Hi Everyone, I have a question which I would hope lends itself to debate among us. Just how much should any of us use such personal or obscure references and language in our writing so that almost every line of a poem has to be explained by the writer to a reader, or the poem …
A former student emailed me recently to recommend an online writing community. Her goal? To get critique on her work. She’d heard horror stories about online writing groups where people stole participants’ work, and she hoped I had some good advice about finding a reputable online writing group. I hadn’t heard about that sort of …
The Annual Poetry Contest’s deadline is December 1, 2017. The contest has two categories: Landscape and Portrait. The poems are read blind and judged by an independent committee. For more information about the contest click here The following two poems won the first and second place prizes in the 2016 Landscape category: First Place Dakota Flamenco …
“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. …
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. …
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 …
