I have been staying in Charleston, SC for a few days to clear my mind before school starts and to get some writing done (and also because, right now, all of my paying work can be done remotely). My plan was to go through the full-length manuscript I “finished” in January. Though I have been… Read More A Few Days in Charleston
Okay, so we’re almost two months into 2019. What’s been going on in the world of this blog? 2019: What’s happening? Savoring new publications written by friends If you like fairy tales, philosophy, and the fantastic, Jonathan Duckworth’s chapbook Book of Never is well worth your time. Copies of other friends’ books are on their way: Chloe… Read More What, Oh What to Read and Write in 2019
The best way to get your poems published is to send them out. That being said, you’ll end up receiving more rejections than acceptances, no matter who you are. The whole thing is just a numbers game. So why not reframe and welcome the reality of those inescapable rejections? One way to do this is… Read More Rejection City, Here I Come: Trying to Accrue 100 Rejections in 2018
This semester, I have started teaching a writing and rhetoric class (thrilling! surprising! edifying! terrifying!) to first-year college students at my university. Though we aren’t writing poems in the class, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on my own poetry writing process because no matter what genre you’re writing in, all writing has something in… Read More 13 Ways to Revise a Poem
One of my major projects this summer was reviewing Adrienne Rich’s Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. One of the biggest challenges with this piece was that there is so much ground to cover in a collected volume of prose that spans more than 50 years, but… Read More Reviewing the Essential Essays of Adrienne Rich
I’ve been having conversations recently about voice and audience, social media and readership, work and attention. As writers, how do we find good homes for our writing? Is a platform “better” if there are more readers? Is it wrong to want additional readers? What about the moral issues we have with social media? We’re “supposed… Read More Links I Like: August 2018 Edition
Right now, I should be writing…something else. I am trying to finish up two book reviews today. I need to scale down many, many pages of notes. I should be planning the class I’m supposed to start teaching later this month. Should be reading the stack of books I’m trying to finish before the summer… Read More Oh, Buoyant Group of Artist-Friends
A few years ago, my friend Bethany Price started holding an itinerant writing group in coffee shops in Milwaukee. The group was fun because we wrote, but it was also great because Bethany assembled a different collection of weirdos each time. You always knew you would meet interesting people. A few years later, one of… Read More Micro-Reviews of New VegAl Poetry: Jarrott, Thompson & La Force
One morning earlier this week, I woke up early, had time to snooze, and thus ended up lying in bed typing a weirdo pseudo-mini-essay Facebook post on my phone about dead raccoons, the perils of Miami traffic, performance art, and my ambivalence toward social media. Every time I post something on Facebook, I get an… Read More Poets & Activists & the Social Media Backdrop
I’m thinking about beginning to frame these Links & Politics posts to focus on the ways that people are using language in the service of social justice. I have also started making a running list of the resistance anthologies that have been published since the November 2016 election. There will be a blog post to… Read More Links & Politics: July 2018 Edition, Part 2
