(Making Creative Writing Accessible for Young Poets.)

Rich decided that if any of the four women were to win the award, she should both refuse and denounce it because it was a sham perpetrated by a patriarchal society that handed out token recognition to women as a way of keeping them in line. In successive phone calls, Lorde, Walker, and Rich all told me this, just in case it was something I didn’t understand.

My reply to each of them was that I would not participate in their—to me—ridiculous protest. To explain why I felt that way, I have to explain something about the kind of cultural moment we were all living in. It was the early days of the women’s movement, which I was well aware of, but I didn’t feel that I needed to be told how to take charge of my life—I was way beyond that step. I had left home when I was 18 to take a job managing a workshop in Greenwich Village that made parts for harpsichord kits. One of the things we had to do was unload trucks that delivered 130 lb. harpsichord cases to us—us being four young women who made the kit parts and unloaded the trucks. We were all living on our own, all supporting ourselves, and one of us was also a single mother raising two young children.

As it happens, our neighbor was a woman I’ll call Allie, who was the daughter of a famous journalist and the wife of a film producer. She lived in a beautiful old carriage house on the other side of a small garden behind the harpsichord workshop and had the kind of wealth and privilege that would have been a dream to us. She was also writing for the Village Voice, so she had become an important spokesperson for the women’s movement. All fine—except that she had decided the four of us were her pet project and she was going to teach us about how we were being exploited by the patriarchal society.

It happens that to get her mail she had to walk through the workshop, so every day she would hand us literature about the women’s movement, make speeches about it, and generally drive us crazy because she didn’t seem to be able to grasp the idea that we were the women’s movement. We were working and being paid much too little, we were raising children, we were designing our own lives and making our own decisions about those lives. Eventually, I had it out with her and told her to leave us alone, which she finally did.

And so, when Rich, Lorde, and Walker came preaching to me about being exploited, I had no patience for this kind of rhetoric. In separate phone calls, I told each of them that they were the kind of people who were exploiting me—women with expensive educations, well-paid jobs in academia, women who didn’t have to get up early in the morning to do manual labor and save their pennies in order to have enough money to pay their bills and buy groceries as I did, while they wrote about women like me as if they shared my struggles. (Eventually, I came to realize that I wasn’t being fair to them—their lives weren’t easy and they weren’t exactly rolling in money, but I was too young to see anything but the black-and-white of my situation as compared to theirs.) My problem, I said, wasn’t men—it was the fact that poets don’t make any money and if I won the award, I would certainly take the $1,000 prize (it’s a lot more now) and be happy to have it. In the end, Adrienne Rich won the prize for her book, Diving into the Wreck, and accepted it in the name of the feminist cause.

I may have been unkind in the way I handled the situation but the crux of my argument still stands—poets cannot support themselves through their work. In general, few writers across all genres can live off their earnings: Most surveys show that only 10 percent of writers (if it’s even that much) earn enough money to support themselves. Poets, in particular, have an almost impossible task because they are working in a genre that is not exactly popular. And, if a poet manages to get a book published, it is likely to cost them money because their publisher will probably be a small, independent press that will ask them to at least buy a certain number of their own books while they have to hire their own publicist, pay for printing Advance Reader Copies, and foot the bill for entering book contests, buying advertising, and coming up with the money for all the other expenses that go along with establishing and maintaining a career such as travel to do readings and attend book fairs.

So why write poetry? In that regard, why write novels or short stories? Why write anything at all? For the same reason painters paint, actors act, dancers dance—why any artist pursues their craft: because they want to. Because they have to. Because, when it comes down to it, the only reason to create art is to do it for yourself. To be specific, if you’re a writer, you have to be committed to the idea that you’re going to spend a lot of time alone in a room, late at night or early in the morning, or on a bus or subway on the way to work, or anywhere else you can find a few minutes, and write because it pleases you. Because you love it. Because it’s the conversation you’re going to be carrying on with yourself for your whole life long. Because you understand that it’s going to be your greatest love and deepest heartbreak. Because even if all you ever get published is a story or a poem here and there, that’s going to have to be enough, and anything more than that will be a triumph.

I’ve been writing for over 50 years now—novels, collections of short stories, and yes, collections of poetry. Back in the harpsichord days, I was of the belief that somehow, someday, my work would provide me with the kind of life that would allow me to stay at home all day and write the books that would help me as achieve recognition as an Important American Writer. Well, that never happened.

I spent most of my working life as an editor, which I enjoyed, and I consider myself lucky to have found a career that depended on being able to help journalists and other writers clarify and strengthen their work. My own writing life is still full of disappointments. I still get lots of rejections, I sometimes spend months writing something that I eventually realize isn’t as good as I would like, and so put it aside. At last count I’ve published 16 books in several genres, along with dozens of stories, poems, and essays that have appeared in literary journals and I’ve still never made a living wage from all that work.

