Ed Skoog’s poems, “Lighting” and “Get Free” appear in the Winter 2010-11 issue, of Ploughshares edited by Terrance Hayes. “Lighting” opens with these lines: Note the surface that surrounds the word,and how unlike its meaning, which you step over to avoid, the word raised and untouchable.Pitted prune, eaten bone, hay in a muddy yard. Here,…
It’s hard to dispute the omnipresent signs that we are a nation of strivers and slackers who have been told that we deserve immediate results, and if at all possible, we should be able to reap the rewards of the good life without any real or prolonged struggle. Instant gratification seems now to be the…
Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and is a recipient of a…
I have become, maybe unfortunately, obsessed with structure. I don’t imagine I’m alone in considering this aspect of poetry: all of us who write have, at some point, had to decide where the line breaks, how we’ll let the clusters of language cohere. I don’t have a goal in mind, in terms of writing about…
A year or so ago, a friend who teaches college English courses made a thought-provoking comment about the reality gap between MFA programs and the publishing world, one that continues to haunt me: “Why do MFA writing faculty turn up their noses at genre fiction,” he asked, “when that’s what most people who still read…
As both a practicing writer and Co-Director of the River Styx at Duff’s Reading Series, I’ve had the opportunity to step to the mic in multiple capacities. The expectations of a reader and a facilitator of readings are very different, but both have the responsibility of engaging the audience on some level. The following advice…
I have, for at least the past year, been mildly to massively frustrated by the rise of the word “random” as it’s presently used. This is dull in all sorts of ways—every writer’s got his/her words which frustrate, to say nothing of the nebbishness of even bothering to be pissed at some utterance—but I haven’t…
In the mid-90s, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University and nervously facing my first class of undergraduate creative writing students, I understood within the first couple of weeks that there were few things more fascinating or more daunting for writers than the moment they decide to disrobe their characters and place them…
Not too long ago, I caught a bit of the original Clash of the Titans on TV. It has always been one of my favorite movies: Harry Hamlin’s hair cut, the impressive stop-motion animation, and of course, Zeus commanding Poseidon to “release the Kraken.” The sight of the sea monster awkwardly palming those alcove rocks…
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