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.
I lived in New Mexico for seven years in the 1980s. I recall the Saturday night car parades down the main street of Espanola…and have magical memories of Chimayo. I’m glad our National Poetry Month editor Stephanie Farrow chose this poem for us. It brings back happy memories of one of my heart homes. –Janet…
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…
In the “Always Coming Home” workshop I gave at the Land Full of Stories Conference we began by generating a list of writing topics we could write on when we returned to our homes. Each woman had a new journal to write in with a rose on the front in full bloom–her homecoming journal. We…
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?
Nancy Connally tells how she balanced out the negative critique by learning from the wisdom of an on-line writing village…including finding out that even exceptionally gifted writers must learn how to cope with folks who don’t take to their work. —JGR ____________________________ Later that day, I checked in with a writers group I belong to…
GULLY by Janet Grace Riehl (from Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary) I raise my head from the ground where my eyes were glued to avoid tripping over my feet. A cleft joins the two curves of the hill, a dimple that marks its face like Cary Grant’s. Matted grass cushions my steps pattering over yesterday’s mud….