Excited to share the news that I’m starting the Hell’s Kitchen Poetry Society! We’ll be cooking up new work every week, meeting on Wednesday nights from 7-9pm at The Artist Co-op, starting Sep 11, 2019. Please RSVP if you’d like to attend.
Also, wanted to share the poems by Toni Morrison that The Believer recently posted. We lost an important writer, let’s reread her work and remember her.
I’m thrilled to have a poem published in the latest issue of Monstering, alongside the work of many others, including the poet Ada Limón. I’m especially excited about the audio work of Katarina Scaife, who brings my poem to life and makes it more accessible to disabled readers.
This Saturday for Jersey City Writers, I hosted a poetry workshop where we used a submission call from the literary magazine Territory as a prompt. They have upcoming issues with the themes Twins and Alaska. Some past issues include fascinating work from Dan Beachy-Quick and Jenny Xie.
Excited to announce that I’ll be offering a kids poetry workshop (ages 6 and up) in Jersey City, at Word Bookstore on Thursday August 16 from 4-6pm.
Duotrope, my favorite source for discovering literary journals and presses for submitting my work, has now added new category: Literary Agent listings! 
I’m enjoying reading an online/print literary journal I recently discovered: Cider Press Review. The journal was founded in 1999 by Caron Andregg and Robert Wynne and currently publishes online issues quarterly and an annual “Best of” print edition. The Press also publishes at least two full-length manuscripts each year, so for those of you looking to submit either a few poems or a book of poetry, see their submission guidelines. I also want to point out two poems I love from their most recent issue, Protest by D M Gordon and How Mom Quit Saying Shit by Benjamin Cutler. Check it out!
This week, I’m listing anagrams of some classic phrases from literature (numbered 1 through 10 below). Use one of them to inspire a poem! Contact me if you’re interested in what the original phrases are. You can also take a strong phrase from one of your own poems a
nd make an anagram out of it using this website.
Whether you enjoy autumn or prefer summer or winter, try to think of specific images, or sounds, tastes, etc. that distinguish one season from the other. Which season do you prefer? What actions do you carry out when one shifts to the other? Do you gladly dust off the pumpkin spice seasoning when autumn rolls around? Are you excited to unearth your favorite sweaters from their cardboard boxes? Or do you sadly touch a portrait of a loved one you lost in autumn? What sort of attitude do you want to encourage the reader to take about the season? Consider using anaphora and turn it into a refrain, like Zagajewski does with Try to Praise the Mutilated World.
One writer who has had a profound influence on me is Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who passed away from cancer in August 2015. A year or so before he died, shortly after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he and his partner, Billy Hayes, decided to record some of his thoughts on tape. You can listen to his voice via one of Radiolab’s latest podcasts. Here is a transcription of an excerpt from those tapes:
A Conversation on Dreams
Feb 6, 2015
“I’ve been having a lot of strangely archetypal dreams of a journey I have to make. Getting lost and getting found, full of surprises, maybe going through a door which I think will be a door unto another one, a door to a mountain landscape. Sometimes frightening ravines, or having to edge along very narrow ledges, but then finally coming to some gracious, heavenly mountain meadow, and then waiting. Dreams about journeys approach an end. It’s a journey from where to where?” -Oliver Sacks
The prompt, then, is to write your own dream of a journey from where to where. What do you imagine you would dream near the end of your own life?
Read Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun.” How do you think she feels about guns? What does her poem say about masculine and feminine nature? How does she use imagery to communicate in this poem? For this poetry prompt, I’d like you to introduce a gun or bullet into your poem somehow. Does it function as a metaphor in your poem, and what does it stand for? Or is it an actual gun, and what emotions do you feel surrounding that?
This prompt is inspired by the Jersey City Art & Studio Tour event called Loving Arms, which has its opening reception Saturday (9/30/2017) from 7pm – 10pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at 38 Duncan Ave, Jersey City, NJ 07304, and gallery hours and performances Sunday (10/1/2017) from 2pm-6pm at the same church. I will be reading selected poetry about guns by greats including Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and others, around 3pm Sunday. Hope you can make it!
The Bellevue Literary Review editor-in-chief Danielle Ofri, MD, discusses why poetry and literature are important to medicine: “The creativity that comes from literature is critical to medical education… The main reason literature resonates so well with medicine is the use of metaphor. To be skilled clinicians and to get the right diagnosis, we must be able to interpret our patients’ metaphors.” Read Rafael Campo’s poem Morbidity and Mortality Rounds.
I also believe poetry can help to heal. So I want you to think of someone other than yourself, someone who is suffering. Maybe it’s someone who has cancer, or has lost a pet or a parent. Can you write a poem prescription for them? What might you say to them to help them heal? Make su
re to engage the senses of your readers.