Being a writer—especially being a poet—is a hard and lonely road to travel, but I don’t think I had any choice. My mother died when I was 13 but before she got sick, she bought me a typewriter, which still sits on my desk today. It’s a little gray manual with a worn-out ribbon and every day, when I see that typewriter as I sit down to work, I think about how she must have known who I was even before I did. The fact that the ribbon is so worn out makes me realize that I must have been typing away when I was very young and I hope that wherever my mother is, she can hear the click-clack of the keys on the laptop I use now. If she can, then that’s better than any money I ever could have earned.

Still, I’d like to win the National Book Award someday, and if I do, I’ll keep the money. Wouldn’t you?

Check out Eleanor Lerman’s Oleander Marriage here:

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The Literary Walk

Let’s start with the Literary Walk. Head west into the park at 69th street, and you’ll reach the south end of the elm-fringed boulevard called the Mall. It’s rich in statues that hallow literary luminaries. No self-respecting poetic tour of the park could leave out Shakespeare. There he stands in bronze with his skin-tight hose making his legs look skinny in contrast to his torso’s doublet and cloak. He made the magic of the English tongue and, to judge from his self-assured expression, knows it. So much voltage, so much zing. Four hundred years, and his work still nightly lightnings from electric lips. Other Bard-related attractions in the park include the Shakespeare Garden, with its plants and flowers labeled with his verses, and the Delacorte Theater, which puts on free productions of his plays each summer.

If you stroll a little further up the Mall, you’ll meet with the Scottish national poet and lyricist Robert “Rabbie” Burns. Everyone knows “Auld Lang Syne”—he wrote the thing. A cloak draped dashingly over his shoulder, his eyes inclined upward toward heavenly inspiration, he is the epitome of a Romantic poet. He seems to be in the very act of addressing his true love “Highland” Mary Campbell, who died young. Part of his poem to her, “To Mary in Heaven,” is inscribed on a scroll at his feet. For a taste:

Eternity cannot efface
Those records dear of transports past.
Thy image at our last embrace,
Ah! little thought we ’twas our last!

Opposite him sits Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish dynamo who packed rapture into expansive novels and panting lyric poems. Wildly popular during his lifetime, he taught grand passions to a bookworm age.

Last, a little further north, the lone American: Fitz-Greene Halleck. Half Yankee Byron, half New York Thoreau, he wrote verse lampoons and nature poems from the outlook of Appalachia’s brow. Though he was a big star in his day, no one reads him now. His work is overdue for a revival.

Cherry Hill

Take a path northwest from Bethesda Terrace, and you’ll go from full sun to the daze of Cherry Hill. Here, toward the end of March, Yoshino and Kwanzan cherry trees, natives of Japan, bloom hot pink and white and emanate a perfume that smells like almonds taste. Every year the Cherry Blossom Festival, a rite of spring, celebrates the sensory banquet this attraction serves up. Visitors arrive in droves and feast their eyes and breathe their fill. A good, deep huff, and you’ll be whooshed westbound across divides and islands, the Date Line, and meditating in a Shinto shrine.

Head uphill under the blossoms, and you’ll reach a round, red-brick plateau and, at its heart, a pool whose finial showcases sheer excess. One chucks modesty to admire the blinged-out bronze petals and bulbs ascending tier on tier. The basin is abrim with liquid art. The water magnifies wheat sheaves, American shields and shined profiles of ol’ Abe Lincoln from whatever year, and every cent is what we most desire.

Strawberry Fields

After you leave the banks of the Lake, hike westward up a steep hill, and you’ll reach the peace garden called “Strawberry Fields.” Pause to catch your breath, slow down and take in the shrubs and trees brought together from all over the world.

There’s spicebush with its scarlet flowers giving off an aroma that’s part cinnamon and part strawberry. There are mountain laurels that launch their pollen into the breeze when butterflies and bumblebees land on their stamens. The greenery grows here in memory of John Lennon, who was shot across the street at the Dakota on December 8, 1980. His widow, Yoko Ono, who still lives there, donated over a million dollars toward the memorial. A great lyricist and performer as well as the composer of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Lennon belongs here in a poetic tour of the park.

A wide, circular gray-and-white mosaic in the pavement centers on the word “Imagine” and encourages the visitor to be “a dreamer” and hope “the world will be as one.” People often leave bouquets to decorate it, as if it were a shrine. Come on a summer afternoon, sit among the ablaze azaleas and listen to the strummers crooning both John’s solo song “Imagine” and Beatles’ classics.

