Author: Erica Goss, Poet

13 Ways to Support Poetry – guest blog post by Dick Allen

/ Erica Goss, Poet / Leave a comment

Thanks to Trish Hopkinson and Dick Allen for this wonderful list! I especially like 2, 3, 4, 12, and 13.

Trish Hopkinson

Great guest blog post rewind up today from Dick Allen… the 13 ways to support poetry below include what to ask your local library, how to support the poetry community, and quotes from others in the lit mag industry.

“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet [humans] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”—William Carlos Williams

1. Ask your local public libraries and college and university libraries and even perhaps public school libraries to regularly order and display books of contemporary poetry. A first guideline to encourage them might be to ask these libraries to make sure they have available the current year’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of poems, and probably the current year’s National Book Award book of poems, the current year’s National Book Critics Circle Award book of poems, the current year’s Poets Prize book of poems, the current National…

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Organizing the Field

/ Erica Goss, Poet / 7 Comments

I’ve been so excited about my new poetry project, Field Notes, that I forgot how difficult it is to organize a poetry collection. So far, the 40-odd poems I've assembled fall into the following themes: Tree, Plant, Weather, Flowers, Seed, Insects, Earth, Grass, Compost, Bird, Stone, Ocean, Animal, Desert My first thought was to put the poems into seasonal categories, i.e., Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. … Continue reading Organizing the Field

Field Notes

/ Erica Goss, Poet / 2 Comments

During much of this spring, I’ve been in a creative lull – not exactly writer’s block but a definite slowdown. I wrote a few poems, I kept up with my twice-a-month blog posts and the newsletter, I wrote daily entries in my journal, but the energy I normally bring to my creative writing felt muted. … Continue reading Field Notes

An Appreciation: Terrance Hayes’s “The Blue Terrance”

/ Erica Goss, Poet / 5 Comments

My first encounter with Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Blue Terrance” occurred in my car. It was the spring of 2009 and I’d been listening to a CD of an episode of “The Playlist,” the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, on my way from one teaching job to another. The drive from Saratoga to Cupertino took about ten … Continue reading An Appreciation: Terrance Hayes’s “The Blue Terrance”