Poetry asks for your intelligence and spirit. It is hard work, but good work. Come along with Kim Addonizio and enter poetry by working on your lines…
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Oktoberfest: Raise a Glass
Wilkommen in Oktober! What’s with the German accent, you ask? It is the last week of Oktoberfest, that German celebration commemorating the marriage of the Crown Prince Ludwig to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen in October of 1810. It is said that the royal wedding party was so grand that the citizens of Bavaria decided […]
Ordinary Genius: Entering Poetry
The other day I stumbled onto an old Google Talk conversation with a friend, from about a year ago. The conversation went something like this: Friend: I lurked at the Tweetspeak Twitter party last night. Me: I can’t do the Tweetspeak. Too confusing. Friend: I was lost. I’m too literal. Me: L.L. tagged me on […]
September: Tea for Two (on Proper Sweet Tea)
Some define the boundaries of the American south by way of the Mason Dixon line. Others define its lines by allegiances during the War of Northern Aggression. Frankly, I find both such delineations to be crude and lacking in nuance. No, I do not ascribe to traditional notions of defining the South. Instead, I reckon its […]
Tea for Two: Autumn
The first fall drizzle blew into Fayetteville this weekend, and though it wasn’t yet cold enough to kindle the fireplaces, someone in the neighborhood tried. The smoke came wafting down the road and through my open window. There is a gathering up in Autumn, and not of leaves. I smell it in the fires and […]
September: Tea for Two (on smell memories)
Diving headlong into the world of tea can be disorienting. I know this firsthand. Last week I decided to kick the coffee habit for a month and opted to replace it with a more refined and elegant beverage—tea. But as I visited the local market’s tea aisle, my head swam with the options—black teas, green […]
Fiction Friday: He Said, She Said
Last week I received my shiny, colorfully bird-laden copy of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. Books like this don’t usually show up at my house: I’m a poet, through and through. But I’ve also had this little fling with fiction on the side since attending the Midwest Writers’ Conference, where I practically skipped out […]
September: Tea for Two (the diary of a coffee quitter)
I am a helpless, habitual coffee drinker. For the most part, I don’t drink yuppie, frothy coffee. No, I drink the black stuff, the kind that tastes like ash. I drink it like it’s a badge of American masculinity, I guess. My grandpa used to say, “real men take their coffee the way God intended […]
image-ine: tribes
tribes save me from the little tribes the us and them tribes that say who can’t marry who that make you take up a gun to defend them give me those sisters and brothers in the bigger family to link arms with to cluck and strut together to head off somewhere not knowing precisely where […]
August Rain: Stormy Weather
There is a long-standing metaphorical marriage of rain and sorrow. Painters, film-makers, musical artists — they have all used tempestuous imagery to denote loss, grief, and sadness. In 1933 Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler penned “Stormy Weather, ” the quintessential breakup song first performed by Ethel Waters. Covered by greats like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, […]
August Rain: The Decisive Moment
As a boy, I lived a spell in East Texas. Somewhere on the edge of the urban sprawl, my sister and I ran barefooted down dirt roads, sat under the shade of mesquite groves, and tromped through fields of briars to the neighbor-lady’s house with all the aquariums. We were home on the range and […]
Caught Flashing
Everyone knows writing conferences can get a little crazy. In fact, this normally prim poet was just caught flashing at the Midwest Writers Workshop. Fiction flashing, that is. I should have seen it coming. I hadn’t written fiction in nearly two decades, was let loose in Muncie, Indiana, without my husband and kids, and was […]
August Rain: Introduction (and a bit of spiny poetry)
The heartland is ablaze. The five-o’clock news anchor tells us that Tower Mountain was kissed by lightning, that it went up like a harvest bonfire before emergency crews responded. “There have been more than 1, 000 wildfires in Arkansas this year, ” he says, “mostly in rural portions of the state.” He makes some awkward […]
The Anthologist: Motion
I found Paul Chowder at the Tip O’Neill building. He was in the passport office cajoling the bureaucrats into renewing his travel documents just days before his departure to Switzerland for some big international poetry doings because he didn’t realize he’d expired. I was there for my once-a-decade passport renewal even though I had no […]
The Anthologist: Pluck the Day
I scheduled a date with Paul Chowder on Friday. We were supposed to hang out and talk about Sara Teasdale. He’d been going on about how some poets spend too much time thinking about death, like going to a movie and just waiting for the credits, which my dad taught me are very interesting if you […]
July Mosaics: Concrete Poetry
In the summer of 2008, the local Barnes & Noble invited Geoffrey Brock to read from his first book of Poetry, Weighing Light. Metal folding chairs were placed between the do-it-your self section and the clearance picture-book aisle. I’m not sure whether it was the ideal spot for a poetry reading, what with patrons whizzing through […]
The Anthologist: Conversation in a Laundromat
I moved upstairs to the kitchen to work. I don’t like the kitchen much. It reminds me of all the times I have to cook, and cooking is not something I enjoy. Sometimes when I cook, there’s a fire, and I’m not sure the fire extinguisher was recharged after the last one. It wasn’t my […]
July Mosaics: Juxtaposition
Years ago, I had the privilege of rubbing eyeballs with royalty. Flanked by an impressive retinue of distinguished figure heads, the fair-skinned and curly-haired king stood before a hushed audience at my university and delivered a cultural manifesto on the artist’s role in creating the juxtaposition of political and religious imagery to benefit and protect society.
But I was more interested in his shoes.
The Anthologist: Book Club Invitation
Paul Chowder is a lonely writer who would have an anthology of poetry to his credit, if he could just get the introduction written and submitted to his editor. It seems, however, that this self-proclaimed “study in failure” cannot. His longtime girlfriend has left him and he is alone in the barn, trying to write […]
Patchwork: A Story
Our theme for July is The Cento—a put-together poem, a patchwork if you will, of words from others. What follows is not a Cento and will not tell you what a Cento is, but we’re okay with that. We tell our writers to “be creative, ” and that’s what Karen Swallow Prior has been by […]