“No, not that one, that one!” Standing in your local pet store you command a teenager, who works there for part-time minimum wage and is armed with a small green net towards one specific goldfish with your finger because you like the look of her long, flowy tail. You’re standing on the sterile white tiles …
Moving to a Bigger Pond: One Poet’s Swim Ever Onward Read More »
Ugh, I know. This was the part of English class that was always the most frustrating and annoying. You’re reading a novel you were forced to read and aren’t connecting with, and a well-meaning teacher asks you to the dissect a moment within it. It’s a quiet moment away from the action of the story, …
Nature as Symbol: When a Tree is More Than a Tree Read More »
Sure, before when I’ve talked about poetry, I touched on figurative language and imagery, but what if you’re experiencing a plant or animal for the first time? Maybe you don’t have a huge reference book to gloss through to pinpoint the name of a specific tree you pass or don’t have enough time to take …
The term “nature writing” is a pretty nebulous one. As we saw here, we can barely give a concise definition to what nature itself is, let alone how we go writing about it. Barry Lopez acknowledges the difficulty to refine a definition, but suggests that its most significant traits are threefold: “1) an assumption that …
Prose, poetry, and experimental writing are not simply genres or writing, but feel like entirely different mediums and constructs. While you may go about writing a space opera differently from a harlequin romance, just as you use different aspects of poetry depending on if you’re writing lyrical poetry or spoken word, they all hold the …
Hopping Genres: My Personal Experiences Writing Prose, Poetry, and Experimental Writing Read More »
While the following passage may seem like a lot to include, I think it’s important to make my point: My basic research shelves consist of around one hundred books, which represents 3 percent of my total collection, took me years to put together. These are the books I have within easy reach of my computer …
Haha, more plant puns! You’ll be seeing a lot more of those, and I don’t regret it all. You might though. Like puns, poetry is another p-word that seems to make a lot of the general populace groan. “It’s too pretentious” (ooo look another p-word), “it’s boring,” “it’s just people with no rhythm attempting to …
One thing to consider before asking yourself or anyone else the questions I pose below is to think about what the purpose of art (in general) is. Even as I focus mainly on poetry, I’m sure there are as many different reasons for writing poetry as there are poets, but personally I find there are …
Let’s go back to the scene I painted in Packing for Writing, except now you have all the writing utensils, potable water and granola bars you could ask for and you used your vital common sense to inform at least one other person as to your whereabouts. Maybe you’re sitting on a downed log near …
Nature Writing and Finding Motivation and Inspiration Read More »
Your muse, inspiration, spark, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t always come to you when you want it to. Several of the sources I used throughout this list have a plethora of prompts. For more general poetry prompts for the starting poet, The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry by Kevin Clark is …