The Ekphrastic Fantastic

Ekphrasis, according to The Oxford Classical Dictionary, means "the rhetorical description of a work of art." And Edward Hirsch, in his hefty resource, A Poet's Glossary, quotes Paul Valéry as saying, "We should apologize that we dare to speak about painting" in one breath, and, "There are important reasons for not keeping silent [since] all …

Stupid Questions

In the education world, the saying goes, there are no stupid questions. But in the big-boy world, the expression has deep roots. One place where it is most prevalent is sports, where breathless victors, still caught up in the power and the glory of their heart-stopping wins, often find a mic thrust into their faces …

Political Poems Big and, Better Yet, Small

Political. It's a big-tent word, all right. And these days most folks focus on the "big" as in bigmouths that crowd the field we should call "government" but instead call "politics" because there's more politics than government going on by far. You can write a political poem about this bigness, sure. But it's a tricky …

Brian Doyle: Pro at Prose Poetry

I first discovered Brian Doyle when I read his imaginative novel of the sea, The Plover, a few years back. The good ship Plover makes a cameo in Doyle's earlier book, Mink River, which I just finished reading yesterday, Doyle is a prose writer with poetic blood coursing through his veins. You need only look at …

Ten Honest Rejections

Your poem has been rejected. Again. But don't you wish the rejections were a bit more truthful? After all, we live in an age where "truth" is under siege. It needs all the help it can get. And boiler-plate rejections are just so impersonally vanilla. Let's try a little chocolate pizzazz, shall we, because if …

The “Sullen Art” of Writing Poetry

Sure, some writers love to spout off about inspiration, about their passion for writing, about the way their precious ideas bloop out as finished products, ninth month in the first week and Hail Caesarean! Then you have the honest writers. The ones who write quality poems, but acknowledge it as work that seems to take …

Sure Things: Food and Loneliness

What to write about? Seems like an easy enough question. Some say your topics should be determined solely by the dictator that is you. Others say have mercy on your readers' souls. Consider them. Others still--the agnostic wafflers of the bunch--say, "Why not both?" I'll be political and not take a stand because who really …

The Ordinary–It Should Scare You to Death

Too often, when writers set out with a purpose such as "to make my readers laugh" or "to scare my readers," they fall victim to stock props of the genre as found on TV, in the movies, and yes, in literature. But there's more to, say, scaring people than vampires by night, zombies by day, …

My Book Finds Precious Real Estate

So your book is listed on amazon. Ho-hum. The same is true for 4,609,398,623,211 other books. Where the rubber really hits the road is when your book sits on a bookstore shelf. We're talking prime real estate, many dots beyond com, between Barnes and his distinguished brother, Noble, say, or between some Mom and some …

A Poem Should Be…

Ars Poetica. According to both Merriam and Webster, it means "a treatise on the art of literary and especially poetic composition." And strictly speaking, in the Dead Language (that's Latin to you), it means "the art of poetry." Many poems carry this title, and it is considered a rite of passage to write your own …