April 2022
The World Comes to Light: Understanding and Cultivating the Art of Metaphor
Karin de Weille
“Metaphors put us touch with reality. This is not some objective reality. Reality is not generic, one-size-fits-all, the beautiful and the sick alike.”
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SUGGESTED TEACHING GUIDE for “Complicity and the Rise of the Post-Human Poem”
Sara Baxter
"Writing a found poem, such as an erasure poem, is a good next step for exploring these questions further. Since the process of crafting a found poem usually requires the poet to give up some control of meaning-making to chance operations, practicing this process can help solidify the practical implications of Lee’s questions."
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Sanctuary: Rethinking Trouble in Fiction
Anne Elliott
“I love this word: unstitch. I want to unstitch my characters. Does this mean I should try easing up on them? Some characters are stitched pretty tight.”
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“Into a Shadowed Plain”: Cathy Park Hong and the Ballad Tradition
Brian Brodeur
“Hong’s ballads rely on this ironized illusion of sincerity, but fused with conventions
associated with the American Western.”
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Response: Writing (Into and Against) Silence
Scott Nadelson
“One of our first aims as writers, then, is to recognize what silences we need to rebel against, where they creep into our lives, who imposes them, and when we impose them on ourselves.”
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Writing the Story of Mental Illness for Young Readers
Ann Jacobus and Nancy Bo Flood
“Stigma is the key barrier—the negative attitudes, prejudice, fear, and silence that urround mental illness. The many different forms these illnesses take are shrouded in misinformation and misunderstanding.”
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The Body of the Poetry Manuscript: Patterning Your Collection with Structural Repetition
Annie Finch
“Prose can also use gorgeous, lyrical, repetitive, incantatory language patterning. But while prose can be decorated by pattern, only poems are structured by pattern."
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An Abandoned Immigrant Finds Her Voice: An Interview with Allison Hong Merrill
Megan Vered
“A fire hoop is a metaphor for an obstacle. Ninety-nine fire hoops is a metaphor for never-ending challenges. I used it to reflect the fact that life gave me a series of trials and tribulations to overcome, the way a circus lion was made to jump through a series of fire hoop."
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In the Note Between Notes, In Round Sound of Breath: A Conversation with Kazim Ali
Karthik Purushottaman
"When I read poetry, I’m looking for that one moment, poem, or poet who’s going to move me. I don’t need ten or twenty. The most important poets to me have been important for thirty years."
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