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A playshop that leaps between details and dreams Something to think about: Part of the magic of the poem is that it goes beneath the story. It is more than a retelling of what happened, though it is that, too. I think that the best poems will allow us to …

Read: Wild Geese Wild Geese –Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, …

Writing Play: My Lips Got Lost Read: My Lips Got Lost on the Way to the Kiss My Lips Got Lost Rumi, translated by Daniel Ladinsky My lips got lost on the way to the kiss— that’s how drunk I was. Luckily though I still connected with the most tender …

Think of a place in your life where you are feeling stuck. On the top of a page, write a word or phrase, no more than that, that symbolizes this stuck place. Read “Ask Me,” by William Stafford. Go outside with your paper and pen and walk till you find …

What would it be like on the last day of the world? I have not spent a lot of time considering the Apocalypse, but thanks to a very provocative workshop led by Jennifer Hancock, professor of English at CMU, I had the chance to consider it. We read some fantastic …

I am in love with Stone Gathering: A Reader, a new periodical that feels great in the hands and features poems, small fictions and essayettes. I was thrilled to be included in the first two editions, which also feature Naomi Shihab Nye, Marvin Bell, Wendell Berry, and many others.

Join me and Susie Harrington for our weekend retreat in La Sal, Utah, embracing the paradox of finding your voice and practicing silence. Learn more and register here.

A bit of a challenge: six unrhymed stanzas of six lines each. The words at the ends of the first stanza’s lines recur in a rolling pattern at the ends of all the other lines. The sestina concludes with a tercet (three-line stanza) that also uses all six words, two …

The pantoum is a poetic form from Malaysia, beginning centuries ago as an oral folk form of indefinite length. It is made up of quatrains that rhyme abab. The lines follow this pattern: 1 2 3 4 5 (same as line 2) 6 7 (same as line 4) 8 9 …

If you look around, there are plenty of ugly things … but can you use words to make them beautiful? Try to create a list of things that are “ugly,” and then look for a poetic way to transform them. Sometimes, just by paying attention to something “ugly,” we begin …