I see you. I understand. I’m feeling it too: the pressure to write while navigating an unpredictable and downright frightening world. It’s tiring. Even in our homes during a pandemic, news and images of climate disruption, persistent racism, misogyny, political maneuverings, etc. live in our phones and computers, always one…

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops — at all -… I still wonder why Emily Dickinson put quotation marks around the word “hope.” It’s as if she’s trying to capture it. If…

Although we humans are good at denying the inevitable end of each of our lives, we engage with death on some level almost every day. Leaves dry up and fall to make way for winter snows; flies are swatted to keep a house clean; animals are butchered to feed families…

Remember Day #24 when we looked at William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow?” Williams believed in the ‘realness’ of objects in our everyday world. He believed art was dependent on that reality. That’s not the only way to engage with poetry, however. Many poets, particularly postmodernists, don’t believe in…

About a year and a half ago, I lost almost all of my sense of taste and smell during a sinus infection. It happened overnight; I could literally taste and smell things normally when I went to bed and lost it by the next morning. Several months and tests later…

Write a poem from the point of view of a historical figure. I’ll be honest — I’ve been looking for an excuse to use one of my favorite 21st century poems to inspire a prompt. What’s important in this exercise, especially if you’re an “I” poet — someone who writes…

Haiku is a short Japanese form poem. I think many English speaking poets enjoy working with haiku because it feels accessible. It’s a brief, three-line form that generally follows a 5–7–5 meter. Let’s take a look at Matsuo Bashō’s famous haiku, “Old Pond”: the old pond a frog leaps in…

“No ideas but in things.” This is the famous quote by poet William Carlos Williams, who believed in grounding art in the reality of the everyday world: Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh and uniquely American form of poetry whose subject matter centered on everyday circumstances of life and…

It’s a big word that means something fairly simple: anthropomorphism describes the process of projecting human characteristics onto something that is not human. I talk to my dog. I imagine we have conversations of a sort. This doesn’t actually happen, because my dog is not human and does not understand…