Louise Hawes: My muse at seventy-something
My muse is fast; her legs, long, relentless,
churn like propellers. She seldom stops to
explain where we’re going.
Doug Anderson: What if I wrote a poem
About being seventy-seven
and trying not
to speculate how long I’ve got left
Sharon Fagan McDermott | Fragments: An Ars Poetica
within the word “ventriloquist,”
there’s “trout” and “rust” and “silver”
Paul Christensen: Portrait of the Artist | James Dickey
He liked one phrase especially, “every word is a sunken Atlantis.” It said a lot about the way poetry functioned –every word in lyric was attached to a root mass of meanings, associations, feelings.
Sean Sexton: Poem Letter to Rick Campbell
A soft-spoken vision runs their gamut
to the end of your pages, a universe far away from mine, yet, by your
gifts, remains within reach as the ruckus of the interstate in the distance
when the wind is out of the West on such a morning as this.
Video: Stephen Dobyns | Interview on the Craft of Poetry
An interview with the poet, novelist and essayist Stephen Dobyns on the craft of poetry. Conducted by Carol Frost, the interview took place in August, 1997 at the Catskill Poetry … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Once
I was a candle
Carried upstairs downstairs
One room to another
Annie Finch: How poetry casts a spell through the rhythmic magic of metre
Dactylic is a rolling, generous metre that people often find useful for accessing emotions and compassion.
Dawn Potter: Heat Wave
a squirrel is hurling insults, and beneath his screeches the cicadas
insist and sigh, insist and sigh, unmoved by his grandiloquent snit.
Video: Michael Simms reads five poems of joy and acceptance
Imagine being so in love
The mistakes you make
Keep you on the ground
Imperfect and happy
Doug Anderson: Negative Capability
…art that honors the art and artist as well as its content, and apprehends it as more than its socio-political reality. Art is hard to do and not everybody can do it. It is not merely a pretext for theory.
Michael Simms: Blue Notes
I think of Fats Waller whose left hand leaped down the keys, showing the path for every jazz pianist who followed, including the great Art Tatum and the minor Billy Joel.
W. D. Ehrhart: Paul Fussell — A Remembrance
While Fussell wrote on a wide variety of subjects over his long life—ranging from Augustan humanism, Samuel Johnson, and Kingsley Amis to the 2nd Amendment, the Indianapolis 500, and travel in between-the-wars Europe—war, the irony of war, the suffering and lunacy and permanent damage of war, the unfairness of war, lay at the heart of his writing and of his being.
Stephen Dobyns: The Poet’s Disregard
He ponders composing an ode
to his long time sidekick Death, but as his
own departure draws near their friendship
has grown problematic.
Vox Populi 