Writing Prompt: The Power of Witnessing for One Another
When/if we witness one another? Really were present and listened to each other? Affirmed what takes place? What does it look like? What happens within both people and in the relationship?
When/if we witness one another? Really were present and listened to each other? Affirmed what takes place? What does it look like? What happens within both people and in the relationship?
The Avalanche Linda Hogan Savings Just last month the avalanches like good women were headed for a downfall. I saw one throw back her head and let go of the world. No more free soup bones for that one. No more faces of friends at the door with doilies and lace, with ivory charms carved…
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.
When I was in college in my 20s at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (commuting from my parents land), I was part of the editorial team for their literary magazine “Sou’wester.” My poem “Under Mama’s Yew Tree” (later published in “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary”) was given some very encouraging words from Galway Kinnell. Because of…
Radiator by Connie Wanek from Bonfire Mittens are drying on the radiator, boots nearby, one on its side. Like some monstrous segmented insect the radiator elongates under the window. Or it is a beast with many shoulders domesticated in the Ice Age. How many years it takes to move from room to room! Some cage…
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…
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?