Craft Talk: Don’t Ask A Poem To Do The Work Of An Essay
We do not, and we should not, assume that the speaker of a poem is autobiographically identical with the poet, even when the poem is written in the first person, even when we know that the speaker and the poet share some aspects of the experience the poem contains.
Four by Four #59
Four Things To Read, Four Things To See, Four Things To Listen To, and Four Things About Me
It's The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the September 11th Attacks and It's Erev Rosh Hashanah
If you are celebrating, Shana Tovah! I hope we all get the sweet and fulfilling and meaningful and just and peaceful year that we all deserve.
Learning To Love The Questions: Do All Writers Write with a Feminine Soul?
My body, in other words, physically rejects the idea that I write as anyone other than the man I am or that my experience as a man is therefore any less inclusive of everything you mean when you use the phrase “feminine soul.”
In The Town That Taught Me How To Live Like Prey
I may not look over my shoulder when I walk down the street the way I did back then, but there are definitely places in both this country and out in the world at large where I wonder how safe I would be as a Jew who insisted on being visible as a Jew.
Four by Four #58
Four Things To Read, Four Things To See, Four Things To Listen To, and Four Things About Me
Rereading Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing The Language
I could not have articulated it this way back then, but I felt straitjacketed by much of the male poetic tradition in which I was being educated and in which I understood I would be expected to write
Learning To Love The Questions: To Write Is To Sit In Confrontation With Yourself
Wrestling with yourself like that, if you’re honest about it, is to court what can be a very frightening vulnerability, because it means by definition having the audacity to lay claim to a readership’s attention...
Like Domestic Violence, Antisemitism Has Also Been A Thread Running Through My Life
“We’re building an oven in my basement,” the ringleader smiled. “When it’s finished, remember, we know where you live,”
Four by Four #57
Four Things To Read, Four Things To See, Four Things To Listen To, and Four Things About Me
On My Desk Now: I Still Miss The Friend I Wrote This Poem For
More than anyone else in my life, and despite the fact that we came from very, very different backgrounds, Adrienne accepted me for who I was.