The Alice in Wonderland Statue

Just north of the Model Boat Pond, you can pay your respects to Alice of Wonderland, the Empress of Pretend. As if at home enthroned atop the cap of a bronze mushroom, she is greeting a kitten climbing up her lap. Around her stand the zanies who inhabit Wonderland: the be-Wellingtoned Mad Hatter, the pocket-watch-harassed White Rabbit, and the dozy Dormouse. The Cheshire Cat’s grin is beaming mischievously in the background.

This scene is like a chakra of the imagination, highly poetic because of both its cast of make-believe characters and its emphasis on playfulness, which, as I see it, is an essential creative virtue. What’s more, Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” wrote “Jabberwocky,” which many, many people name as their favorite poem.

This sculpture wants you to join it, so don’t stay back at Museum-distance sitting on one of the benches ranged along the fence. Go walk among the wonders, climb and play. Go live a life of curious events.

*****

I hope this brief vacation in Central Park has shown that it both abounds in the sensory material of poetry and incites the visitor to give way to a frolicsome, inventive cast of mind. The former will send you back to your creative life with fresh sights, sounds, scents, tastes and textures to draw on. The latter will help you transform your ideas into art through the magic of an openness welcoming to metaphor and association.

Check out Aaron Poochigian’s Four Walks in Central Park here:

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It is not lost on me that it has been another decade since.

(7 Ways Writing Heals Us Even After Terrible Trauma.)

The talk among the candidates was immigration control via border walls. That’s what I remember. According to the Pew Research Center, the talk among the people was “economy,” “terrorism,” and “foreign policy.” Next was “healthcare,” “gun policy,” and “immigration” in descending order.

Writing the poem felt askew of appropriate: I was a white American who had visited Palestine with my Christian College in the early aughts. The trip was formative, but not because I enjoyed it. I was what I then called “spiritually depressed,” going through the shift from faith to doubt to whatever liminal space that would happen after. But I hadn’t told anyone.

That silence is telling–a closeted crisis of faith for a closeted person who was also shy.

I had been embarrassed by how young and American my group was, how loud, how obviously out of place. I was embarrassed by how much space we took up, unapologetically, as if we belonged wherever we went. So many layers of privilege.

But what is more, I believed I would die on that trip, that class–a geography and history of key Biblical moments we’d visit in real time and space–traveling from Egypt to Jordan to Israel and Palestine. Places of holy movements and centuries of war, oppression, genocide, disease, famine, death, often at the hand and/or blessing of a god I no longer wanted or could not get myself to believe was real.

What made this worse was I did not believe enough in God to say I believed in God, but I believed enough to be afraid of hell and to think I was destined for it because of my unbelief.

This could be the beginning of a poem from that time: “Oh mind fuck, of swirling circle of hell, oh tight-lipped moment of my own undoing…”

* * *

I was pacing. I was in the Santa Cruz mountains at a self-made retreat, surrounded by the A-frame gorgeousness of the cabin I had rented for far, far below the going rate. The impulse I had was to start something new, something I hadn’t planned, something that would articulate the images that had been knocking around my head for years about that trip I’d taken with my college class.

I had resisted the allowance because of sheepishness and shame: What did I have to say about a religious and political conflict not my own? If I did have something to say, who the hell was I to say it? I didn’t want to take up any kind of space–airspace, pagespace, worldspace, or otherwise on a topic that felt so out of my daily life and half a world away–like my American college class had done.

If I wrote some of the images–the headphones in Yad Vashem, the sculptures outside, the Dome of the Rock built on the Temple Mount, the monastery at the base of the “holy mountain”–wouldn’t I also have to write something insightful? Something clear? And how could I edge towards something political and not implicate myself in the process?

Bingo.

I’ve had enough therapy–and spent enough time with the book this poem is in, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones–to see that making peace with self-implication was the key to releasing my ability to write and write it as well as I could. I felt guilty about traveling because it was, in fact, guilt-ladened. I felt guilty for my silence around so many subjects of race and religion because I was, in fact, guilty. I felt ashamed of my shame. Oh mind fuck, indeed.

Another poem in the book has a line in it I added very late, and after I allowed myself to write it the rest of the poem finally fell into place.

The poem is “Spermaceti,” and it began as a hater poem for the men of the whaling era–the 18th and 19th centuries in America–and also cryptically to white western “expansion” and “exploration” from Europe of the warmer oceans and the Americas from the 15th century on. The line is just past halfway, and it visually and thematically acts as a barb for the speaker, who has just finished a rant on how destructive the men were, environmentally, relationally, and sexually, and then it hooks: “This is the moment I become truly afraid/I am hardly doing any different. Often silent/when I need to speak. All logic lost at a woman’s touch.”

The barb was implication. This is one of only a few references to sexuality in this book, and it shows how I was feeling about it when I came out and was finishing the poem: I felt like the cisgendered straight men of centuries and millennia past who I’d been annoyed and harassed by–and navigating–my whole life. I did not speak up when I saw injustice, and I was as susceptible to my own desires as any other human, male or otherwise.

