Sitemap - 2023 - The Sharpener

Writing Problems: Things They Don't Teach you in MFA Programs

"The future by that time"

"I was mute wood"

"no degree for what is learned in the dark"

"the boat has not turned to stone"

"its bread of breath"

"as [magical] intimate - as fugitive"

Craft: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

"it sets its hook"

"trickling through the intimate brooks"

"Night is a room"

"Power is what I want"

"Age seasons me"

"The mighty wheel rumbles beneath"

Craft: Calvin C. Hernton

"huge & unending door...."

"A cold ship"

"from the pasts scattering it all over"

"Good that this is love"

"in dark, airless conditions"

"You were all I had"

Craft: Laura Ulewicz

"green and red tears"

"like negatives drying"

"matter's savagery"

"Just to open ourselves in delicate circles"

Reading Group promotion

"a joke no one gets"

"Low the sound"

Craft: Richard Hazley

"taken into its tapes and filters"

"Fastens like fur to the river"

"a change spreads in the air"

"our square of stone"

"Of a breaking string"

"it becomes a thing."

Writing Problems: Things to do Instead of Cycling Through the Same Fears About Civil Unrest

"Ah, miserable at last!"

"Advocate the Azure / To the lower Eyes—"

"A fountain's pulsing sobs"

"When Memory is full"

"fragile as the inner skin of eggs"

"I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull's belly"

Writing Problems: Small Presses, Distribution, & Poetry Economies

"Prime paramour and belted paragon"

"her sovereign claim to white"

"Save your pity for yourself"

"I will remain nearby"

"The long familiar pang"

"completely unto itself"

Writing Problems: AI and Disorientation of Reality

"Cut structures in the air"

"I need a hand to nail the right"

"the powerful, well-oiled latch"

"All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup"

"stay or go"

"Unleash your savage justice"

Craft: Drummond Allison

"When we love enough"

"That's all there is to know!"

"Why upset others and oneself?"

"I felt like I was falling down someplace else"

"To a honey-brown dream"

"I want to be entered and picked clean"

Craft: Helen Adam

"in inarticulate frenzy"

"Strange about that...."

"As if firsts and lasts were one and the same"

"This keeps the focus where it wants to be"

"as I was outside the circle"

"An arc alike inscrutable"

Craft: Marie Ponsot

"like raisins of immortality"

"no witness. You are around me"

"Who am I?"

"The mounting tension and the spasm"

"Almost too big to get used to, its dimensions amaze is. Who are blind to Whatever"

"A thunder cloud"

"it will writhe in front of you in ecstasies"

Writing Problems: What's Wrong with Poetry?

"not, won't be"

"unanimous omninudity"

"Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards"

"They were weightless"

"Like spooks—a vapor from another time"

Writing Problems: Representation? Appropriation?

"But there are lovers and lovers"

"By the yielding"

"I said tide but tide was never right said tide"

"I walked through it through you"

"Come, help flatten a raindrop"

"so that you can enter in the amber"

Craft: Joyce Mansour

"You are a planet on this planet"

"within a tight-closed ring"

"Believe me, I loved you all."

"and now it looks like we won't"

"Memory / like Melody, / Is pink"

"It is a map of change"

Writing Problems: Crime / Poetry

"strung up into the trees of the future"

"still able to unwrinkled on his spine"

"In their shadows & promiscuous"

"Does this happen to the others."

"Or do we just stand and watch?"

"Before it was quite unsheathed from reality"

Craft: Pamela Alexander

"Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown"

"Keep the same precise stitch"

"Be careful of my needles"

Writing Problems: Professional Development

"These had a being, breathing frost"

"I think I can finally stand me"

"the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath"

Writing Problems: How to Respond in Workshops

"to touch, to be touched"

"Everything's a fan"

"the wild grows wild"

"The world fades"

"hand over hungry hand"

"Which way to look? Nonnegative?"

