I repeat to you, ladies and gentlemen: the State of the Author is strong. And with the unlikely help of every last one of us...
The ghosts of men who named the river / suckle moon-limned mist slipping down / from thick firefly-flickering treelines...
The corniness and implausibility of melodrama stems from a form of narcissism—a fictional world that conforms too completely to the character's emotional state, indicating a micromanaging author...
Remember that what matters is that you be fearless and write fearless poems. The world needs you to say the things it cannot say for itself...
I wasn’t complaining. I was living / in a land where two double cheeseburgers cost less than a single. / Nice people were passing through the park…
All day I have been sitting around / waiting to be thin. / There was a time I was more or less pure. / I still am...
She would fly from the islands and fall in love with a white boy like me, start a family, get lost in a medium-sized Midwestern city...
And there they are, two little boys, Jacob with his face scrunched in agony, and tears and a nub of his finger on the floor near the closet...
You’ll say it was because your parents didn’t understand you—that’s why you left—but really it’s because they understood you too well…
Mutability is within the soul itself. It listens its way in / With eager mouth. God was never so economical. / Death inscribes its signature without blot...
In the caked oak tracts of the thumbed / dim chalkboard, behind the easel tipping paler / continents further / north, toward the gloss of April...
Gulf Shores, Alabama. The sun spun in its flaming sphere, light-belching charioteer. I was pale and in the ocean, naked but for a swimsuit and a snorkeling mask...
I am not ashamed to tell you that my debut book of poetry, Beast, was rejected 70+ times over an approximately five year period before it was finally accepted and turned into an object in the world …
As Paul was readying the kids for a little hike, one of the boys started to panic; a first-grader, he was worried he'd get attacked by a bear. Paul told the kid: "The good news is we're all gonna die …
As others have asked before, "Where is the poetry of the first Gulf War?", I ask, "Where is the great twenty-first century American bicycle poem?" And I am only half kidding...
There are many different types of writing: but I've found it's just plain easier to write when I have a clear, manageable objective, no matter what stage of the writing process I'm at. So I thought …
"For all men live by truth," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay The Poet , "and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter …
Merwin unable to make it to reading with Dean Young. #Staycalm everyone: I brought some poems to read...
The exchange was just another reminder that the capitalist society I live in is obsessed with material wealth and measures human value by net worth and not, say, capacity for feeling...
We strive to create images that intrigue the reader by offering them a vision of the world that is slightly skewed, that give us a picture of the commonplace made new and strange...