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, […]
Do you ever go to the park and feel like your entire life led up to the moment of you staring a bee in the face, buzzing around a grassy shade of abyss, as the noon dust is blown from the wind and you find yourself basking in […]
Writing poetry can cause the earth to move. It wakes us up, fosters deeper understanding and more self-awareness, and when we would despair, instead, we are granted the gifts of hope and perspective. Perhaps most importantly, when we capture our own history and stories in poetic form, we […]
The morning of March 16th, 2020, I was at a dance class in Brooklyn, when we got word that New York City was going to shut down entirely, effective that afternoon. There was an agitated feel in the studio as class ended, and dancers parted ways. The hub […]
Poetry, perhaps more than other forms of oral and written expression, is intended to convey the immediate moment — the idea and experience — that triggered it in the mind of the one conceiving it. The language — the forms, sounds, rhythms, and images — embodies the mental […]
Every time I teach Creative Writing: Poetry to college students, I spend some time going over how to submit poems for publication, and then they send out two batches of poems to different literary journals at the end of the semester. I set them up for the reality […]
So much has changed since I first started sending my work out two decades ago. Publishers are more open to simultaneous submissions, and I seek out (rather than avoid) online publications. But the biggest shift has been the number of pieces I get accepted each year. Take a […]
