking Assoc. )
"Often we try to include the poems you submit to our office in our publications. They're great."
"Thanks again for the years of great poems."
"Thanks again for the poems. It's the calendar I refer to everyday over my desk."
"These are much appreciated poems."
"I enjoy them very much. Keep them coming."
"Great stuff. Thanks - keep up the good work."
"We look forward to August and September. Keep up the great work."
"Thank you for sending me your poems over the past years. I have really enjoyed them."
The Canoe Poems
I'm a happy canoer or canoeist, or whatever, so opne fine day I took to writing canoe poems.
That was a reasonable idea: canoers are generally intellectuals who like canoes and poems and trees and all that.
I wrote some damn fine canoeing poems.
But I'd had enough of rejection (most poems get rejected by most people most of the time).
So I got a list of every damn canoeing organization and journal and a lot of canoeing outlet stores in the North American continent.
And I made up a sheet of paper with a month's calendar and a canoeing poem on it, and mailed it off to all these places, With no return address!!
What a definitive way of handling poetic rejection!!!
Every month for a couple of years I mailed off these poems with the month calendar attached.
I figured there was a good chance that some people were tacking the poems up for the month. Which fit with my theory that poems had to be read more than once to be appreciated,
After a while....
I wondered if some of these had been mailed to places that no longer existed, like. And in a moment of utter bravery, I started enclosing response cards. Like, did they want to keep getting the poems?
I got such a positive response (from those sources that turned out to still exist) that I continued sending the canoe poems for five years.
One outfitter tacked each poems to the washroom wall, but people kept stealing them. My highest compliment!
Now I publish my own book, Love in a Canoe, in my basement, one copy at a time.
Links to Other Web Sites for canoeing poems