About the piece: I wrote this piece for my Reading As Writers Across Media class with Professor Angie Johnson. We had to imitate works from three different poets: Michael Torres, Sandra Cisneros, and Brian Doyle. This particular piece is based off of “A Very Short […]
Mr. Richard Blanco is a former engineer turned poet and has found great success. He received both his undergraduate degree as well as his MFA in creative writing from Florida International University and has gone on to publish five successful collections of poetry including Looking […]
This is the time of year for reflection. The sun-soaked, breeze-cooled April evenings are punctured with carilloning birds and the scent of burgeoning lilacs. These expectant days, teetering on the verge of tulips and triumph, always seemed ideal for meditation on renewal and redemption. The […]
About the Piece: “Walls” was originally a poem called “A Hill in Vernon,” but I wanted to try and see if I could write it as prose, while still keeping the flow and lyricism. This piece is about my childhood home in Vernon Hills, a […]
Author commentary: I am a passionate devotee of poetry, but sometimes I feel as if words refuse my sainted efforts to wrest them into lines and meter. For this reason, the concept of a prose poem appealed to me as I attempted to express my […]
Between bites of very-late-night tepid ramen, in an attempt to escape my never-ending internal to-do list, I’ve been reading a lot of Mary Oliver’s poetry. Her work is a comfort object akin to warm milk, and I prefer my belly to be full of it. […]
Writer Commentary: In the spring semester of my sophomore year at Bethany, I was in a class called Reading As Writers Across Media, and in this class, we spent time reading various books, one of which was Mary Oliver’s American Primitive and that is where […]
Like many other young adults, I still hold on to a great many ideals when I think about the way the world should work, especially when it comes to my chosen field of English and literature. As a student, I am constantly becoming more and […]
On November 7-8, the Minnesota State University’s Good Thunder Reading Series hosted St. Paul-born poet Danez Smith. Smith’s most recent book Don’t Call us Dead earned the United Kingdom’s Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection and also contended in the United States as a finalist […]
The Joy of Stealing Why the hatred of poetry, when its reading and making is like playing a black piano, stealing sugar from the castle, wearing the mask of God. An ancient oriental myth teaches loss of poetry is loss of paradise. Its reading and […]