Craft: Recent Canadian Poetry

"the universal language, translatable"

"this expanse of nothing"

"The empty process of it"

"The the"

"we staying till the stamens trembled"

"a phantom curiously floating"

Writing Problems: On Not Being Able to Write

"One is always nearer by not keeping still"

"I can't hang around here all day"

"Minute survivors, permanent and clear"

"One self from another"

"since I myself stand in my own way"

"how they transform the useless"

Writing Problems: Censoring Maus

"just guests of one another's senses"

"black feathers of the sea"

"leaping from junk to junk"

"traveling on its tongue of light"

"This whole Experiment"

"I release you"

Writing Problems: Shame

"The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain"

"Italian plums, the dears"

"Resting, they are empty"

"leaflike layers"

"the inside of an anthill"

"Crumbled to smoke"

Craft: Vladimir Mayakovsky

Writing Problems: Is My Manuscript Good Enough?

"the nothing beyond time"

"The darkness from the darkness"

"So many kinds of creature"

"Every living situation has one"

"Through a lyric slipknot"

"you think I am, more than I think"

Craft: Jay Wright

"My flesh was its own shield"

"The sun-comprehending glass"

"scorched by the sun's blueness"

"if the voice is your voice"

"But the mind is a machine"

"trembling in its torn pocket"

Craft: Amy Clampitt

"from the shredded night"

Writing Problems: Poetry Book Sales

"utterly clear"

"Its dark and beaded rain—"

"glinting bright as hard polished silver nails"

"take a note and spin it around"

"aware of no thing but art"

Craft: Joanna McClure

"it's not the color blue, it's the color cold"

"full of spheres and zones"

"the vapor rising"

"Red, the delicate tribes of roebuck, doe"

"I am becoming a horizon"

"My red filaments burn and stand"

Writing Problems: Old Words and New Words

"touching the darkness of their whole story"

"You get up to close that clear brittle door"

"twisting fruit as if I was entering a thousand doors"

"a song of measured tones"

"the nun of water"

"you can't top my superpower"

Craft: Barbara Howes

"you're invisible once more"

"I beat you with a hazel rod"

"The rounded ones cry out & are sent in"

"Plasma-bearer, visible"

"wielding his burning underwater torch"

"red the woof"

Craft: Malinda Markham

"Little Elvises"

"a window is always lit"

"Let us have honey cakes, too"

"again into the mudhole"

"No comfortable feel in any member"

"I see the yellow maculations spread"

Writing Problems: Roots—Alphabet / Poetry Family Tree

"Himself have not a Face"

"wings hoarse voices of our clipped and necessary feathers"

"How done is gone?"

"Bunches its knobby browns"

"Scattering earth in the strange woods"

"words are suitcases with false bottoms"

Craft: Saskia Hamilton

"relics of vanished animals"

"entered, touched, possessed"

"You'll awake with holes in your forehead"

"Voice like that of letters eaten by grass"

"Rather a stop with a green shadow"

"those bronze balloons"

Writing Problems: Not Centering the Human

"Untouchable Free"

"telling where the wind goes"

"along the wet fuse"

"which one's the world?"

"but it hurts, the mirrors closing in"

"screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting"

Writing Problems: Who Reads Poetry?

"understanding such flow as transmuted acre"

"in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn"

"pickle relish & garlic powder plus"

"And the fashionable monde of the red couch"

"Here a false face won't help you"

"tart stillness of a bush"

Writing Problems: First Poems in First Books

"I keep one ray"

"fat as a cushion"

"you-everything-in-between-it"

"Existence has a stated width"

"like a blue space between mountains"

"unraveling his skein of private nightmares"

"That pounding thought"

Craft: Hart Crane

"some oscarboscarbinary bevy"

"the buzz inside the root of things"

"Story without corners"

"each thing as separate and enough"

"the slow, light, grave unstitching of lies"

Writing Problems: Space and the Tyranny of the Left Margin

"Here's the small gasp"

"it had loosened itself and gone"

"A stream of enchantments"

"the mirror becoming stranger"

"It keeps the nerves progressive"

"heartless world of fact"

Craft: Diane di Prima

"works, and the linked, articulating"

"Leaf, lichen, the least refinements, and the perfection"

"Have you no beginning and end?"

