Short essays
Waiting for Poems
Poetry is not a steady job, and when we’re unemployed, it’s not a good feeling. The waiting we have to do goes against all our cultural upbringing, and we often look to craft to reassure us. If we only take the right “generative workshop,” read the right craft essay, or listen to the right podcast, we won’t have to wait anymore. Perhaps, though, this waiting is important. Perhaps, it’s what allows us to write poems that matter, that address the conflicts between all the selves we contain.
Please Don’t Like This Poem
If you knew the poem you were working on was never going to be published in your lifetime and would never be posted for responses on social media, how would that poem be different?
Poetry Without Purpose
I spend much of my week doing purposeful writing, usually legal writing with the goal of convincing someone of something that benefits a client. The poetry I write, however, does not have a purpose and should not have a purpose. I understand that our democracy is...
Who Am I Reading?
A random thought just passed by and smacked me: when I read a poem, a picture starts to form in my mind of the poet. I don’t mean a picture of the poet’s physical appearance, although that may happen eventually. I mean an impression of a person, an individual, created by the voice of the poet as expressed in the poem.
What Are We Doing When We Write?
The poet begins to write a poem because . . . we don’t know why. Perhaps the first lines of the poem arrived in a dream, and when the poet woke up, she rushed to write them down and continue the poem. Perhaps the poet sat down with a blank sheet of wood-pulp paper or a blank digital screen in front of her, a white nothingness, and for an unknown reason a memory surfaced. She was walking alone at night along a medieval street in a European village. The poem follows her like a shadow cast by a streetlamp. She shapes words to express this vision and writes more to give it meaning, to convey to a reader what the cobblestones felt like under the soles of her new shoes and how her footsteps seemed to intrude, to come from somewhere outside of this world. A little while later, she realizes she has a poem.
Writing Poetry in a Time of Crisis
The best kind of poetry that is written during a time of political crisis may be counter intuitive, not a poetry of activism but of humility. It does not preach, solve national problems, or tell other people what to do; rather, it partakes of that interior conversation in which the poet does not claim to speak for anyone else or to anyone but the private interlocutor who mysteriously is at once the self and not the self.
The Profession of Poetry
Professions are usually regulated and well defined, and those who have a professional practice of anything most often use that practice to pay their rent and put food on the table. Poetry is different.
On Writing Unpublishable Poems
Given the low cost of electronic publishing, as opposed to paper publishing, I ought to revise the title of this essay. There is likely a place to publish just about anything somewhere. “Unpublishable” in this context, though, refers to poems that are not likely to be accepted by the more widely read journals. My purpose here is to celebrate those unpublishable poems and encourage poets to write them.
The Intent of Poetry
I want to suggest that poems aspire to this process of love. Perhaps that is one reason love has been so often the subject of poetry. Poems are intended to become part of the reader’s self and to enlarge that self.
Travel and Poetry
There is something about the unfamiliar feel of a country where the architecture, food, customs, and even the money are different. That unfamiliar something can free writers to reimagine themselves, to see themselves as part of a broader geography, one that the self has to stretch a bit to accommodate.
Poetry and History
As I write this, two days have passed since Donald Trump was elected to a second term as President of the United States. This was shocking for many of us, including me. I could not understand how citizens of a democracy that--whatever its flaws--had withstood wars...
5 Myths about Big Writing Contests
5 Myths about Big Writing Contests It really bothers me when I hear about excellent poets who have written amazing poems, poems anyone in their right mind would envy, getting rejection emails from fancy poetry contests. I can’t help but feel that many—though not...
5 Myths about Submitting to Literary Journals
This is a post for my friends who write and submit their work to literary journals. It is probably superfluous, as you've likely had the same experiences that I've had, but maybe putting it into words may be useful to someone. You've probably also run across these...