When you receive a “Listenback” from a critique on your work, what can you do next?
Use the feedback you’ve received to set up exercises to try things out.
Use this releasing question: What other poems are inside this poem?
Editing and re-writing are like sculpting.
To complement Eden Maxwell’s excellent advice today on making rejection work in your creative life, look in Riehlife’s WRITE PEN! archives for more solid advice on using rejection by Nancy Connally, Janet Muirhead Hill…and (the other Janet) myself. My article “Relishing Rejection” was posted on “Eliot, a Literary Blog” as well as www.ezinearticles.com. August 24,…
These Days by Charles Olson from “Collected Poems of Charles Olson—Excluding Maximus Poems” whatever you have to say, leave the roots on, let them dangle And the dirt Just to make clear where they come from
Algebra has a poetry of its own. Poetry has an algebra of its own. 1) How is poetry like an algebra equation? 2) What is the ration and proportion of poetry? 3) What is your definition of “earned abstraction”? How does a poem earn the use of abstract concepts and words?
This poem was written in Lake County, Northern California, and refers to Clear Lake, California’s largest self-enclosed lake. I now cross the Mississippi River at least once a week, rather than gazing out on Clear Lake. But, as we’ve slid deeper into Autumn with the time change, this poem from “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” (see…
Here are some of the early lesssons I learned growing up on the land of Evergreen Heights…about sex, alcohol, and protecting your territory from intruders.–JGR GATED COMMUNITY (from Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary) Three gates protected our hilltop kingdom. One at the bottom, just past the No Trespassing sign. One at the top, just short of…
“The Apple Factory,” is the third poem in this series of reprising Arletta Dawdy’s poems which appeared on Riehlife in its early days. Read “The Apple Factory,” a poem by Arletta Dawdy–1914 Sharp turns in Russia and China…apples, war, and rivers. “The Apple Factory” grew out of a conversation in the 1970s with an elderly…