Begin with a free-writing exercise of the plot of the narrative. After reading what you have written. Circle or highlight the areas of the story that you think are poignant. Next, create short haiku-like verses for each of the areas…
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This piece explores using family photos and other personal items as a way to enter poems. Writers can use journals, family photos, oral histories and/or a combination of the above as writing prompts to enter poems. Questions that often come…
Poets and Performance Whether you are doing a performance of your poems or reading them – you the poet want to present your poems as best you can. Right? What does that mean? Once a friend who was a jazz…
It starts with a whisper. An image. A single word. An idea so subtle that if you don’t sit still, it will evaporate by the time you blink. That is poetry. More than any other genre of writing, I feel…
Jennifer Jean Speculating Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding around the heath/ and the desolate fens. ~lines 103-4, Beowulf 1. Sometimes, Grendel is a fist— is 5 or so dicks digging into 1…
Megan Buchanan Diamonds Heat the House What you have is exactly what I’m always looking for, he said. How soon can you come by? Monday’s good, I said. And there go the Victorian diamonds worn twice in ten years.…
Danielle Jones-Pruett Elegy in Search of a Speaker I would like to explain how the house on fire is different than the house she set on fire. It’s cavernous. My mind can’t find the edges, the walls. Soot and…
Not for Mothers Only Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing Edited by Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff & with a foreward by Alicia Ostriker Not for Mothers Only collects poems on a range of subjects under the motherhood umbrella, some…
Brainwalk by May Joseph On October 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy enveloped downtown Manhattan in a total blackout. The terrifying reality of living on the top floor of a tall skyscraper without electricity, a generator or emergency lights hit home. My…
Alana Ruben Free and Akilah Mosley, Co-editors “Stretch Marks” – “Stretch Marks” is collection of poetry by a group of English language writers who have, temporarily or permanently, made their home in Israel. Whether born speaking…