Awake. This far north the sun is an early riser, though it stays groggy with fog till mid-morning. The red-checked garter snake still sleeps beneath the front stoop; the window spider still clings to the center of last night’s web, spangled with wings. The desultory cries of a crow. An old engine clearing its throat…
I got a chance to sit down with Kim Addonizio and talk about poetry, the blues, and her new rock and roll band Nonstop Beautiful Ladies. PK: The relationship between poetry and music has long been a contentious one. Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading argued that “poetry begins to atrophy when it gets…
I am ready to launch my website. This is not something I’ve undertaken without long consideration. After all, what does a website have to do with my writing? Launching a website isn’t likely to lead me to write more poems – in fact, I spent hours trying to design it when I might have been…
In passing with my mind on nothing in the world but the right of way I enjoy on the road by virtue of the law… ––William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, XI There are no more guilt-free Sunday drives, no cleanly joyful joy-rides. And maybe there never were. Maybe the true joy-ride – that exhilarating…
How do we find good critical readers for our work? Whose eyes will see it as ours can’t or won’t? Who makes for a better critic – a sympathetic reader, or a skeptical one? We ask much of these readers – they must devote time and emotion and thought. They must have knowledge of the…
I am a poet without a kind. I write formal poems in an age of free verse (not to mention poetry in an age of prose!), but I don’t feel kinship with the most visible formalist movements. The divide I feel goes beyond subject matter and worldview, though these do play a part – they…
This weekend, in the spirit of trying something new in the kitchen, I cooked up some kasha. I will not be cooking up any more kasha. Kasha, for those of you who are like I was until very recently – that is, blissfully unaware of all manner of things about kasha, particularly those things that…
For all of my adult life I’ve kept a list of words. Each time that I come across an unfamiliar word in my reading, I try to dutifully look it up in the dictionary and copy down its definition. There have been busy weeks when I’ve let it slide – months later I’ll find a…
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reworking my manuscript, ordering and reordering, adding and removing poems, trying to shape it into something that’s more than just a coherent collection. I want my book to feel like a particular kind of experience, one that develops unexpectedly as it unfolds in time, like a provocative…
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