I feel a particular kinship with Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” The fishing in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts are different from fishing in Minnesota, but some images are similar. There are other lines within this poem that resonate with me and give me more understanding of Bishop as a poet […]
Some poets feel like kindred spirits as soon as we read their work. Some take longer to get to know. We need to get to know them beyond their written word because they reveal more about the world around them than about themselves. At times, we may need to go […]
Fiction The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah Five Stars I absolutely loved this newest book by Kristin Hannah. I learned more about this era of history–the Dust Bowl and how it affected people during the Great Depression–and would compare its themes to those of The Grapes of Wrath . Hannah […]
Throughout the month of April, I shared insights about poets, poems, quotations, poetic forms, and my own poetry practice based on these themes. I decided that I enjoy what I am learning about the poets I am studying. Learning new things–even about topics I already know in depth–excites me and […]
During my mentorship with poet Jim Moore, I wrote this poem based on the title from Tomas Tranströmer’s “April and Silence.” While my poem and Tranströmer’s are different in their themes, this title is often one that comes to mind during the month of April.
“[Tomas Tranströmer] has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object.” Katie Peterson, Boston Review as quoted by Poetry Foundation; italics mine When I was researching Tomas […]
Join me each Wednesday for this virtual reading experience as I read a selection from Redefined: A Year of Poetry. By the end of the year, I will have read 52 of the 366 poems contained in this collection. I encourage you to subscribe to this blog in order to […]
The poem “Kyrie” by Tomas Tranströmer entered my life when I read it in college. But, it became a transformative influence on my poetry after my middle son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2001. Since then I have written two poems based on this poem–one using the title […]
The first time I read the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, I knew I had met a kindred spirit. He creates a mood that I understand even though my experiences and direct culture are not exactly the same. I had this same feeling when I read Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called […]
