Am I a poet?  I haven't written many poems lately, so perhaps I'm not actually a poet but rather an arts admin bureaucrat who had some possibly worthwhile daydreaming episodes years ago and now talks about those episodes as if he knows what he's talking about. Am I a novelist? I probably need to publish another one to be considered as such. Oh well.  MORE

I almost never write a poem with a sense of what it will be about. I don't use preexisting forms (traditional or otherwise), writing exercises, or poetic formal devices to generate material. At this point in my writing life, I do tend to think about a whole manuscript while I'm composing individual poems, so I might begin a poem in relation to a manuscript with the thought that it should be a longer poem, or a shorter one, or perhaps lighter in tone, or maybe more fierce. But overall, I prefer to keep the parameters loose. MORE

In recent years, our life at the PSA has been graced by the generosity and exuberance of the photographer, Lawrence Schwartzwald, who attends many of our events and sends us beautiful pictures the very next day. Lawrence has compiled his own "Best of 2011," and we thought it might be fun at the close of this year to share a group of our favorites of his PSA photographs. MORE

When we started Burning Deck Magazine in 1961, it happened to be the moment when letterpress printing was being replaced by offset, and print shops were dumping their letterpress equipment. We were graduate students at the University of Michigan, so buying a letterpress and learning to print seemed the only way we could afford publishing.  MORE

While arranging the shelves for the current configuration of the store, I decided that Cormac McCarthy's books would always appear in the same place. That is to say, regardless of where the alphabet would situate them, they will always appear at eye level, on one particular shelf. Other authors' names may appear before or after McCarthy's in the common order, but because of where we are, the popularity of his titles, and the laws of marketing, McCarthy has trumped the alphabet.  MORE

We grew up right next to the Tennessee River, and the beauty of that going-by gave me, early on, a truer sense of the sacred. I had a place I would go to be by myself, and feel that living presence inside me. It is still there. I was, and am, a river mystic. A riparian, riverine aesthetic flows in my writing much more vitally than any Christian influence. The shining reaches are downriver, upriver, under, and spread out into the sky all at once, a definite place, and a station of awareness too. MORE

The world of this poem grew from a simple wish to play on the word "felt."  I like the fact that the word houses both the material and the act of feeling (or the act of having felt). Also, at the time I wrote the poem, I was very interested in Joseph Beuys's work and was learning about his symbolic interest in materials like felt and wax.  MORE

"Bliss Street" was written in and about Beirut, where I lived for about a year, in faculty housing of the American University. My husband was teaching law, and I was tending to our two young sons. My first-grader was in the American school, which abuts the university campus; I was able to see a fragment of it from my balcony. MORE

My great-grandmother Phoebe was French-Canadian. My mother, who was named for her, studied in Quebec for a spell, and eventually became a French teacher. She had several albums by Edith Piaf that she acquired in the 1950s and 1960s, and certain Piaf songs—like the plaintiff yet commanding "Mon Dieu" and "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien"— are part of the soundtrack of my childhood. MORE

Despite the way mainstream books are sold, genres are, of course, porous and I'm not invested in defining or sustaining them as either writer or reader. I wanted to write in a way I had not written before: to begin with characters modeled on people, to begin with a story. I think those aims can be accommodated in poetry, but I am mostly a lyric poet and my poems aren't driven by stories or characters. MORE

God was all around but not everywhere. My parents were not Born Again people or heavy-handed Christians. We were United Methodists. We went to Church once a week, at the standard time, and on the traditional holy day of Sunday but not in between. We were not a family who stayed in church all day, as some families in our small town did. We were in at 11 a.m. and out by 1 or 1:30 p.m. MORE

This weekend, as part of the New York Botanical Garden's Thain Family Forest Festival Weekend, poet-walker Jon Cotner designed a self-guided meditative walk titled Poem Forest. 

At 15 spots along Sweetgum Trail, visitors were encouraged to "speak, sing or variously engage with" 15 corresponding lines of poetry.  The lines were selected from 2,500 years of nature poetry, and included such gems as Denise Levertov's "One stone is not like another," and Heraclitus' "People have talked about the world without paying attention/ to the world." Below are some photos of the spectacular autumnal forest, and guests (including a hawk!) "paying attention" as they participated in Poem Forest.   MORE