Author Archive
Awake. This far north the sun is an early riser, though it stays groggy with fog till mid-morning. The red-checked garter snake still sleeps beneath the front stoop; the window spider still clings to the center of last night’s web, spangled with wings. The desultory cries of a crow.
I got a chance to sit down with Kim Addonizio and talk about poetry, the blues, and her new rock and roll band Nonstop Beautiful Ladies. PK: The relationship between poetry and music has long been a contentious one. Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading argued that “poetry
I am ready to launch my website. This is not something I’ve undertaken without long consideration. After all, what does a website have to do with my writing? Launching a website isn’t likely to lead me to write more poems – in fact, I spent hours trying to design
In passing with my mind on nothing in the world but the right of way I enjoy on the road by virtue of the law… ––William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, XI There are no more guilt-free Sunday drives, no cleanly joyful joy-rides. And maybe there never were. Maybe
How do we find good critical readers for our work? Whose eyes will see it as ours can’t or won’t? Who makes for a better critic – a sympathetic reader, or a skeptical one? We ask much of these readers – they must devote time and emotion and thought.
I am a poet without a kind. I write formal poems in an age of free verse (not to mention poetry in an age of prose!), but I don’t feel kinship with the most visible formalist movements. The divide I feel goes beyond subject matter and worldview, though these
This weekend, in the spirit of trying something new in the kitchen, I cooked up some kasha. I will not be cooking up any more kasha. Kasha, for those of you who are like I was until very recently – that is, blissfully unaware of all manner of things
For all of my adult life I’ve kept a list of words. Each time that I come across an unfamiliar word in my reading, I try to dutifully look it up in the dictionary and copy down its definition. There have been busy weeks when I’ve let it slide
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reworking my manuscript, ordering and reordering, adding and removing poems, trying to shape it into something that’s more than just a coherent collection. I want my book to feel like a particular kind of experience, one that develops unexpectedly as it
The shapely tesserae of a well-chopped onion. Butter and flour foaming into roux. The beauty of texture, the formal grace: the rough seed husk and the slippery seed. Precision in small things. The hours spent simmering and adjusting, simmering and stirring till the earth is in it. Knifecraft; the