Author Archive
A Writer’s Life
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.
A Conversation with Kim Addonizio
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
Website
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
Joy Rides
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
Finding Readers
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.
Meter
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
Kasha
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
Word List
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
Manuscript
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
Culinary Art
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
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