Yusef Komunyakaa “Back Then”

I’ve eaten handfuls of fire back to the bright sea of my first breath riding the hipbone of memory & saw a wheel of birds a bridge into the morning but that was when gold didn’t burn out a man’s eyes before auction blocks groaned in courtyards & nearly got the best of me that [...]

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Rabbit Hunting Day

Rabbit Hunting Day draft 4 straddling the culvert, a baby blue ’57 F150 gun rack arms skeletal the smallest Carhartt scarecrow, snatched by barbed wire, grunts across frost- crackled grass tinged gray washed sky a path wailed wide by banshees woven shut by black whipstitch tails hunger a rhythm pulsing fingertip to trigger dew-damp cold [...]

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Back to Voigt for more essential craft truth

So I had no idea that Ellen Bryant Voigt would become a major mentor of mine, but I just keep finding her critical/analytical writing to be what I need when I need it. One of my many writing struggles this fall has been using image; my poems have been flat, narrative, discursive, two-dimensional, with not [...]

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Lynda Barry on Images and Thoughts

from What It Is, her graphic/illustrated guide to writing. And living. And memoir. And art theory. This is an amazing book. Go buy it. An image feels different than a thought. It feels somehow alive. If you say your first phone number out loud, you can feel something that is different than saying your phone [...]

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