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.
Readers have written—even called!–wanting to know what’s going on with me and with the Riehlife site. As to both, I can say, “We are under construction. Pardon our dust.” First, as to the site, because that’s more simple: We’re in the process of shifting from a standard blog-column with a website sidebar to a visual…
One of the pleasures of the Story Circles Network “Land Full of Stories” Conference I just came home from was meeting Cindy Bellinger. I attended her workshop on journaling, bought her new book on journaling, and enjoyed having her participate in my workshop “Always Coming Home.” Her website describes Cindy as “a Western girl through…
Janet Riehl with her book “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” (see sidebar) This aphorism is something I said at a book evening at Left Bank Books in the Central West End, St. Louis…when the conversation turned to writing. The author of the evening urged me to write it down, so I did. (One of the foundational…
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
—from “Insect Life of Florida” by Lynda Hull In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander…
I met Joe on-line during April’s Poem-a-Day. I met Marcy Burns when she reviewed “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.” Joe and Marcy are friends. He responded to my father’s poem for mother “When Trails Divide” by sending me a poem Ric Masten wrote for Joe’s wife. Marcy had sent me Ric Masten’s book “Words & One-Liners,…