Jose Padua: My Definition of a Boombastic Poetry Style
Going up to bed early on the night before his first day of school for the year our four year old son asks, “Is Daddy coming up too?” and my … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: What is Poetry For?
I’ve been thinking about all the conversations about whether or not poetry “matters” in this culture and thinking maybe it’s a silly question. We have a country on the verge … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Poetry, A River
If you set out on it, raft or riverboat, if you sound your way through the sandbars and submerged barbed wire, if you watch the crows riding the floating corpses … Continue reading
Michael Simms: The Master Potter
Today I visited my friend Bill Foglia who’s a master potter. He’s a founding member and the landlord of Penn Avenue Pottery, an artists’ cooperative located in the Strip District, … Continue reading
Djelloul Marbrook: The Poet is a Luthier
A poem is a musical instrument. The way its author plays it is not necessarily the way others will play it. The poet is a luthier. He uses certain materials … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: From this Rubble
From this rubble I reach down and retrieve a poem that requires no electronics just a sharp rock to scratch it out on another rock. There. Done. Now I climb … Continue reading
Alice Friman: What Is This Thing Called ‘Voice’?
To my way of thinking, your poetry matches who you are. Not just in the subject matter you choose or that chooses you, or even in the words you select, … Continue reading
Ed Ochester: Poetry
I too dislike it the mystified truisms the dusty puzzle-prunes the theatrical exaggerations: “the brutal crescendo of woodworms”— yet I think of O’Hara’s delight in the endless pleasures of quotidian … Continue reading
Jose Padua: A Simple Declaration of my Personal Philosophy
Efficiency is the enemy of art, purity the death of the soul. Curses are rarely stranded at the tip of my tongue, and the blades I work with are dull … Continue reading
Jose Padua: The Night We Tried to Get a Poet Arrested
I remember the night my friend and I tried to get a poet arrested for his crimes against literature, his hiding of horribly sentimental lines by speaking like a seller … Continue reading
Video: ‘Dust’ by Dorianne Laux
In this video, Dorianne Laux reads her poem Dust at the 2011 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. — Dust Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just … Continue reading
Djelloul Marbrook: What is Poetry For?
To say the unsayable is the province of poetry in society—to say it in such a way that it occupies the rafters, the eaves, the cantilevers, cornerstones, ogees and Palladians … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Rediscovering our world through poetry
Morning rumination: Hive mind, large and small. Some years ago, having been trained in the tight modernist lyric, the poem that adds up to the neat conclusion, usually with an … Continue reading
Chard deNiord: Poetry
The secret I have no say in keeping is safe with me and everyone else who sees himself in the space between the stars. How to tell what can’t … Continue reading
