Starting the Sharpener

Thinking through poetry

On my writing desk, I have a pencil sharpener and three boxes of Blackwing 602 pencils. Sharpening the pencil makes a clean, precise line. Poems sharpen our thinking.

Once we read a poem, we can’t revert to the state we were in before we read it. It follows, then, that poems are not objects to be consumed: they are tools to effect change.

Poems reduce our glibness and scornfulness, and increase our capacity for compassionate imagination. Reading a poem demands our attention. This empathetic act changes the reader. So the poem changes the reader’s understanding, their understanding changes other people, and people together can change social institutions.

For the past few years, I’ve begun my mornings with regular posts on Facebook: images of poems and quotes from writers and artists. I like sharing poems and seeing people engage with them, but I’ve become angry about how Facebook has enabled autocracy. I want to continue the conversation in a new format, and I want to dive deeper into the topics I discuss with clients at Sean Singer Editorial Services.

I’m offering two versions of this newsletter. A free version will include the kind of content I currently post on Facebook and Twitter: a continually-unfolding anthology of poems, images, and quotations from artists.

A paid-subscriber version ($7/month) will also include short craft pieces on literary fixes, deep dives into poets on their birthdays and memorials, strategies for how poets can stay healthy in a sick world, information about professional literacy and labor issues for writers, and detailed citations and analyses of the poems I’m reading.

I hope this newsletter holds your attention, and I look forward to making content about poetry that will help you read and write with the most beauty and meaning as possible.

Thank you for reading,

Sean