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When I was nine my grandparents gave me a copy of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, and I fell in love so completely with poetry, I told everyone that when I grew up I was going to be a rich and famous poet. Then in the seventh grade I took one of those career…
When Versedaily posted Benjamin Sutton’s, “three poems from Refutations by Memory,” originally published at burntdistrict, founding editors Jen Lambert and Liz Kay saw a marketing opportunity— one that also created conversation around Sutton’s poems— and offered a lottery for a free subscription to anyone who posted a comment about Sutton’s work. Impressed by the contest’s…
I happened to read Natalie Diaz’s book When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) on July Fourth, and it was a surreal experience. I live on small lake in Massachusetts, and as the neighbors blasted the sky with exploding light I wondered about the Wampanoags who lived here before us, what happened…
What fascinates me most about Qiu Jin is the near absence of her work in America, especially considering our love of a rebel and a martyr. Sure, if you Google her name, several sites will offer a version of the same information: Qiu Jin lived from 1875 to 1907. Her family was wealthy, she had…
This is a series about women writing life, but sometimes the lives we write are not our own. We may have a personal connection to the historical characters in our poems or we may feel an inexplicable kinship, an irresistible calling to tell their stories. I’ve been told that I have no claim on stories…
I don’t want to write this review the way I’m expected to write it. I know I should keep the “I” out and pretend the thoughts I’m about to express come from some objective intellectual place separate from who I am as a person with a history. I could write it that way—I am capable…
The work of getting a manuscript published, that rejection and frustration, begins to feel at times like self abuse. Writing is a lonely adventure, but most of us feel driven to it; quitting is inconceivable. Submitting work, though, is more like managing a business, and most poets I know are not business managers, so it’s…
I knew Katherine Case as a poet first. We were in a poetry workshop together at Mills College, and I was enthralled with her ability to integrate so many ideas into a poem that was usually one breathless sentence. Little did I know that when class ended, and I was bobbing around in water aerobics,…
As a poetry editor at Prick of the Spindle, I find that poems about certain subjects, such as childhood, love, aging, and death, often lean too heavily on nostalgia, so that the language limps. In fact, I’ve been guilty of writing my own nostalgic poems now and again— and again. Hey, nobody said this poetic…
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