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Field Notes from a Poetry Coach
Biweekly inspiration for developing a creative practice that supports your writing and your well-being.
You have a draft you’re excited about. It’s a new direction for you or it finally says that thing you’ve been trying to say for years. Or maybe you know it’s going to be a big supporting wall in your manuscript. You felt alive and tuned-in while writing it. You let it sit a few weeks before revising it. Then you start knocking the rust off: you delete some unnecessary adjectives, you cut the throat-clearing first stanza and replace it with a strong image. It’s going well. You’re still excited...
I have a new microchap out from Rockwood Press. It’s called minutes between city and forest and it’s my shortest book yet. I say this because I think there is an unhelpful myth out there that poets should graduate from chapbooks to full-length collections; some manuscripts need to be small—and brevity gives poets (and readers) more room for experimentation and risk-taking than they might have in a full-sized collection. As a case in point, this is also my first speculative book (it’s a series...
Beginnings are exciting, but they are also hard to spot. My nephew is learning to crawl this summer. He’s an energetic baby and he gurgles knowingly at my literary references, but he’s finding (as each of us did once) that quadruped-style locomotion is a complex challenge. First, there’s the matter of pressing off his tummy-time blanket and onto hands and knees. Then there’s the issue of coordinating his limbs into forward movement. Recently, he perched excitedly on his hands and toes and...