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, […]
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 […]
