October 19, 2017: After Me, Too In the aftermath of the current sexual harassment and abuse scandal — I say current because there always seems to be a new one, doesn’t there? — I, like many other women, posted #metoo on social media and found myself overwhelmed by memory and its complex, attendant emotions. I…
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Origin, Confluence, and Mystery: How the Personal Becomes Universal
In my last post, I talked about how a poem needs to have something more than the simply the personal at stake in it to make is work for the reader. Now, using a very early poem of mine, I’m going to take another approach to Shari’s excellent question, which goes as follows: How much…
The Problem of the Personal: How Much Can We Share?
September 6, 2017 This is the second of a series in which I take questions from Shari Lawrence Pfleeger on the poetry writing process. Shari: How much should a poet reveal of herself and her life experience? Should the poems be universal, or is it okay to describe a very particular experience or feeling, regardless…
July 26, 2017: Writer and Reader
This is the first of a new blog series I am devising with a fabulous student from my poetry classes at Politics & Prose. When Shari Lawrence Pfleeger first took my A Poem a Day class last year, I was thrilled to discover that in addition to writing very good poems, she asks the kind…
A Circle of Books and Poets
I no longer remember when it was I first set eyes on that beloved literary dynamo, Grace Cavalieri. As a young poet, I came to know and love her voice, as I heard it in her poems and also on her radio interview show, The Poet and the Poem, then broadcast on WPFW.
A Reason to Dance
As a way of launching my new, spiffy website, I am spending the turn of the year reflecting on various artists and arts organizations who seem to me to have done particularly powerful and important work in the past year. First up, Word Dance Theater. Though poetry was my first love, it wasn’t the only…