That was how I found peace to finish “Americans at Yad Vashem.” I allowed the implication that was implicit in my story. Of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not my experience. Of course it also was: I was raised on stories of Ishmael and Isaac, and the spiritual lineage was my own. Of course the Israeli occupation of Palestine was and is not my experience, but I saw the walls with my own eyes. I just had to land on the shape of the connection, which, as it turns out, is and was not declarative and loud. It was something else more humbled.

Isn’t that how we write? We ask ourselves what story we must tell, where our stories brush against other stories that seem so far apart? And I also ask what it means to risk, to risk being wrong, to be ok with that implication.

For me, and for the poem–and for the book as a whole–the permission and call to speak is central to its themes. As a shy person, I have sat in many seminars incapable of jumping into the mix.

What is interesting though is how my resistance to speech continues still. I had a very hard time sitting down to write this essay when Gaza is under rubble, when people are barely surviving, when my knowledge and action is wildly incomplete. I struggle like many to know how to be of service, to speak or act against this hulk of war and genocide and hate.

Before the election I took an op-ed writing class with Megan Mayhew Bergman. She’d offered it for free to encourage more people to write political articles on topics that might make a difference for who was elected and what measures and laws were voted into place. The big takeaway: It doesn’t have to be huge. Write what is nearest your heart. Write from your actual experience. People listen when they hear authenticity. People change over wide swaths of time. Just speak. Just write. Maybe try humbleness. The rest will fall into place.

Check out Amanda Hawkins’ When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones here:

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An excerpt from an early letter:

I’m lying on an army cot at my outpost. Last night I about got plugged writing a letter using this same flashlight. (sic) A sniper saw it. That would be a helluva way to sign off—with a big glob of guts.

The same box held notes from high school friends—our means of communication before answering machines and cell phones. I decided to write a verse novel about those tumultuous times. Until then, I hadn’t written poetry.

(How I Spent Years Writing a Memoir and Ended Up With a Novel-in-Verse.)

Experimenting with this nontraditional form was challenging. I needed a story arc for each of my eight viewpoint characters while they struggled with highly charged emotional issues: war, riots, sexual identity, family alcoholism, etc.

I spent weeks rearranging index cards on the floor, figuring out the progression of each character and their part in the story. Two characters were axed. The story arc for the remaining six was woven into the whole. This approach seemed the best way to give readers access to the individual, innermost feelings—to immediately draw them into the story’s pulse.

Since the novel is character-driven, the landscape of the mind is more important than the physical setting. What my characters think and feel is more powerful than their surroundings—as are their attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities. Emotions surpass action.

The story felt truest when told in short, energetic bursts—scenes that captured a single moment, whether an emotion, thought, or idea. This poem is four short lines:

Love is like sticking
your car keys in a pocket with
your sunglasses and thinking
your glasses won’t get scratched.

Another example:

My motel sign:
VACANCY

The condensed, metaphoric language gives readers an intimate understanding of the characters without extra words. There’s something punchy and immediate about a page with more white space than text. Similar to negative space in a painting, or absence of sound in music, the more negative space, the more an object stands out.

Writers often ask when they should consider this structure.

1. Stories that are better told from more than one point of view. Mel Glenn’s verse novel Who Killed Mr. Chippendale? has more than 50 viewpoint characters. Even if Glenn chose an omniscient POV, bouncing in and out of so many heads could be confusing. That said, not all novels-in-verse have more than one POV character.
2. Predominantly character-driven stories. Verse novels often deal with highly charged emotional issues, such as incest (Furniture, by Thalia Chaltas), mental illness (Stop Pretending What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy, by Sonya Sones), and teen pregnancy (First Part Last, by Angela Johnson).
3. Stories with poetry as a subplot or theme. In Ron Koertge’s Shakespeare Bats Clean Up, the main character is a bedridden, bored kid who reads his dad’s poetry books. He begins writing poems to express his feelings and frustrations.
4. Stories that are best told in short, vibrant bursts instead of traditional margin-to-margin prose. Scenes that capture a single moment, whether an emotion, thought, or idea.

When beginning a new writing project I play with language and how words appear on the page. Can I come up with more telling details? A more intimate voice? Well-placed, interesting word choices—their sounds, how they look on the page. I experiment with metaphor, alliteration, and assonance.

Of course, all good writing should contain these elements. However, I tend to focus more on “voice sounds” and “patterns of expression” when my writing looks like poetry.

The post Creative Choices: Why I Wrote a Novel-in-Verse appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(8 Reasons Why Poetry Is Good for the Soul.)

