Poet, Writer, Instructor
I discovered wordpools in Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy. “I collect…hats, coins, cougars, old Studebakers,” she writes. “That is, I collect the words. Pith helmet, fragment, Frigidaire, quarrel, love seat, lily. I call gathering words this way creating a wordpool. This process helps free us to follow the words and write poems.” When I read this, I’d been writing… Continue reading Dive Into the Wordpool
I like to tell my friends that I never, ever have writer’s block, and yes, I rarely have the full-blown version. I do, however, experience creative slowdowns, periods where I produce less work than I’d like, or my ideas seem stale, or I feel a lack of interest in writing. This is more dangerous than… Continue reading How I Banish Writer’s Block
More than two years ago, I started tinkering with a poem about my long drives up and down Interstate Highway 5, drives that began when I was a child and continued, with regularity, until the present day. My first note was an entry in my journal, dated December 15, 2017: “I cross the border going… Continue reading The Making of a Winning Poem: Writing “The State of Jefferson”
Attending an AWP Conference is exhilarating and exhausting. Watching thousands of introverted writers awkwardly networking is, of course, part of the fun; being too overwhelmed to even nod at someone you know is not. At the most recent AWP (Portland 2019) I admit to moments of complete and utter bewilderment, whether I was trying to… Continue reading Getting the Most Out of AWP
I was reading my Christmas present, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963, when I came across a mention of syllabic verse. Plath’s poem “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” is written in stanzas of seven lines, each line containing seven syllables. In a letter to her brother Warren, dated June 11, 1958, she writes about the… Continue reading Syllabic Verse
Two of the books I received for review consideration in 2018 came from poets who live and write in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California: Starshine Road by L.I. Henley, and Waking Life by Cynthia Anderson. Henley writes of growing up in the Mojave, of walking down dirt roads as a child past a house filled… Continue reading The Poetry of Place
A couple of times a year, I search my submission spreadsheets for poems with the dubious distinction of having collected the most rejections so far. If these poems are not currently under consideration for publication, they go into a special category: Most Rejected Poems.Then I print them out and spread them on the floor of… Continue reading Saving the Most-Rejected Poems
I found this list in a 2003 letter from my father. At the time, I was beginning my MFA degree in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. My father was worried that I would succumb to the "tricks of rhetoric, which are the opposite of poetry." In the same letter, he went on to… Continue reading Flowers of Rhetoric: A List of Obscure Literary Terms
I’ve come to realize something about the reviewing process. Every book I review is unique, and therefore, dictates the type of review it receives. I call this style of reviewing The Exploratory Review, which combines elements of narrative, description, and exposition. In the exploratory review, the book leads the way instead of the reviewer. A… Continue reading The Exploratory Review
Recently, I came across an article titled “An Anatomy of the Long Poem”. The author, Rachel Zucker, states “there are many short poems I admire and, of course, too many wonderful mid-length poems to name that I adore. But I have a special love for a good long poem.” This gave me pause. I admit… Continue reading The Long Poem Project