April 2, 2018 (For National Poetry Month, Alan Squire Publishing is featuring a poet a week from their list with a special sale. From now until April 9, my three poetry collections are $10.00 each on this site.) As a child, I distrusted mythology, as I did any literature that adults seemed to think was…
Letters From Rose
After Me, Too
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…
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.