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July 30, 2020Mom's Turn
While Accretion, my recently published debut, is a collection of poetry, it’s also a narrative closely based on a really transformative moment in my life a few years back. Given that family and tradition ...
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November 30, 2020
Playlist for How Do I Look?
To wrap up my Open Book Residency, and to lead us into December, I thought I’d leave with a little goodbye present: a good ‘ol playlist! I don’t ever listen to music while I write - I get distracted ...
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May 08, 2023Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"
So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...
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May 10, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni
I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...
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March 02, 2022Carl Watts on Why Poetry's So-Called Shortcomings Might Be Its Greatest Strengths
It's easy to imagine the scene: at a poetry reading (pre-pandemic), an open mic-er ascends to the stage, taps the microphone, and announces with aplomb, "I just wrote this five minutes ago." Cue the ...
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November 20, 2020Writing Beyond the End of the World
We spend our days scrolling through countless words. Many of us are fixated on screens from the moment we awake until the moment we return to the same bed to sleep. And from day to day, not a whole lot ...
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April 15, 2014
The Best Words
Sometimes I’m haunted by Coleridge’s nifty definition of a poem as the best words in their best order. If I try to say it quickly several times in a row, “order” starts to sound like “odour.” ...
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April 12, 2014
Poet for Hire
I heard a few days ago that a colleague did a major job of editing that took the better part of a year to complete for a mere five-hundred dollars. I happen to mention this to a friend who works as a ...
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April 22, 2014
Endurance
It was a minute-and-a-half since I finished toying with a poem that hadn’t been working for weeks; I had that submarine feeling that it was sinking out of sight. But I had no time to dither with the ...
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April 18, 2014
Body Parts
Am I writing the same poem over and over again? My books are teeming with the invisible and a state of loneliness that could be a one-man cold war. I never set out to revisit these themes, but they almost ...