Poetry Pairing: Dark Matter

I know I’ve posted this poem on the blog before, but I really love it, and this short video on dark matter arrived in my email quite serendipitously, reminding me of the wise Jack Myers and his poem. But now I’m about what can be done without. I just need a thin valise. The full … Continue reading →

Seredipity at The Bookstore

Remember that little bookstore, The Bookstore, I walked to in the rain while I was in Lenox? Well, I didn’t tell you what happened there, did I? A little bit of serendipity. A little bit of the world telling me I was right where I needed to be, that I wasn’t a fool for attending … Continue reading →

The Portable Poetry Workshop: Connecting Content – Thematic Shapes of Poems

Pen and Paper by mlpdesign via Flickr I know poems have shapes. I’ve even seen a poem about a rabbit crafted in the shape of a carrot in forum for an online class I was taking. People can get creative with their forms, certainly, but I’ve never thought about a poem being organized in a … Continue reading →

The Portable Poetry Workshop: Connecting Content – Triggering Words

“Spring” by Dani via Flickr Triggering words open up new opportunities for content and direction in our writing. As Jack Myers says, these words can act as “a semantic springboard that uncoils enough upward lift to give the poem new momentum.” Such words can elevate theme, create or extend a metaphor’s matrix, or even determine and/or … Continue reading →

The Portable Poetry Workshop: Connecting Content – Syntactical Transitions

In this section, Jack Myers presents the poet as architect and illustrates the various methods one can employ in making connections and “building” a poem. There is hypotaxis, in which “the ordering of content proceeds through conventional forms of logic and the conventions of syntax, grammar, and language as a medium, and there is parataxis (or … Continue reading →