Carnival of Aces: October Call for Submissions

Hey all! This month I am hosting the Carnival of Aces, a monthly blogging carnival centered around asexuality! For more information on this project, see its masterpost on The Asexual Agenda. Tl;dr, a host provides a specific topic to be discussed, and others write blog posts or poems, make videos, etc. in response! Posts for this call for submissions can be sent to me as links in the comments below, or emailed to me at bougic88@uwosh.edu. If you’d like me to post your response for you, send me your text/images/etc., and I can put them up here!

The theme I’ve come up with for this month’s round of the carnival (fairly self-indulgently) is asexuality and poetry! As an aro/ace/genderqueer person who also identifies as a poet, all of these identities are ones I think about frequently. There’s a fair amount of writing out there about asexuality and writing in general, but most of these dialogues have focused on prose works, and fiction, specifically.

My prompt for this month, then, is one that can be taken in several ways. Feel free to write about your experiences as an ace person who writes or reads poetry, or write an actual poem for your submission! If you’d like, share a list of recommendations of poems that resonate with your asexual identity. My aim here is to connect two subjects–asexuality and poetry–that, thus far, haven’t often been written about as two intersecting topics for conversation. 

Some questions and suggestions to prompt you on your journey this month: (Feel free to stray from these suggestions and do something else!)

• Have you ever read a poem you felt could describe your asexual experience/identity? What was that like?
• Do you know of any ace poets? What are your favorite pieces of theirs?
• Have you ever tried to write a poem about being ace? How did that go?
• Is it difficult to express an identity like asexuality through poetry?
• Do you identify as an ace poet? How do these two identities intermingle within you?
• How can poetry describe asexual identity better than prose-style writing?
• Have you ever read a poem about being ace at a reading/open mic night? What was that experience like?
• Suggestion: write a poem about being ace! Or anything! Post the result, or post about how it felt to attempt writing a poem of this kind.
• Suggestion: do a video of you reading a poem! Alternatively, post an audio version on Soundcloud or Bandcamp.

To close, here are a few places I’ve found some of my favorite poems in–check them out at your leisure:

• OUT/CAST: A JOURNAL OF QUEER MIDWESTERN WRITING AND ART
• The Asexual Journal
• Crooked Arrow Press, Issue 1: Platonic Love Poems
• Analog Submission Press
• Poets.org

I hope all of you are doing well, and happy blogging!