The anxiety and hyperawareness followed me in school. I was called harebrained by a few of my teachers, mostly because they had very little information about why I was making trivial mistakes, not asking for help when needed, hiding in washrooms, and leaving unannounced between periods. I did not have the essentials for coping in day-to-day life; I only had a knack for responding ingeniously to distressing experiences.

In adulthood, I became severely depressed and contemplated the value of my life. I barely ate and spent months at a time hiding away and giving my undivided attention to my anxiety and panic attacks. However, life was catching up on me. I needed to figure out if I wanted to further my education and how I could make a living.

My physician referred me to a psychotherapist who had a successful track record with women’s issues and childhood trauma. I can remember the first appointment like it was yesterday. She asked me to fill out a chart that rated my emotions on a scale of one to ten accompanied by questions that focused on how certain scenarios made me feel. I stared at the page with tears in my eyes from defeat wondering if I could even get past this first step. The same silence bled into my session, which encouraged my therapist to provide me with a list of activities that could help dislodge my subconscious. One of those listed was poetry.

On my way home, I was scrolling through Instagram. I came across “In this short life that only lasts an hour,” by Emily Dickinson. It was the first time where I really felt the presence of fate. The poem’s purpose made me realize that sometimes only two sentences is all I have control of when it comes to my mental health, and that’s okay. I either have the choice to befriend it or not in order to heal. It also made me feel less lonely thinking about the generations of people who read that poem and experienced the same awakening. It may not feel like those individuals exist, but they do, and sometimes finding them constitutes a lot of patience.

It gave me a hunger that I never felt before. I spent hours researching the art of poetry, as well as other poets who have written about their mental health, like Sylvia Plath.

This prompted me to write “My Twin, The Foe,” a poem that represents me taking back the power my panic attacks had, and acknowledging that they do not define who I truly am as a person. They are an extension of my being, like a twin, and respectfully should be individualized.

When I read it to my therapist, I could finally feel that little girl peacefully putting her dirty dishes into a sink for others to help clean. I knew at that moment I didn’t need to cook and tidy up all on my own.

I decided to submit the poem, without any expectation. A few weeks later, I received confirmation that it would be published by the League of Canadian Poets. It was not only a win that felt long overdue, but I couldn’t believe that my past woes were deserving of being heard. The community of poets on social media overwhelmed me with beautiful responses and notes of relation. It was the start of something beyond my wildest imagination.

They say actions speak louder than words, but I tend to disagree. 

The post How Poetry Saved My Life appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this post, Crews discusses the events that led him to edit the anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, why people need hope more than ever, and more!

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Click to continue.
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Name: James Crews
Title: How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
Publisher: Storey Publishing
Release date: March 23, 2021
Genre: Poetry/Anthology
Elevator pitch for the book: More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the U.S., including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and many others.
Previous titles by the author: Bluebird, Telling My Father, Every Waking Moment, The Book of What Stays, and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I started this book as a response to all the negative news out there. It seemed that so many of my friends and I were feeling drained, overwhelmed, and disconnected from any sense of joy in life with everything that was going on. I’ve always been moved by Brother David Steindl-Rast’s teachings on gratefulness and his view that it’s not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy. More recently, I was inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights to put together an anthology of poems that delighted me, brought me joy, and showcased gratefulness for the little things as a way of life. I feel so lucky too that Ross Gay was kind enough to write a foreword for How to Love the World.

I actually began gathering the poems when my husband and I were traveling in Argentina in January of 2020, and I’ll never forget walking through customs at the end of that month and seeing the sign: If you have traveled to Wuhan, China, please alert a customs agent. I remember saying out loud, “Oh, no. What now?” as we stood in line. I had no idea, of course, this was the first sign we were about to enter a global pandemic. It never occurred to me either that the poems I’d continue to seek out over the next few months would feel more necessary and timely than ever.

(Assembling and Submitting a Poetry Collection)

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? 

It took about a year and a half from my first inkling of a new anthology of gratitude poems until publication happened. Initially, I thought I’d edit an anthology of poems about gratitude and joy, but once the pandemic officially hit in March of 2020, hope became a basic need for all of us, and I decided that needed to be one of the main themes for How to Love the World. Without hope, joy is just not possible. On a personal level, I also felt my own lifelong anxiety coming up again. I needed all of the poems in this book to ground me again in gratitude for the world as it is, and still can be. I needed these poems to remind me that hope lay in our everyday relationships with the people in our lives, and even the strangers that we meet. Each of these poems, telling its own story of a moment, became like medicine to me at a time when nothing else was working to keep me present and calm.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title? 

