In the fall of 2015, I took my first poetry class. The class was cross-listed for undergrad and graduate students, and it focused on poetry forms. I had limited form experience before this class: in sixth grade, I wrote some haiku, in 10th grade, I wrote limericks, and I had read various sonnets, mostly Shakespearian. …
Cottonwoods anchor banks above the Missouri. Chartreuse leaves dancing. A cormorant flies low over the gray water like a black arrow. For the past eleven years, I’ve spent a morning and afternoon on the bank of the Missouri River at Clay County Park near Vermillion, teaching children to write haikus, and haikuing alongside them. On …
“Some poems are good medicine. and some “good medicine poems” are mindfulness poems.” So say Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson, both members of the South Dakota State Poetry Society, who are celebrating the recent publication of Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems. Cole-Dai, a resident of Brookings, and Wilson, who lives in …
As Jane Hirshfield writes in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, “Images…are forms that let us inhabit abstraction as if from within, and so begin to know our kinship with the wide field of being.” I love that sentence although I admit, I need to ponder it a bit each time I read it. …
Lindy Obach is originally from North Dakota but now resides in Sioux Falls and teaches for the University of South Dakota at the University Center. Her poems about growing up on a farm in the Dakotas in the late 20th century will resonate with other Dakotans, and her explorations of emotion and relationships, particularly within …
Brandyn Johnson teaches at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, and he writes touching, understated poems about his family—he has several particular affecting poems about his brother in his chapbook in Four Quarters to a Section, published by the SDSPS in 2015. I particularly like this poem of his, from The Puritan: GARBAGE When you …
Creative writing professor at Augustana University, Patrick Hicks published a touching and honest portrayal of adoption in 2014, his book Adoptable (Salmon Press). One of my favorite poems from that book is up at The Poetry Foundation: The Strangers By Patrick Hicks After we picked you up at the Omaha airport, we clamped you into …
I recently attended a panel of women artists at SDSU’s art museum. They discussed the difficulties in making art, and one of them said something that I found especially encouraging, which I will get to later. I have also recently been reading Art and Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David …
She’s not going to be a South Dakotan much longer, because she got a teaching gig in Texas, so I thought I’d give a shoutout to Sara Henning while she’s still our neighbor! I’m particularly fond of her poem “The Color of Ashes,” available at The Superstition Review: The Color of Ashes “We all live …
November is NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month). It began in 1999 as a way of encouraging authors to write a certain number of words on their novel every day. Undoubtedly, it has resulted in the publication of novels that would not have been written otherwise, and that’s a good thing. I adapted that idea to …
