“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.” –Virginia Woolf As writers, we are each of us part observer, part critic, part dreamer, part mad scientist: we start with an idea or image and begin our furious stitching from there. But so often our creations go unfinished: we get stuck on a particularly difficult …
At the end of semester when I was studying poetry forms, we played with some newer experimental forms. I was assigned the Paradelle, which was invented by Billy Collins in 1996. In his own words, Collins asserts “I invented the form (parody + villanelle = paradelle) in order to produce a very badly written one. …
I think all good poetry is written from emotion. Either something happens that touches us in our everyday walk of life, or we are moved by the special events that mark how we give meaning to ourselves and our world at large. This emotional response is not something that any of us can fake. Its …
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 …
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. …
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 …
When I was younger, I only ever wrote when inspiration struck. I typically wrote poetry or song lyrics (song lyrics included a melody in my head and usually included more repetition and yeahs). My notebook would collect dust between emotional outpourings. And the first page often read something kind yet firm “If you are picking …
The nature of my work is such that I spend a good deal of time on the road. Not just traveling, say to spend a few days at a conference or in meetings, but actually on the road, driving from here to there to investigate an accident scene or inspect a home damaged by fire …
“Writing Process” refers to a method or way of approaching the practice of writing; it’s a series of recursive activities that begins with generative writing and ends with a polished text. I use “writing “ and “text” generally because I use this process for all kinds of writing that I compose, including poetry, memoirs, essays, …
Re-Seeing: The Role of Revision in the Writing Process Read More »
