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How can that be? For no very good reason I can think of, the idea of the Businessman/Poet intrigues the reading public no end. (If a surgeon plays the violin in a chamber group no one gives it a second thought.) Perhaps the two stereotypes, the “hardnosed” businessman and the “Romantic” poet, are at opposite […]
People often ask me how I come up with my poems. While I can’t provide a set rule for how poems come to me, or how I write them, here’s a little story about how one poem came to me. One snowy January day I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange […]
A century ago the early Modernists, in their mania for the experimental, pushed all the boundaries of poetry. The traditional verse forms of 19th century poetry were abandoned for a century of free verse. The nostalgic poetry of the Edwardians (Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?) gave […]
There is no Frigate like a Bookto take us Lands away.– Emily Dickinson I find you in these sunless stacks.Your poems might be uncommonly fine —but your pages darken to brittlenessand you’ve never been checked out. Unlessyour anchor’s weighed and you proceedto find the harbor of another’s mind,nothing will come of the cargo in your hold.I […]
I am pleased to release my latest offering: The Subcutaneous Art: A Collection of Short Essays on Poetry “Poetry. I, too, dislike it.” Marianne Moore wrote that a century ago and it still lives, ubiquitous on T-shirts and coffee mugs. But it’s not really about liking or disliking poetry. Here’s the full quote: Like it […]
This is the second in our occasional series celebrating State Poets Laureate. It is adapted from a reading I gave at Bennington College in 2018 when the college was gifted the Stone House in which Robert Frost lived with his family and wrote from 1920-1940. It was here that he won the first of his […]
All rhyme is a regulation of sound. When rhyme is overused and mismatched to the meaning of the poem, it distracts from rather than reinforces the flow. Rhyme then becomes an independent activity; the effect is that of watching a child skip rope while trying to sing an unrelated song. If rhyme in a poem […]
Can you name your state’s poet laureate? If not, you have a lot of company. Although 45 of the 50 states have an official position of state poet laureate (per Library of Congress) the programs vary widely from state to state. Some of the appointments are local and, to steal a line from Ezra […]
If you’re a poet, have you ever read through what you wrote and asked yourself this question: How do you know if what you wrote is a poem? For me, a poem is a sound train. The consonants as givens, the vowels, endlessly open, endlessly Ee—ii—o—oo—aa. Airy aspirates, diphthongs, fricatives, apocopes: Poetry is sound bites […]
Do you differentiate between your work and play, your avocation and your job? Robert Penn Warren asked, “What is a man but his passion?” If you make your life’s work out of your passion, then there doesn’t need to be a distinction between vocation and avocation, or between business and poetry, or between any other […]
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This collection comes from my lifelong engagement with poetry—an obsession that has never let go. Together, we’ll explore questions like: What makes a poem, a poem? Can a poet be wrong on everything—and the poem still be right?