So far, the most surprising thing about this book has been how much attention it’s already received. Friends keep emailing me to tell me about the places that How to Love the World is now popping up—the New York Public Library gift shop, the Harvard Bookstore, Buzzfeed, and so many local independent bookstores. I’ve had numerous requests to visit reading groups that have adopted the book, as well as libraries and museums. I knew that we all needed more gratitude and hope, but I could never have imagined just how much the positive message of these poems seems to be landing with readers right now. Another big surprise, of course, was when one of the contributors—Amanda Gorman—was named as Inaugural Poet for President Biden. I had no idea her career would explode in such an amazing way when I chose her poem. I just knew I loved the poem, and it needed to be in the book.

(5 Ways to Revise Poems)

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Editing a book is very different from writing one entirely on your own, of course, but there are some surprising similarities. Editing is still very much a creative process, and I’ve found, from having edited two anthologies now, that at a certain point, you have to just surrender to and trust the synchronicity that happens when you’re deeply engrossed in a project. Many people ask me how I chose the poems in the book, but the truth is that most of them seemed to choose me. I started with a stack of my favorite poems, and then just start adding in other poems that matched the intention of hope and gratitude for the book. I found many of the poems in How to Love the World on social media first, including Kim Stafford’s “Shelter in Place,” and Jane Hirshfield’s “When I Can Do Nothing Else Today,” both composed during the early months of the pandemic. When you become known as an editor, people also begin sending you poems and books you didn’t even ask for, which is frankly one of the real pleasures. I’ve gotten so many free books! And I love flipping through the book of a poet I might never have known before, and finding a poem that I feel is just right and fits exactly with the flow of an anthology.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

In his TED Talk on gratefulness (which I highly recommend!), Brother David Steindl-Rast says that we can’t be grateful for everything, but we can be grateful for what it teaches us. My father passed away suddenly at the age of 43, and I was only twenty years old at the time. His death came as a shock, and soon after that, I began writing poetry. I’ve found that my poems, and the poems by others that I love, are each a gateway into the so-called small moments in life. If nothing else, I hope that people take this away from How to Love the World: those quieter moments of deep presence are the ones we will always remember the most. We often post on social media about the big accomplishments, but it’s the small, everyday stuff that matters at the end of a life. I have a mantra that I say to myself when I’m feeling distracted, about to blow up at my husband or someone else I care about: “Only moments matter.” I can’t help but feel that each of the poems in How to Love the World reinforces this universal truth. If we focus too much on the big stuff, and only on what’s wrong with the world, we can easily lose sight of what’s going right, and what we can still appreciate. For me, the only way to love the world is through relishing the daily moments that make up our lives.

If you could share one piece of advice with other authors, what would it be?

It’s the same advice I give to my students: Be persistent, and be patient. We live in a very distracted world, so it can often take people a long time to pay attention to what you’re doing. But if you love what you’re creating, and believe in it absolutely, you just have to keep doing it and (most importantly, perhaps) keep finding ways to share it with the world, no matter what that looks like. I never expected to be editing anthologies of poems that people would actually read, but I just kept gathering poems that moved me and storing them in files on my computer, sharing them with students and friends on social media. Very slowly, it dawned on me: these could be a book. I always think that when we share what we create with the world, we complete the circle in a way. We just have to remember that writing is a long game, but the effort you put into it will always pay off.

The post James Crews: Art in Response to Negativity appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this post, Barksdale discusses how she decided which poems would be included in her latest collection, Grim Honey, why drafting each poem was a learning experience, and more!

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Name: Jessica Barksdale Inclán
Title: Grim Honey
Publisher: Sheila-Na-Gig/Ingram
Release date: April 1, 2021
Length: 47 poems
Previous titles by the author: The author of 15 novels and two poetry collections, Jessica Barksdale’s latest novel, The Play’s the Thing, will be published May 18^th.

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How long did it take you to write this book?

During lockdown, I participated in several writing round robins—poets/writers are paired up for a week and commit to sending each other work each day—and a couple of poetry retreats through Two Sylvias Press. Many of these poems came out of the early part of the pandemic, and these great writing experiences provided accountability, inspiration, and salvation.

Some of these poems were written after my first collection went into production, and I was very happy to have a nice home for them in Grim Honey.

How did you go about getting it published?

I was lucky enough to have the poet Maggie Smith edit my first collection, When We Almost Drowned, and I used her hints and tips to put together this collection. Once I felt it was in good form, I began to submit it to contests, a common way for poetry books to get published. My editor at Sheila-Na-Gig was really helpful, too, with thoughts and suggestions, and we worked well together to come up with the finished book.

How many of your poems were previously published?

18 of these poems were previously published, and another couple were prize-winners in poetry contests.

(Poetry FAQs: Having what it takes to be a poet)

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I will say immediately that this was the swiftest, most collaborative, most supportive publishing experience I have ever had. Haley Haugen invited me in and allowed me to make choices. She never made me wait and wonder. She was present and willing. All of that is totally surprising!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book? 

