“Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.” —Virginia Woolf In the famous, book-length essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), Virginia Woolf comments on the disempowerment faced by women throughout history. The lack of opportunity and resources, she claims, have kept […]
A former pastor of mine argued that the Biblical first act of human speech was poetry: Adam calling Eve “bone of my bone/flesh of my flesh.” This experience of woman’s creation was so spectacular to Adam that couldn’t respond with a simple narrative. There was something supernatural, seemingly […]
Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite poets, published his first book of poetry, Harmonium, when he was 44 and didn’t publish another collection until Ideas of Order, when he was 57. He went on to publish five more collections of poetry. E. B. Moore published her first chapbook of poetry New […]
The End. Wouldn’t it be a relief if you could just end a poem like that? Every reader would know the poem had resoundingly concluded. However, most of us would like to be more subtle with our poetic craft, to signal the end with the structure of the poem, […]
Last year, just in time for the spooky season, visual artist Sally Jane Brown and I produced an art and poetry book about West Virginia cryptids, What We Do In The Hollows. Because we’d been longtime collaborators in our day jobs, working together on Hollows was a natural […]
A poem with “after” and another poet’s name underneath the title is an “after” poem. A good example is Jane Zwart’s “All my Life I was a Bride married to Amazement,” after Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.” Identifying a previous poem that a new poem is “after” indicates […]
Humans are creatures of habit. It’s tempting to find one or two poetic forms you like and stick with them for the rest of your life. But don’t let yourself get complacent! No matter where you are on your poetry journey, it’s always useful to experiment with new […]
Love, death, nature: these themes inspire poems every single day. But great poetry doesn’t have to stem from heartbreak or existential crises. Original, quirky, and random subjects can be just as fun to read and write about. From light-hearted to deeply thought-provoking, here are five fresh, intriguing poetry […]
My reputation as a performance poet is centered around my joy of incorporating music, theater, other poets, even dance into my poetry presentations. While I would not insist most poets and writers take the path I have chosen, I would encourage every writer to dabble in at least […]
I’m reading two books right now. The first is Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning The Sixth Extinction, which painstakingly documents how humans are causing catastrophic die-offs of everything from coral reefs and forests to amphibians and mammals. Kolbert elucidates how this biodiversity loss is quickly approaching the scale of the […]
