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poetry, publishing, and mentoring
On Poetic Gesture and Emotional Commitment
Here we are as poets, in search of primordial forms that pull our imagination beyond the strict confines of the world as we’ve grown used to seeing it, picturing it, describing it – figures of the bird, the fish, or some other unknown prehistoric creatures. It doesn’t matter, really, whether that vision is all elegance […]
Posted in: Poetry
Making Better Poems, Part II — with sample annotations
December 6, 2011
In my last blog entry, I spent quite a bit of time and space talking about space and time, as well as (importantly) the role of resonant diction and “correspondence” (the tethering of image to whatever is correspondingly human) in making a poem come alive. Somewhere in the midst of that entry (in the […]
Posted in: Poetry
How resonant diction and correspondence propel a poem: Part 1 in what we look for at Tupelo Press
November 16, 2011
In my last post I promised a discussion of the “craft annotation” and, by extension, an explanation of why the meticulous work of annotating poems is so very valuable to the further work of the writer. The value of a craft annotation derives from the way it closely examines the inner workings of a […]
Posted in: Poetry
Contest Manuscripts: Behind the Scenes at Tupelo Press
November 4, 2011
The doorkeeper’s feet are seven armlengths long five oxhides for his sandals ten shoemakers worked on them –Fragment of Sappho (110) translated by Anne Carson (If Not, Winter, Knopf, NY 2002) Why are these lines, fragments of lines—all that remain legible on a papyrus, a song of Sappho—sitting here atop this short piece on what […]
Posted in: Poetry
The Night Sky in Black & White: How the Poem Listens
October 27, 2011
Where do poems start? Where do they finish? What do they hear? The problem, as Olena Kalytiak Davis points out (or rather, as her invention, the speaker points out) in one of those astonishing poems in her Brittingham Prize-winning book, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing, is that “the brain sits right next to the […]
Posted in: Poetry
On the Idea of Order: A Western Key
October 19, 2011
All criticism is argument, of course, and critique (as in criticism) by one blogger of another blogger’s blog is the urging of a particular way of seeing the world. Curtis Faville, who blogs at The Compass Rose, has written this rather energetic critique of my advice, not on his blog, but to mine: If the book […]
Posted in: Poetry
On Making the Poetry Manuscript
October 12, 2011
The Poetry Manuscript: Arts and Crafts Here, adapted from my article in the 2007 issue of the AWP Job List (there titled Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript: Some Ideas on Creation and Order) is a revised and updated advice on making a book out of your individual poems, given as one who […]
Posted in: Poetry
December 20, 2011
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