If you write poetry, perhaps you’ve had an experience of reading a poem that makes you sigh and utter the words “if only I had thought of that first”. What about consciously working a phrase or line of someone else’s into your own poem? Perhaps you’ve never done that, and yet found unconsciously a line… Continue reading Poetry: The one that got away
Tag: MFA
Not quite the bedfellows you had in mind
I finished reading “The Nakedness of the Fathers” by Alicia Ostriker tonight. Since she’s my mentor this semester, it was good to delve into some of her writings to see how she approaches craft and spirituality. Below I share with you one of the images I found most striking and profound from her book: “Some… Continue reading Not quite the bedfellows you had in mind
Leaving the desert
I have been roaming in the desert longer than forty days and forty nights. What is to become of me, of them? James Wright’s poem “To the Saguaro Cactus…” really got me thinking in a new way of this usually barren plot of land associated with hardness of earth and heart. Moses and I convene… Continue reading Leaving the desert
Good Friday
I avoided Allen Ginsberg tonight. Usually I take Good Friday off and spend it hiking, silent, in contemplation reading the four accounts of Jesus’ last moments before the gruesome death at 3 p.m. Earlier this week, I could see that we would have a press check today bringing one of my most recent projects to… Continue reading Good Friday
A poet’s celebration
Culminating a marathon week of back to back tradeshows, I found myself in New York righteously upsetting several union workers. Amidst their yells and screams of “lady, you can’t move that” my 5’2 stature heaved and shoved the largest of our crates waiting at the back of the Javits Center, the last vestige of our… Continue reading A poet’s celebration
overcome
After a day of being back at work, I decided to stop off at Borders for a moment to look around the poetry section for the one “text”book I couldn’t order that must be hidden underneath a rock somewhere. I’m not giving up. Have you ever been overcome with a voracious desire to want to… Continue reading overcome
a winter wuthering heights
I have been in an intensive first residency of my poetry MFA program. We have been lodged in Northfield, MA, which has been described as the “Wuthering Heights Residency.” The campus has myriad architectural styles gracing the buildings, along with two graves in the middle of the campus that turned out to be those of… Continue reading a winter wuthering heights