Kirsten Ogden
Keep the Boring, Predictable, By-the-Book Poems to Yourself
Musing on poetry’s place in the 21st century–reignited and redefined after re-reading Reginald Shepherd’s article in AWP from May/June 2008 about difficulty in poetry and how poetry matters. Shepherd argues that complaining about poetry’s difficulty has been going on a…
“Which three books would you have taken?”
In Parade Magazine several weeks ago, a reader asked why his tax dollars were going to support a poet laureate of the U.S. when no one reads poetry anymore. Never mind that, for now. . . I’ve been ruminating on…
“No ritual scarring, but maybe a tornado”
Why is Creative Writing always so sad and depressing? –David Lynn, I took the 12:30am flight from Los Angeles last Saturday and arrived in Ohio at 11am for my sixth summer as a participant in The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops…
The Rise of Reading (or, the art of finding a quiet nook)
I’ve been pondering the NEA’s most recent “Reading on the Rise” report for over a month and don’t really know what to think of it after all the gloom and doom reports of the last 10 years. This new report…
For the Occasion: “Poetry is the human voice”
I listened today with great pleasure as Elizabeth Alexander read her poem Praise Song for the Day at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. What a joy it was to hear “We encounter each other in words, words spiny or…
