I was deep into W.S. Merwin’s last book, Garden Time, when I felt the urge to write a poem. Garden Time has a dreamy, disquieting quality; Merwin writes about the passage of time, about the mystery contained in calendar days, and about how he can clearly see his life coming to an end. […]
As we begin National Poetry Month’s twenty-sixth year, my thoughts turn to the tiny bit of extra attention poetry and poets receive during this time. In April, Poets Laureate revel in their brief moments in the sun, coming up with creative ways to force poetry into the attention of […]
When I was eleven years old, a friend of my parents gave me Diane Wakoski’s 1968 poetry collection, Inside the Blood Factory. Needless to say, the poems were far over my head, but some of the lines stood out to me, even at that young age—from “House of the Heart:” […]
“A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals.” – Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life In “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,” an essay in Synthesizing Gravity, Kay Ryan writes, “Isn’t it odd to think that in order to listen we must be a little bit relieved of the intention […]
I just finished writing a poem, and I’m worn out. For days I walked around in that weird stage I call “pre-poem anxiety,” which feels almost like a period of mourning: what the hell have I been doing with my time, not writing a poem? I’m plagued with […]
Originally posted on BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog:
It’s Giving Tuesday! A hyped-up commercialized day of charity to balance out the hyped-up commercialized days of shopping! You’re probably getting exhortations from every nonprofit you’ve ever lent your email to, plus the charities who bought your email from them. It’s…
Here’s to another year of celebrating poetry! Each book I reviewed in 2021 was a tremendous gift. As we endured a second pandemic year, poets wrote about navigating an unquiet and often frightening world, about Nature, humanity, and relationships, about heredity, abuse, and the rewards of long love. […]
If you’re a writer, artist, musician or other creative, how do you get noticed? Is it enough to be good? How will people find you? One way that’s become popular in the age of the Internet is to send out bits and pieces of your creative process, sharing […]
The blank page. A rectangle of absence, it fills the writer with equal parts expectation and dread. A stark reminder of the writer’s apartness, it demands that you pay attention to it and not your family, dogs, messy house, or whatever else might distract you. We could compare […]
I’m a dedicated freewriter. I especially like that freewriting has roots in poet Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness, “spontaneous prose,” the Surrealist Movement’s “automatic writing,” and in Yeat’s “trance-writing.” (Check out this videopoem by Helena Postigo, “I Think of Dean Moriarity.”) My first introduction to freewriting was in a college English class in 1980. […]
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