Lorine Niedecker, “Transition”
Why do we create? This is America. Many believe that if you don’t produce, you don’t deserve to exist. This absurdity drives people to publish on th...
Category: poetry
Louise Bogan, “Knowledge”
Bogan opens with knowledge from pain. Now she knows “that passion warms little of flesh.” She did not know this before. A relationship gone wrong wa...
Kay Ryan, “New Rooms”
What I would like to learn as I write more: how to be a better student. If, confronted with words of an almost alien language, how would I find what’s rel...
Emily Dickinson, “The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman” (1487); Twila Newey, “In the Plum”
Often I think about doing. It is a form of procrastination but potentially more. When Dickinson wonders about a man who trekked “so far so cold… / F...
Robert Creeley, “The Rhyme;” Georgia O’Keefe, “Red and Orange Streak / Streak;” Ted Kooser, “Sitting All Evening Alone in the Kitchen”
“Loneliness makes you part of the largest group of people in the world,” I used to tell myself. It never worked. I felt miserable no matter how many...