As part of my creative thesis for my MFA, I made visual artworks out of several dozen poems (poems which lent themselves to visual display). Additionally, I set up an audio station (laptop plus headphones) for an experimental project in which I recorded my then fourteen-month-old daughter…
Read MoreThe group had for a long time been all male. The head of the group, a doctor my wife knows pretty well, was persuaded to ask her to join the committee because of the gender disparities. Think: “we need one of you for the optics.”
Read MoreThis meme (above) was immediately interesting to me, but not because it looked accurate or trustworthy. In fact, it looked interesting because it looked absurd. So I thought I'd pull a Ronald Reagan and "trust but verify." After an exhaustive Google search, I was finally able to figure out how to find "nyc crime rate by year" and I also found an official table of crime statistics through calendar year 2021 (the last complete year and last year for which information is fully available).
Read MoreI was never the guy at the bar who hit on every woman there. I had friends who were like that. Quantity over quality. Sorry, that’s an offensive and pretty disgusting way to look at the dating scene. But I couldn’t deny it “worked” for those guys, who, more often than not, would leave our group of guy friends at some point in the night to go home with a woman in order to chase the excitement of a new “conquest,” a woman interested in being—or a woman willing to be—partner to a brief physical engagement.
Read MoreWriters know: rejection is not something we seek out, but it is a significant part of the game. A post today on Facebook reminded me that four years ago I wrote about a very short work being accepted, but that it was an exception to the general rule that submissions end in rejection.
Read MoreSix and a half years ago, after completing writing a poem I really liked, I submitted it for the first time. 233 days later, I got the standard rejection letter. No problem. Even then I was used to opening rejection letters, updating my submissions spreadsheet, and moving on.
But I really felt like this poem was "good." I put that word in quotes, because
Read MoreI want to start with a number: Five thousand two hundred and twenty nine. It’s not a number you hear all the time. But it’s the number that Mom happened to use when referring to how many things she had to do:
Read MoreMy favorite work of all time is a book-length poem. It was published in 2001. That’s this century. Whenever anyone asks me my favorite work…
Read MoreThe word “stiatimcatis” (STY-uh-tim-KAH-tis) is an acronym that stands for “Seed Text Into Acrostic, Then Into Morse Code, And Then Into Syllables,” and that is the method of constraint that dictates the construction of the poem…
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