For the next two weeks, I will be researching for my weekly posts about poets, poems, quotations, poetic forms, and practice of poetic themes. My Redefined: A Virtual Reading Experience will continue to be posted on Wednesdays. I will post my Books of the Month on the first Saturday in […]
I had a difficult time choosing a poem for this week because, to be honest, sonnets are not a go-to form for me. Yet, what often happens for me when I am reading about poets and their works is that I begin to imitate them, which is often what practicing […]
Most high school English courses include an introduction to Shakespeare and his voluminous collection of sonnets. But, Shakespeare was not the only poet to hone his skills at waxing poetic to his Muse in iambic pentameter for fourteen lines of three quatrains and a couplet. In fact before Shakespeare, Petrarch […]
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 […]
Before I delve in “First Fig” included in Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles—“a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism”–I want to approach this poem from the common ground of poet to poet and poem to poem. Most poets at […]
Before studying Edna St. Vincent Millay’s life and work, I knew little about her except for her most famous poem. I still think I have much to learn about one of America’s influential women poets of the twentieth century. In truth, I find it difficult to separate her life from […]
Sometimes the best theme to write about is the thing we are doing. Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” is one of her most intriguing poems for its original premise and its revision scale . As poets, we always create, but the writing process often changes. Sometimes we love poetry. Sometimes we truly […]
Free verse is a literary device that can be defined as poetry that is free from limitations of regular meter or rhythm, and does not rhyme with fixed forms. Such poems are without rhythm and rhyme schemes, do not follow regular rhyme scheme rules, yet still provide artistic expression. In this way, the poet can give his own shape […]
