I began my writing career in an analog time. We got our news from Poets & Writers, the AWP Chronicle, and good (or bad) old-fashioned gossip. We wrote letters and put stamps […]
Building Community in the Online Age
Katie Riegel
Poet, writer, editor, teacher, blogger, mentor, meditator.
Thoughts About the Future
1. Will there be hummingbirds? 2. Sometimes I comfort myself by thinking in geological time, astronomical space. When humans die out on the planet we call Earth, what other species will be […]
Rewilding
One of the critiques of the environmental movement has been that it’s too much gloom and doom. The facts and statistics can be so depressing that people just turn off. It’s understandable […]
What She Said, April 11: Muriel Rukeyser
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. –Muriel Rukeyser
What She Said, April 10: Jane Hirshfield
Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. –Jane Hirshfield
What She Said, April 9: Rita Dove
If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshipped, then our children are going to have a rough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together. –Rita Dove
National Poetry Month 2021: One Poem to Love
…We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds—
five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—
until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.
What She Said, April 8: Naomi Shihab Nye
I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that–if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that’s a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise you just feel assaulted by all the tragedy in the world. –Naomi Shihab Nye
What She Said, April 7: Jane Kenyon
The poet’s job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it. –Jane Kenyon
What She Said, April 6: Adrienne Rich
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. –Adrienne Rich
The Gloria Sirens 