The personal is political.--feminist slogan I was raised in a family and culture with "a strong work ethic"--an inflexible ideal. Part of this philosophy is that we should never give in to pain; we must always overcome it. I am a professor, poet, wife, mother to three dogs. […]
LAST WEEK, THE SPALDING MFA Alumni Twitter account tweeted about my small online lit mag: "@slushpilemag is accepting #fiction, #poetry, and #cnf submissions through @submittable & will provide feedback!" it cheerfully announced. The post got a handful of likes and retweets. Then came this: "Do you pay your […]
LAST WEEK, THE SPALDING MFA Alumni Twitter account tweeted about my small online lit mag: "@slushpilemag is accepting #fiction, #poetry, and #cnf submissions through @submittable & will provide feedback!" it cheerfully announced. The post got a handful of likes and retweets. Then came this: "Do you pay your […]
It's tax time, you had a new project at the office, the kids were serially down with a stomach bug, and your sister came to visit last week. Sometimes taking an hour to write feels impossible. You finally find the time and a quiet place, and your head […]
Here are seven ways I know of drawing upon words and languages, the tools of our craft, to ignite the spark which inspires the creation of poetry. Three Word Addresses On this map 'what3words', the whole world is divided into some 57 trillion 3m x 3m squares and […]
Not a lot of fuss is made over poem openings today. Sure, we all know that April is the cruelest of the months, and I am sure you secretly (or if you were a truly brave middle schooler, publicly) compared a love interest to a summer's day. But […]
For most of us invested in poetry--as writers, scholars, teachers, students, and readers--close reading is a fundamental practice. In this blog post, I consider what is involved in and produced by close reading, why we do it, when we do it, and its political effects. Close reading is […]
Second Day I just rewrote the poem I started yesterday, updated the TOC in the new manuscript, and yawned. Am I running out of steam? I have decided to start this record of my one month between-teaching assignments that I have dedicated to writing at home. The flow […]
When I first learned about erasure poetry, I was enamored with the form. The idea that a poem could be hidden inside any text was intoxicating--a challenge I insist on pushing to the limit. There are so many variables: your source text, your mood, whether you're working by […]
As a lover and reader of poetry, and as a poet and editor, I'm always thinking about how to connect poems (my favorites, my own, poets I publish) with readers. This is no easy task; it's not as if poems sell by their own weight in worthiness. It […]
