Erica Goss is a poet, writer and instructor. She served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, from 2013-2016.
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. […]
Ekphrasis: (meaning “description” in Greek; expanded to mean “the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.”) Merriam-Webster: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art I published my first ekphrastic poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Ekphrasis, […]
Plenty, it seems. Ask any writer who’s been at the craft for awhile what inspires her and you might get this pithy answer: everything. Or nothing—“I don’t need inspiration,” says the truly advanced writer. “I can write a poem, or a story, or an essay, just by staring at the […]
I recently received an exquisite little treasure: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Poets & Writers Spill Their Worst Reading Experiences, edited by Richard Peabody of Gargoyle Magazine and Paycock Press. This charming book of flops and failures gladdened my heart, from its laugh-out-loud moments—i.e., Dinty W. Moore’s very first reading […]
“For her graphic imagination and her instinct for matching feeling to image, I chose Erica Goss’s poems. It is far easier to describe in language the push-pull and shove of emotional attraction than it is to locate and pinpoint the meaning of feeling in time and space. Put […]
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Erica Goss 