Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Tonight’s Dinner Companions
you, old poet, gone, whose lines I often
say aloud against the ocean’s constant shush
James Davis May: Portuguese Man-of-War
Look at this one,
its sail translucent, its inky tentacles
taut as a line of verse. After the thing dies,
they go on, stinging whatever touches them.
David Kirby: Taking it home to Jerome
Everything else was to come, everything about love:
the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken.
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.
Vox Populi 