Right now, I’m making eyes at my most steadfast companion over the last six months, sitting patiently on the window ledge—my sweet rejection jar. The small honeypot that’s come to be one of my most valued writing tools, helping me smooth over the sharp edges of submitting work […]
Last month at my poetry reading in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the bookstore owner introduced me with an anecdote. He described an open-mic regular who summoned the courage to read because he realized that “everyone’s got something to say.” I recalled the summer in my early 20s when […]
Are you feeling stuck? Is your muse off flirting with other authors? Do idle pens and pencils and blank pages fill you with guilt? Do you have a bad case of what we commonly call “Writers Block”? Well, oddly enough, it is a description that does not apply […]
Poetry is, by nature, a personal art. There is no need to share it with anyone if one doesn’t want to. But I’ve always wanted to. Throughout my life I’ve found myself drawn to other poets. I joined reading clubs, school magazines, entered contests and participated in open […]
This new ranking includes 500 literary magazines and ranks them by their number of Twitter followers – an easily comparable statistic that is available for virtually every magazine and gives a good indication of their digital reach and potential readership. As someone new to writing, I wondered where […]
In the past few years—okay, decades—of writing poems, I’ve found myself returning again and again to certain impressions, aching to get them down, but often disappointed by what I’d made. Some moments, no matter how crucial, how wounded or wild and starlit they are—or maybe because of that—resist […]
A picture is worth a thousand words—not exactly music to a writer’s ear, especially a poet. Still, it’s hard to argue the fact that a picture can create an emotional reaction faster, deeper and longer lasting than words alone. When you read the words “E.T. phone home,” what […]
In my twenties, my biggest struggle with writing was translating my brain to the page. I knew in great detail what feeling or atmosphere I wanted to paint or evoke, but my poems generally came out either full of impenetrably abstract and densely stacked metaphors, or sentimental platitudes. […]
Things we need: 1. Money Someone wrote the above text on a whiteboard in the Fort Des Moines Museum earlier this year. I’ve returned to it often, ever since a friend retweeted a photo of it, as a reminder of the inherent difficulty in critiquing small presses and literary […]
I’ve used poetry writing prompts with my high school students for as long as I’ve been teaching poetry, describing them as a way to distract your brain so the poem that needs to get written can get written. I tell them that like cats, poems can be shy, […]
