Author: Michael Klein

In 1988, the only thing that was happening in my life was A.A. and people with AIDS. I was living with an architect in a loft in Brooklyn that had once been a picture frame factory still trying to figure out what to write now that I was coming out of a coma that had…

I met Tony Leuzzi a couple of years ago when he came to interview me for the Lambda Literary website and our mutual passion for poets and poetry bonded us immediately. In our interview, Tony asked hard questions about what it means to be engaged with the continual elusiveness of the creative process and why…

It’s hard to write sentences or poems with people singing songs in the background but I think that some other music – orchestral music, smaller music involving instruments, singers singing without words – is a great and inspiring thing to have playing next to you when you are writing.  I wrote a whole book listening…

When the poet Alan Dugan was alive, there used to be a reading every summer in Wellfleet at the local library where members of his workshop would read their poems to, mostly, locals.  It was a generous thing of Alan to do, and also something rare – seeing poets sharing their work in obstensibly the…

As soon as you find your voice, you’ve lost it                                                                          Jon Anderson * Shifting the point of view is…

This week, I’m posting a short little video on the topic of dialogue in prose and how big a fan I am of dialogue not being there. Of course — as I say, if I remember right, in the video — writers are urged to include and even rely on characters to show up a…

I didn’t know how obsessed I was with the world – with the actual word world – until I went through my last book of poems and saw that I used the word at least 30 times.  Actually, another poet told me I used it 30 times but of course I went back and counted…