A Poem on the Middle East “Peace Process”

A Poem on the Middle East “Peace Process” Etheridge Knight ~1972 Israel à la Begin, begins, “We              /  love  /peace-and-uh Yakady-yakady-yak-yak-yak. That’s why we  /   drove  /              the Palestinians off   /  their   /  land— With the help of america and england’s evil hand. And-ah-yakady-yakady-yak-yak-yak.” In the Gaza strip an Arab boy sleeps, [...]

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Poem a day #14 Getting Dressed for Work

here’s a little lesson in what first drafts can look like. This not-yet-a-poem wanders all around, taking forever to tell a story which will probably be reduced to a few descriptive details when I’m done blithering and ready to really write. Inside every narrative is a lyric waiting to happen, but sometimes digging it out [...]

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Poem a Day #4 – Southern Illinois Summer 1970

Lest you think I exaggerate, I grew up never eating rice. I don’t remember when I first learned what it was, but I didn’t grow up knowing. I think my Grandma Dorothy would sometimes eat minute rice with a lot of sugar and cream as desert, but I never tried it. Potatoes, almost daily. Egg [...]

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Mud, Apples, Milk

Even though I didn’t grow up milking cows myself, I grew up with people who did, and I knew their connections to the cows, and I knew some of their cows. This poem makes me homesick for a childhood I almost, but didn’t quite, have. Mud, Apples, Milk Michael Walsh Of all things to miss, [...]

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working drafts – Flashback

Sections marked in [ ] are waiting for the right words or phrases to fall into place. That happens – either you stop writing to look for the right word and lose the next four ideas, or you leave it bare and come back later. Still writing, of course, which is why it breaks off [...]

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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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Welcome to Writing the Unthinkable

from Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Why haven’t you gone out and bought this book already? Jeesh. Do I have to say it again?? There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way crooked teeth [...]

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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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Enhancing, Fudging, Protecting, Lying?

One of the big issues in writing autobiographical poetry is that, as a poet, I can rarely write only about myself. To write about and from my reality, I am inevitably writing about other people. And sometimes what I am saying about them is harsh, strong, and revealing. So, as a writer and as a [...]

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A poem has two subjects

from Richard Hugo, Triggering Town a poem has two subjects: a triggering subject that gets it going and a generated subject that the poem discovers along the way. The first subject is finally just a way of accessing the poem’s true subject. The first subject is the map, the second the treasure. Billy Collins adds: [...]

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