Every poem is a learning experience, and then putting these packets of learning close to each other is always kind of mind-boggling. I can see my current themes and obsessions pretty clearly. Also, the notion of grim honey—the dark and the sweet—really sort of expressed what has been going on in the world this past year. What kind of horrifying amazement has this past year been? It’s so, so dark, and yet, yes, so sweet in many surprising ways.

(Finding Success as a Poet)

Did you revise any of your poems between acceptance and publication?

Yes. I had one error, in fact (I won’t say what or in what poem), and I also took two poems out that ultimately made me uncomfortable. I like the poems, but words can be weapons, and really, why? We don’t need anything else out there hurting anyone, even if that was not the intent.

Who or what are you currently reading?

I am currently reading Alicia Hoffman’s new collection Animal. Full disclosure, I blurbed the manuscript, but it was amazing to hold it in hard copy, turning each and every page.

If you could share one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Write every day. I mentioned the round robins and the poetry retreats. Both provided me with that simple task. Write every day. Revise later.

The post Jessica Barksdale: On How Every Poem Is a Learning Experience appeared first on Writer's Digest.

My name is Ravishu Punia. I am a student currently studying MBA and CMA with the hopes of starting a business which could contribute positively to the world. When I am not reading through kilograms of textbooks, I like to write. I am a closet writer who indulges in poetry and philosophical essays as well as a science fiction book (The Game of Life) which I hope to finish by the end of this year.

*****

Master Poetic Forms!

Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.

This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!

Click to continue.

*****

Why I Write Poetry: Ravishu Punia

I began writing for the same reason I believe most people take up writing; they have simply too much going through their head. Just before I turned 20, my head was swelling with questions of all colors and sizes. I started swimming in information, drinking gallons of it every day in a futile attempt to quench my thirst for answers. There is, however, a peculiar problem with questions and their answers; answers only lead to more questions for which you need even more answers. Unperturbed by this Sisyphus-like task, largely due to the naivety of youth, I continued my gluttony of knowledge. This was, until, I grew disillusioned with the whole process and gave up entirely.

Finding no answers in the outside world, I turned my attention inward. I began to meditate, convinced that the answers lay somewhere between the neurons in my head. By now I wasn’t even sure about the questions; all I knew was that I needed some answers. Instead of dispelling the confusion in my head, I made the situation worse by tying myself into mental knots. Stuck in this vicious loop, I found myself standing in front of the fifty gates of reason, a spiritual tale of a student of meditation who finds himself lost as a result of asking too many questions (which is also the title of one of my poems).

Losing all hope, I was about to renounce meditation as well when writing found me and showed me a way out. Writing allowed me to perform a “brain dump,” to quell all the noise reverberating through my head. I would write for hours on end, spraying my mind out onto the paper through a pen. That was until I hit a wall. Words are indeed beautiful; it is mind-blowing that a few squiggly lines can combine to form limitless literature. They express myriad elements of the universe but their power of expression leaves a lot to be desired. Words do more than fine when they need to convey the tangible, but they fare poorly when it comes to the intangible. I was exasperated with these restrictions of prose until I discovered poetry, which allowed me to leapfrog them.

For poetry is nothing but words that band together in peculiar patterns to point to something beyond themselves. Poetry is word art. It allows you a glimpse into the inexpressible which is the entire purpose of art. I can paint a vivid picture without the use of colors and I can create music without the need for sound. A poem has the imagery needed for a painting. It has the rhyme and rhythm required for music. A poem breathes life into words, making them sing and dance to its music. Through poems, words say nothing and yet, they utter everything. Listen carefully to the silent music because when you lose yourself to the music, you relinquish the need for answers.

*****

If you’d like to share why you write poetry, please send an e-mail to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with a 300-500 word personal essay that shares why you write poetry. It can be serious, happy, sad, silly–whatever poetry means for you. And be sure to include your preferred bio (50-100 words) and head shot. If I like what you send, I’ll include it as a future guest post on the blog.

The post Why I Write Poetry: Ravishu Punia appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Eileen Sateriale is an Analyst for the Federal Government. She writes in her spare time. She has had poetry, short stories and travel articles published in on-line and print media. She lives in Methuen, Massachusetts with her husband.

*****

Master Poetic Forms!

Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.

This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!

Click to continue.

*****

Why I Write Poetry: Eileen Sateriale

When I was in school, my fifth-grade class had a poetry contest for Valentine’s Day. I won the contest but I thought the second-place poem was better than mine. I shyly accepted my prize and hoped that the runner-up knew, that if I were the judge, I would have awarded her first place.

