Every April I challenge myself to read one poetry book per day—tackling all those books I’ve impulse-bought or been given by friends over the past year. Last year, I went all-out at the blog (see my post about Kathleen Flenniken for a great example), contacting many of the poets and asking questions about how their […]
Very likely it’s because I have a bad case of “want-to-escape-this-life-itis” (or maybe it’s just this news cycle), but lately, everywhere I look, I see poems about alternate lives. One that keeps surfacing is a poem from Hold Fast, “Approaching 52,” in which Holly J. Hughes imagines a self realizing “she’ll never be a lion-tamer, […]
It’s been two weeks of dodging my work and trying to walk away from images in the news. But I’m pleased to recommend poet Sharon Bryan’s poetry blog and its new series of conversations, often on the very topics I’d most like to avoid. In this week’s post, Sharon writes, “Not surprisingly, the terrible destruction in […]
I recently emailed my writer’s group with this link to a conversation, Facts Into Poems, between Dorianne Laux and Jane Hirshfield, sponsored by Alaska Quarterly Review. It’s a tutorial about how to write about deep, difficult topics — which, as we all know, abound. I’ve been a bit “off” about posting here of late, but […]