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.
After a writer’s meeting where would you want to go? A fancy restaurant with “bistro” in it’s name? A malt shop reminding you of high school? The Woolworth counter? Or…McDonald’s? For the four of us, it was definitely McDonald’s only a few blocks down the street in Alton, Illinois darkness. Safety in numbers with more…
I met William T. Dawson in Mountainair, New Mexico, in August 2007 for the 10th annual Sunflower Festival centered at the historic Shaffer Hotel. First, I’d attended the Sunflower Poetry Writing workshop, then participated as a featured reader in the Mountainair Poetry & Writers Picnic. This spoken word event is sheltered in the tree-shaded garden…
Marvin Bell has written a fine poem on an impossible subject. In its sweep, yet anchored in strong, precise images that anchor the ideas that America was founded on…in its inclusion of family, of people who work with both hands and heads…for me, it’s a true poem—perhaps even a great poem—of the beat of what…
Wisdom lives within us, we have only to connect with it. But, how? In the 1980s, when I lived in New Mexico, I studied Psychosynthesis Professional Training with the Intermountain Associates of Psychosynthesis, co-directed by Molly Young Brown and Walter Polt. Walter collaborated with me on training programs for my consulting firm Clear Communication and…
Wizard Altar, by Janet Riehl “Thinking as if…magic is real.” If someone gave you a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could be a character from any book, who would you be? What is the silliest thing to ever happen to you?
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…