So many of my intro to creative writing students can’t get out of the habit of writing poems like papers, planning a “topic,” and outlining the “points” they want to make. They think of poems as “meanings” decorated with pretty, poetic language. No! The purpose of a poem is to...
So jazzed to announce that three of the poems from my Letters from Spickert Knob chapbook manuscript that I’ve been working on will be forthcoming in The North Meridian Review, a new interdisciplinary, open-source journal of culture and scholarship from Marion University. The poems are “Letter 2,” “Letter 3,” and...
I am a person who has served my university as a diversity coordinator, hired speakers, and even facilitated workshops and discussions on diversity. So as I have myself taught that white passivity is viewed by victims of racism as complicity, it would be terribly wrong of me to refrain at...
Good morning! Continuing my travels through W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems, I arrived at this lovely verse. Auden seems to be channeling Shakespeare in this stage, with formal syntax and even in setting looking backwards (nothing like the American inventions of, say, William Carlos Williams et al.) But my, how...
Lately I’ve been reading the Selected Poems of W.H. Auden and posting bits I find interesting or inspiring. Here are two. This first one is very sombre, and fits with our pandemic times, as it did with his world sliding toward World War II. The sky is darkening like a...
This assignment has students engage with poems as sound. By recording poems students explore a poem’s rhythm, word sounds, and other musical qualities.
Here are six essential principles for writing lyric poetry. They are based on my many years of writing and studying “ars poetica,” the art of poetry. Keep these principles in mind when drafting and revising. 1. Poetry is Music A poem isn’t just words in a certain order. A poem...