Author Archive

I Know How it Ends

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In 1988, the only thing that was happening in my life was A.A. and people with AIDS. I was living with an architect in a loft in Brooklyn that had once been a picture frame factory still trying to figure out what to write now that I was coming

5 for Tony Leuzzi

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I met Tony Leuzzi a couple of years ago when he came to interview me for the Lambda Literary website and our mutual passion for poets and poetry bonded us immediately. In our interview, Tony asked hard questions about what it means to be engaged with the continual elusiveness

Goddard College: Talking with Writers about Teaching (Part 2)

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My friends and colleagues Darcey Steinke and Douglas A. Martin and I all got together one afternoon during a break from the Goddard College MFA low-residency program where we all teach to talk about the MFA degree in general, what we feel is different about Goddard and  how teaching one-on-one informs us as writers and

Goddard College: Talking with Writers about Teaching (Part 1)

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Post by guest-blogger Michael Klein. My friends and colleagues Darcey Steinke and Douglas A. Martin and I all got together one afternoon during a break from the Goddard College MFA low-residency program where we all teach to talk about the MFA degree in general, what we feel is different

Music to Write By

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It’s hard to write sentences or poems with people singing songs in the background but I think that some other music – orchestral music, smaller music involving instruments, singers singing without words – is a great and inspiring thing to have playing next to you when you are writing. 

5 for Carl Phillips

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When the poet Alan Dugan was alive, there used to be a reading every summer in Wellfleet at the local library where members of his workshop would read their poems to, mostly, locals.  It was a generous thing of Alan to do, and also something rare – seeing poets

The Indoor Secret Movie Voice or Being Wildly Coherent

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As soon as you find your voice, you’ve lost it                                                                          Jon Anderson *

Don’t Speak

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This week, I’m posting a short little video on the topic of dialogue in prose and how big a fan I am of dialogue not being there. Of course — as I say, if I remember right, in the video — writers are urged to include and even rely

The Word I Couldn’t Leave

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I didn’t know how obsessed I was with the world – with the actual word world – until I went through my last book of poems and saw that I used the word at least 30 times.  Actually, another poet told me I used it 30 times but of

Interview with Tracy K. Smith – “Poets are Lucky”

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I met Tracy K. Smith a couple of weeks before she won the Pulitzer Prize for her terrific and completely ravishing new book, Life on Mars.  We were at a book party for Stephen Motika and his lovely new book, Western Practice – a loft somewhere downtown, in the