Category: Good Writing

“Imagery can’t really be taught. You can lecture about the different kinds of imagery in different sorts of poems, but the truth is, imagery is the most important core of a poet. What you know and what you feel becomes your imagery. The more you actually see – how carefully you look at an opossum…

Every Swiss-village calendar instructs as to how stone gathers the landscape around it, how glacier-scattered thousand-ton monuments to randomness become fixed points in finding home. Order is always starting over. And why not also in the self, the odd blocks, all lost and left, become first facts toward which later a little town looks back?

Across a Great Wilderness without You by Keetje Kuipers The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I’m drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them— language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow…

Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like – though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled the center, leaving…

Once in a small rented room, awaiting a night call from a distant time zone, I understood you could feel so futureless you’d want to get a mermaid tattooed on your biceps. Company forever. Flex and she’d dance. The phone never rang, except for those phantom rings, which I almost always answered. I was in…