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
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
Well, many of us are waiting for tomorrow with…bated breath?…to hear 45’s new Supreme Court nominee. It sound like it’s going to be a decision between bad, terrible, and horrifying. You may have seen Ms. Magazine‘s newly-revived “Daring to Remember” series to which people are submitting their stories of what it was like to have… Read More Links & Politics: July 2018 Edition
Shelter (noun): A shielded or safe condition, protection. A place giving temporary protection from weather or danger. Shelter (verb): To protect or shield from something harmful. To prevent someone from having to do something difficult or unpleasant. 45 has been in power for over a year and a half. Why? What kinds of shelters have… Read More Call for Poetry Submissions: Shelter
I have no hesitancy in bragging on my publisher, Headmistress Press, especially because of all their really incredible associated poets. I first became really acquainted with Headmistress when I wrote a review of Lesléa Newman’s I Carry My Mother in 2016. I have a soft spot for queer narratives about family, and that book really… Read More Processes of Becoming: Joy Ladin Speaks in South Beach
In 1080, Su Tung P’o was a “Special Supernumerary” of the Water Bureau. I’m a Water Plant Operator I, so I feel a bond, fattening up in civil service, preparing a one room cabin for retirement. from “For Su Tung P’o” I know Sue Blaustein from the open mic scene in Milwaukee. A… Read More Interview with Poet Sue Blaustein
