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 […]
I figure if you’re here at Trish’s website, you must write poems or care about poetry. Me too, three bags full, and yet sometimes I’ve wondered if we poets aren’t a little bit like salmon—working our fins off just trying to hold our places in the current, building […]
I used to be a perfectionist “No work of art is ever completed, just abandoned” – Paul Valery We all know this, and yet we all want assurances that our writing is truly solid before we send it out. For example, when I was a young writer, I […]
We can use persona poetry techniques to write memoires. Technically, memoir poetry is not persona poetry, because in persona poetry, the poet and the speaker are different people. It is a bit like ghostwriting. We want to preserve the feeling that it’s true to the person’s voice, even […]
Poetry and Memoir writing are traditionally thought of as different kinds of writing but a mash-up can be very successful. One way to use poetry in memoir writing is to think like a memoirist but write like a poet. Organize the poems with a theme, paying attention to […]