"uttering cries that are almost human"

"Through the huge reflected sky of a triumphant noon"

"Such are the inlets of / the mind"

"if the world wants, it nothing wants for us"

Craft: Szilárd Borbély

"Mist is when the sky is tired of flight"

"it passes through the mesh of thought"

"breaking out through nerves"

"mobile mouth that siphons in the air that nurtures"

"They spoke as chords do from the string"

"geometry of pleasure"

Writing Problems: Cheap, but Good Advice for Making Poems

"I feel your coils tightening..."

"Into what carbonates"

"Out of old mythologies"

"—goldtrace counterheaved"

"the black demon cares little"

Guided Poetry Reading Groups

Craft: Louise Bogan

"a magnetic mist"

"You're a crisphead"

"The mineral case is soft and gibbous"

"O delicious rest!"

"Is the winter sentinel"

"What the heart bore, she noted on a chart"

Writing Problems: Surviving

"There's no way out"

"This swift darkness is spring's first hour"

"may it continue"

"And again now, and now, and now"

"From a magician's midnight sleeve"

"here in middle air together"

Craft: Bill Knott

"still trying to tell me surface things"

"As a moon when necessary"

"Even though we give (give up) ourselves"

"so out from us there's no vocabulary"

"whose breath is a verb"

"A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun"

Writing Problems: "The card says 'Moops!'"

"Can't we both take care and rejoice?"

"And in the vault I heard a clank of chains"

"In your sea-buried ear"

"Apply mind energy they will move"

"danced with a purple thumb"

"By pulling off flesh from the living planet"

Craft: Samuel Menashe

"weatherbeaten laurel"

"any sweet / “Come in” Impelled to / hark"

"written on terrestrial things"

"and found myself in a chamber of options"

"twisting up out of depth beyond depth"

"An ethereal agonal of sooth & rune"

"The earth was fragile and mostly water"

Craft: Blind Lemon Jefferson

"bees of the invisible"

"You think it's me / but it's only me"

"I, its friend, shielding it from harm"

"Diamonds on the stamens when the sun goes blind"

"its emptiness was the very devil"

"the wire from this box of nerves"

Craft: Hyam Plutzik

"with whiskers of iron"

"Contact lens of a full moon out of breath"

"find a somebody"

"through the brass-boned monster"

"Of worldly purity the stained archetype"

"A chamber deaf to noise"

Writing Problems: What is "Poetry Voice?"

"you echo"

"How slow the whistle"

"Navies fed to the fish in the dark"

"Don't let anyone in to wake us"

"your seven leaves unsheathed"

Craft: Jean Garrigue

"Inherit from disaster before I move"

"The raindrop's tomb"

"Glass was / the Street -/ in Tinsel / Peril"

"like a bright-decked star ship"

"through a complicated pipework"

"I remember a corrugated ribbon"

Craft: d.a. levy

"The two-sided nature of doors"

"Winterworn / Enticed to Break"

"Words in blood-bloom"

"the slender tines of this pitchfork"

"talking in mindless ease"

"when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten"

"a black parrot repeating"

"this blackened disembodied question"

"an agent herself"

"Windows of the blind text"

Craft: Jane Mead

"I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly"

"I've eaten a bag of green apples"

Craft: James A. Emanuel

"that one you pass off as yourself"

"Night's pleasure and the press of weather"

"From the glass joint of a rod of grass"

"rags, ropes, rumpuses"

"With invisible nets from their sad, night bridges"

"the trees are having their hibernal bark event"

Craft: Elise Cowen

"the incurious seeker"

"berries warm a field of bones"

"The sky was a hot, blue sheet"

"from its being kept forever under"

"I dug you out"

"Dark silent forms, performing"

"her clavicle hinged at her neck to sing"

Craft: Vasko Popa

"One note from one Bird"

"Circum/ambient"

"Moving and being, the image at its source"

"When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy"

"cracking open in the heat"