Category: On Craft
Hawks and Walkaways: How Nature Can Aid Revision
“Not everyone will walk away from a computer into the vast outdoors and find help from a hawk. But over time, these ‘focused walkaways,’ which were first unexpected distractions, have become a scheduled part of my practice, my discipline.”
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Getting Away with It: Epistolary Fiction
The epistolary toolkit is a rich and varied one—it insists on the reader’s interpretive participation, and offers powerful methods for developing character and setting and for playing with the progression of time. So: what, supposedly, is wrong with it?
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Poetry in Fiction Workshop: Everything Is the Same, Everything Is Not the Same
Summer Assistant Editor Rome Hernández Morgan explores the ways poets can learn from the craft of fiction.
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Are You Gonna Go My Way? The Inclusiveness of Second Person
What makes second-person narration so compelling? What makes it so polarizing? In this essay, Jen Michalski reflects on the magnetic pull of “you.”
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Elliston Poet-in-Residence Spotlight: Brian Teare
We reflect on Elliston Poet-in-Residence Brian Teare’s vivid call for “poetry as fieldwork.”
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In Defense of Wish Fulfillment & Romantic Fantasy
What can romance teach us about the space between “improbable” and “impossible”?
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Trapdoors & Lit Fuses: How We End Our Poems
How do we choose a poem’s final, resounding lines?
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On Writing in a Secondary Genre
Working across genres can be intimidating for those who write and publish in mostly one genre. Cindy Juyoung Ok, SJ Sindu, Philip Metres, and Kathryn Nuernberger share insights.
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Poetry at the Museum
What draws us, as writers, to museums, exhibits, and galleries? What is it about these spaces—real or imagined—that makes us curators in our own work?
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On Titling Poems
Titling is sometimes the easiest, sometimes the hardest part of crafting a poem—a process that seems shrouded in both mystery and luck. Five poets share their perspectives.
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On Craft: Notes on a Failure Poetics
“I’m not going to talk about ways to succeed in poetry—not how to craft a perfect line or please your reader or even excite the staff at a literary journal. Instead, I’m going to briefly talk about a poetics of failure.”
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