Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Copyright 2007, Fox Broadcasting

Chris Richardson and Phil Stacey

This week, American Idol voted off two contestants, since no one was eliminated last week due to the charity special.

Host Ryan Seacrest started by bringing out three finalists: Melinda Doolittle, Phil Stacey and LaKisha Jones. After telling Melinda she was safe, he made the others sweat it out.

I can honestly say that at this point in the evening, I had no idea which of them would go home. Phil Stacey has been stepping up his game for the last several weeks, while many feel LaKisha has been slacking. If the votes had been based simply on last week's votes, many had predicted LaKisha would be going home, but apparently her powerhouse performance this week was enough to save her, because Ryan announced she was safe and that Phil was the one leaving.

Ironically, the song he'd sung the previous night, and which he sang as his final performance on the show, seemed appropriate, with lyrics like, "I'm going out in a blaze of glory." He made a point of walking down to the audience and greeting his fellow Navy seamen and his family, who had come to support him.

Then, after a couple more celebrity performances and some more videotaped segments, Ryan had the remaining finalists stand. He told Jordin Sparks that he'd played with her feelings enough last week, so he told her to sit down right away, and he brought Blake Lewis and Chris Richardson to the center of the stage.

While waiting for the results, Blake and Chris revealed they were best friends and said they were looking forward to spending the summer together on tour. But then the happy moment had to end, and Ryan announced Chris was going home.

This leaves a top four of Melinda, Jordin, LaKisha and Blake, which as I see it, is exactly the way it should be.

Attending the Literary Voices event this last weekend inspired me to get back on track with my writing career. I got a chance, while I was there, to meet with various writers and editors from the Philadelphia area, and they were encouraging me to send them my work. So Monday afternoon, I actually sat down and put together submissions to one of those magazines, as well as another that is run by a former president of the Penn State Monty Python Society.

I even wrote two poems while walking my dog, Una, on Monday, and another yesterday. One of my most productive periods writing poetry was when I just got out of grad school, when I was in the habit of writing regularly. I had a notebook I carried around, and I tried to write something almost every day.

When I was working in the city, I wrote poetry on the El and during my lunch break, when I used to hang out in the public parks in Old City, people watching. But for the last several years, I've been working from home and haven't set aside a regular time to write poetry. I've been writing other things, instead, such as reviews for Wild Violet, and, of course, Musings. But I haven't written a lot of poetry.

So it felt good yesterday to get back into that process. Just like my morning dog walk is devoted to dictating the day's Musing, I'm going to make a regular habit of writing poetry during my afternoon dog walk.

I also sought out some publication advice from someone I met at Philcon this year who works with writers to steer them away from publishing fraud and towards respectable, safe ways to get published. I asked her what to do with my poetry manuscript, and she suggested having as many of the individual poems published as possible, then see if an academic publisher would be interested in a collection.

I think I'm also going to consider sending the manuscript to the chapbook contests held by respectable publishers, such as universities. They choose one manuscript to publish, give you an award and print a certain number of copies.

As I've discovered with my first chapbook, Picturebook of the Martyrs, you have to do a lot of distribution on your own, which is very time consuming. I'd much rather have somebody else do the work for me.

More on American Idol:

Musings on American Idol Season 6 (2007)

Musings on American Idol Season 5 (2006)

Musings on American Idol Season 4 (2005)

Musings on American Idol Season 3 (2004)

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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