by gsfrnkln | Aug 13, 2023 | Uncategorized
Prompts are all over social media, and a lot of people seem to like them. The idea is that writers need a little push to get their creative momentum going on its own, so a teacher or facilitator will suggest either a subject to write about or a formal tactic that...
by gsfrnkln | Jul 26, 2023 | Uncategorized
So many poems are written about death, but it is the nature of language to describe something that can be described or to reason about abstractions. Death is neither, and that presents a problem for poetry. When anyone dies, there is an absence, one life is missing...
by gsfrnkln | Apr 18, 2023 | Uncategorized
The image is at the heart of poetry. Without the image, there can be music on the one hand and speech on the other, but not poetry. This is because poetry originates in the human impulse to control the uncontrollable by recreating it. Examples are the cave art that...
by gsfrnkln | Dec 20, 2022 | Uncategorized
A close friend died two weeks ago. It was unexpected. He was 49 years old and in excellent health. A blood clot went to his heart, and despite the best efforts of doctors and nurses, he was dead within hours. The family was not religious, but the woman in his life...
by gsfrnkln | Jul 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
There is a widely held view that the translation of poetry is doomed from the beginning. Frost left us his famous line that poetry is what is lost in the translation, and Hannah Arendt wrote of Auden that she knew he was a great poet because his work did not...
by gsfrnkln | Jan 18, 2022 | Uncategorized
I read an article recently where the author celebrated how certain poets had saved American poetry from being the property of “academic” poets. The author was not a polemicist on a rant but was ecstatic at the energy of our current poetry, so the names of the...
by gsfrnkln | Jul 15, 2021 | Uncategorized
File this under fascinating-but-disturbing news: I read yesterday that an editor of a prominent journal, one I respect and enjoy reading, has announced to the world that poets should never submit love poems to his journal and only rarely submit poems about nature. Of...
by gsfrnkln | Jul 2, 2021 | Uncategorized
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...
by gsfrnkln | May 31, 2021 | Uncategorized
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...
