“What is your process when writing a found poem?” editor Jessica Purgett asked me recently, in an interview. Good question! And one I hadn’t considered before–it had seemed like a simple thing. But the more I thought about it, the more complicated and interesting that question was. My […]
1. I come to reviewing as a reader, a simple lover of books. For many years, I believed that loving a book was not reason enough to review it. I believed that one needed special degrees in judgement in order to be able to speak of books with […]
While the notability of literary powerhouses such as Granta, Edinburgh Review or the London Magazine is undisputed, there are countless lesser known literary platforms that highlight diverse voices in Europe without compromising quality. I don’t often see smaller European literary magazines represented in submission calls, so I’ve assembled […]
Among the many calls these days for how the pandemic has affected our writing, has any publication asked about what the pandemic adds to a month of birthdays, estrangement, and miscarriage? Forty-two years are a minute and a lifetime. I could write about how the protesters at the […]
I believe strongly in poetry. It has worked before, and it will work again. It is infused in the culture of every civilization. Whether it’s the Bible, the Odyssey, or Shakespeare, poetry has been extremely popular. Today poetry lacks the prestige it once held. There are no Robert […]
A few years ago, I wrote a post here about how to promote a book of poetry with a chronic illness or a disability. That post was a digest of ideas from my how-to book from Two Sylvias Press, PR for Poets. With everything going on, I thought […]
Blue Light Press, along with being a publisher, is a community. We are dedicated to the publication of poetry and flash fiction that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight. We are a group of poets, artists and musicians based […]
You’ve written a literary masterpiece. The characters are awesome (one of them is called Breathless Muffler), the setting is exotic (thousands of miles away from Milton Keynes) and the conclusion mind blowing (the main protagonist turns out to be his own daughter). You randomly submit your short story […]
Prewrite. Draft. Revise. Edit. Publish. These are the five stages of the writing process. Whether or not you intend to publish your work, you want it to be its best expression of your intention. Wait. That was a big assumption. Do you? Do you want your poems, stories, […]
Years ago while working on my MFA at Drew University, my mentor Ross Gay cautioned me of something he referred to as “poetic gesture.” He wanted to warn me of moments when I was trying to make a poem sound like a poem. If you are trying to […]
