Sitemap - 2024 - The Sharpener
Writing Problems: Mixed Metaphors
Craft: Virginia Hamilton Adair
"righting themselves with a thirst"
"we learn how to adjust the adjuster"
"with icecream spoons for feet"
"But hidden in our forgetting"
"To reminisce and woolgather is negative"
"The window-panes were crying"
"Go back to a parent before thought, before speech"
Craft: Drafts and How Poems Get Made
"Oh, to be alone for 5 minutes"
"moving away from me into tomorrows"
"Through shadow and fly buzz and the floating dust"
"an orienteer with a thumping heart"
"Consider what you will find in the black garden"
"twists & coils of flexi-script, remaking"
"of sour wind and dust emptied into the firmament"
Writing Problems: Get the body into it
"That stuff and satin aiming to unfold her"
"You must go by the way of dispossession"
"Fuzzles through slender crescent leaves"
"One by one he calls night out of the teeth"
"from the furnace and the tang"
"And you just know he knows he knows"
"it was held together with heavy iron staples"
"Like birds, and yet so human"
"Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust"
"They are the color of old spoons"
"the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured"
Writing Problems: What is Enjambment For?
"alloyed with laurel, laureled with mineral"
"Swift to that cluster of evenings"
"Because of the increasing Night"
"The swarm dilating round the perfect trees"
"For earplugs, some used cigarette filters or toilet paper"
"my mind through the tight-closed window"
"The name that nothing can erase"
"no wolf tracks could be found"
"the mica glint in the granite"
Writing Problems: Things to do Instead of Cycling Through the Same Fears About Civil Unrest
"I don't need to explain it to you"
"a tapping at the door and nobody there"
Writing Problems: Origins of Open Form
"the great golden hive of the invisible"
"and lungs will eventually unravel"
"like an empty walnut it will roll along"
"the ravenmaster in the fullness"
"Or that one word no earthly dictionary can translate"
"the muse's blue lips, the all-of-us"
"Believes in carbon, after death"
"She feels molecular, bedeviled"
"Stony hills poured over space"
"this whole world is your home"
For Paid Sharpener Subscribers: New Support Levels, Gifts, and Extras
"You spoke as if you knew so well"
"the wasp goddess taught her in the vision"
"Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws"
"Snow is a hybrid of wish and lament"
"Places are different from people"
"You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander"
"Looks back at you in miniature"
"With a whisper no one understands"
"this squat package of sounds"
"Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards"
"Was numinous creature to their dying"
"the green turn in the river's green"
Writing Problems: Perseverance
"Scales and hunter, goat and horologe"
"some of your flimmering silver"
"getting ready to go away and going away"
"only the street that solves the stars"
"Enough to want to start backward"
"where the sea is the most expensive blue"
"I didn't know I loved sparks"
"Another cannot wake thy giant-size!"
"world's ever-more-disappearing vacancy"
"how can our love move more surroundingly"
"tolerate its careless brash intrusion"
"growling from within the whirlwind"
"in this morose part of the earth"
"the little quavers as the local tongues"
"Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night"
"Released forever from all charge of letters"
"For the ocean, nothing is beneath consideration"
"Is it your position life isn't a fountain?"
"opened past your inch-close eyes"
Writing Problems: Where Do Poems Come From?
"With you I was transplanted twice"
"the yellow spout of the anthrax-ray"
"inside the mirror and in her"
"The deep muscle of the world"
"Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife"
"All cold-nosed toward identity"
"Mildly solemn without its milk"
"It's a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling"
"sunned and birch bark-floated"
"I assume her horror is smaller than mine"
"We say God and the imagination are one..."
"Hot breath tucked into a neck"
"they heard the new fruit drop"
"We are passing through the world"
Craft: Samuel Greenberg (Did Hart Crane plagiarize?)
"into water pus of a silver volcano"
Writing Problems: Zombie poetry!
"I am to see to it that I do not lose you"
"no bathrobe, no loofah, no vascular reaction"
"like a bandoneon wet to the bones"
"Dressed in cobalt, charcoal, thistle—and control"
Writing Problems: Is My Manuscript Good Enough?
"The silence else unbroken all about"