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This month there’s been a sudden surge of writing “Against Conceptualism.” Most notable is the piece of the same name written by Calvin Bedient, which recently appeared in the Boston Review, and was subtitled “Defending the Poetry of Affect.” As this subtitle suggests, the piece claims that while lyric poets continue to explore the nature […]

I’m sitting on a lawn chair on the front porch of a rented cabin near Livermore Falls, Maine, feet up and mug of coffee in hand. The sun is beaming through the trees, and loons are calling to one another across Parker Pond. The air is already moist and warm, and it’s not even nine

Two of my best friends from college visited me over a long, hot weekend in July. We spent a brief time in catch-up mode, covering the four years since our last meeting together, before slipping smoothly into the comfortable space of true and present friendship. When people are this intimate, bullshit becomes unnecessary. Truths and

My mother has come back from a trip to New Orleans and given me a piece of gris gris, a little piece of voodoo. It’s a little blue bag, big enough to hold a large olive, tied at the top with a black string. It smells faintly of men’s deodorant. I understand that it’s meant

When he was in high school, my older brother Don was a lifeguard at a lake. I was eight the summer our mother suggested he take me with him for a day and teach me to swim. He had rigged up plastic milk jugs that floated on the water with fishing line, sinkers and baited

I’m a typical obsessive-compulsive writer with a lot of insecurity so I usually end my assertions with the question: “Does that make sense?” It’s tiring to second guess myself all the time. Like recently during a writing workshop I attended in Queretaro, Mexico. While I was eating gummy bears and wasting time on the Internet

Who knows how far his poem will travel? For many of us, most of our poems won’t make it past the rectangular space of our door. And, if a poem does manage to make it into the world and thrive, it’s often without our intent. The poem makes its own way, finds its own home,

The subject of determination and stamina came up recently with some writer friends. I feel like I can talk about this with some authority not just for myself but because I’ve been in contact with writers from all stages since I was in high school, when my best friend and I decided we were going

There is a common ingredient to all writing I find most compelling: soul-baring honesty. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction. Most of what’s considered nonfiction is actually fiction, as it’s necessarily filtered through a perception shaped by beliefs and experiences and opinions and biases. But when a writer testifies — when she writes