For many years, I wrote sporadically but then I rediscovered writing when I was a stay-at-home mom in the 1990s. During that time, I pursued many writing avenues. I was the public relations liaison for my daughters’ private school. I wrote articles about school activities and student accomplishments and I contributed to a column for the school in a local newspaper. I also had some short stories accepted for publication as well as some travel articles. However, I really enjoyed writing poetry and discovering different forms. I had some poetry published in online and print media. For my efforts, one time, I received a $10 gift certificate as payment and another time, a leather bookmark! So, I know that quitting my day job would not be wise.

I try to write each day. If I am having a hectic day and can’t write, I’ll approach it the next day. I wrote a lot of poetry about my children growing up and enjoy rereading it now that they are grown and on their own. I found myself writing about current events and find it amazing to read about the current events at the time, years later. After the attacks of 9/11, I wrote a lot of poetry. It’s a good thing that I did that then for I could never go back and recapture the emotion of the raw event.

I find writing challenges beneficial because they help me generate new material. My favorite are poetry form challenges. With poetry forms, I research how the forms came to be and try a fresh one on my own. I like taking the time to make the rhyme and the syllable count match the form while making sure that the poem is readable and makes sense. Some of my poems have been a work in progress for years but they will be worth it when they are done. Writing challenges allow me see how other people approach the same topic which expands my horizons.

Lastly, I hope someday, I will reconnect with my fifth-grade classmate on a poetry website. It would be awesome to read her poetry!

*****

If you’d like to share why you write poetry, please send an e-mail to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with a 300-500 word personal essay that shares why you write poetry. It can be serious, happy, sad, silly–whatever poetry means for you. And be sure to include your preferred bio (50-100 words) and head shot. If I like what you send, I’ll include it as a future guest post on the blog.

The post Why I Write Poetry: Eileen Sateriale appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Pat Anthony writes from the rural Midwest, getting inspiration from the rugged furrows of plowed ground and those on the faces of the men and women working the land. She draws from experience and observation, responding to the poetry she finds everywhere. She has work published or forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Snakeskin, Cholla Needles, Gryoscope and Waterways among others.

*****

Master Poetic Forms!

Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.

This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!

Click to continue.

*****

Why I Write Poetry: Pat Anthony

I began writing in sixth grade to meet the required poem-a-week. I found topics challenging, rhyme more so. Beyond what I produced, which earned high marks, was the fact that weekly, when it came my turn to recite, Sr. Mary Henrietta (RIP) left to go into the hall and fill up her water glass. Out of spite I wrote more, worked harder. She never told me why, but she had to realize I noticed. First lesson: Poetry can propel you past pain.

High school was relatively normal until boarding school the last two years. The death of my older brother to leukemia. I wrote now for survival. Locked myself in the high-ceiled classrooms and spent hours trying to figure out the shades of green in trees, how words might fill voids. Counseling was nonexistent, writing was all I had. I stuffed poems into a little pink stationery box I have to this day. Second lesson: Poetry can get you out of bed in the morning.

Graduation loomed and learning to be a proper housewife was all the future held so I boarded city buses into the next state and announced I wanted to go to college. I had no money but a stellar GPA, class president senior year, yearbook editor. The business department put me to work. I published my first piece in the student literary magazine. Third lesson: Poetry can be shared and expanded upon by others.

I wrote. Published often, won small but noteworthy awards from state associations, area schools and universities. Studied with the Kansas Poet Laureate, Jonathan Holden, until I discovered I couldn’t do two things at once and do them well. I would either write full time and starve or work full time and invest in family, first as a single mom, later with a second family. With much regret, I resigned as a small-press poetry editor, stuffed my work into an ominous black filing cabinet and only wrote furtively in spare notebooks, the 3×5 labeled Roadkill in the car’s side pocket. Started every new year in anticipation of a comeback. Fourth lesson: Always have paper, poems are in your blood.

Retiring after years in corporate and education found me resolved to reclaim the only thing I had ever wanted to do: write poetry. I dug out the notebooks and began to transcribe. Laid work aside to chill. Edited and re-edited. Looked up a number of old publications only to discover many had vanished in the wave that decimated small presses in print format.

A careful investigation of online publishing was to discover that a vibrant world awaited. While some print withstood the test of time, new journals had emerged. Dusty drafts morphed from years of distillation into poems. Fifth lesson: You do not write poetry. You are a poet. You. Are. Poem.

So why do I write poetry? Because I have to. It’s my lifeline, and I don’t dare let it go.

*****

If you’d like to share why you write poetry, please send an e-mail to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with a 300-500 word personal essay that shares why you write poetry. It can be serious, happy, sad, silly–whatever poetry means for you. And be sure to include your preferred bio (50-100 words) and head shot. If I like what you send, I’ll include it as a future guest post on the blog.

The post Why I Write Poetry: Pat Anthony appeared first on Writer's Digest.