85 poets, 85 Pulitzer works, learning to read at 85. It's a brand new week of great poetry links in Our Top (85 minus 75) Poetic Picks.

Welcome to a new year here at Tweetspeak Poetry. With this new year comes a new series of Monday poetry prompts to help you get your week started right! If you’ve been with us for a while, you know the drill–I’ll provide a writing prompt touching on Tweetspeak’s monthly theme, and you’ll compose a poem to [...]

Random acts of poetry, communing with nature is not an excuse to get out of the office, going to class with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. It's all in This Week's Top Ten Poetic Picks with Seth Haines.

Artist Evy Lareau and poet Maureen Doallas pair off to produce a lovely piece of visual poetry.

My entry into poetry did not happen in a night. Oh, sure. It may look that way. One day I was calling poetry “cryptic nonsense” and practically the next, posting a lengthy poem on Facebook about lumberjacks, kitchen knives, Twinkies, and the persuasive powers of semi-colon eyelashes. Now, she’ll never take the credit for it—no, [...]

The other day I stumbled onto an old Google Talk conversation with a friend, from about a year ago. The conversation went something like this: Friend: I lurked at the Tweetspeak Twitter party last night.  Me: I can’t do the Tweetspeak. Too confusing. Friend: I was lost. I’m too literal. Me: L.L. tagged me on [...]

Some define the boundaries of the American south by way of the Mason Dixon line. Others define its lines by allegiances during the War of Northern Aggression. Frankly, I find both such delineations to be crude and lacking in nuance. No, I do not ascribe to traditional notions of defining the South. Instead, I reckon its [...]

The best in poetry (and poetic things), this week with Seth Haines. 1 Art Brian Hirschy is a good friend and a grand photographer. Last weekend we were discussing the state of photography and how the iPhone has become a useful tool in the photographer’s gear bag. With its high resolution capabilities and the development of [...]

You could say I’m playing around with writing a sonnet today, as long as your definition of “playing around” is broad enough to include tapping aimlessly on my desk to The Guess Who’s Bus Rider.  Our Canadian columnist Matthew Kreider loaned me one of his famous Ticonderoga pencils this weekend. It keeps a terrific desktop 70s beat, [...]

I am a helpless, habitual coffee drinker. For the most part, I don’t drink yuppie, frothy coffee. No, I drink the black stuff, the kind that tastes like ash. I drink it like it’s a badge of American masculinity, I guess. My grandpa used to say, “real men take their coffee the way God intended [...]

As a boy, I lived a spell in East Texas. Somewhere on the edge of the urban sprawl, my sister and I ran barefooted down dirt roads, sat under the shade of mesquite groves, and tromped through fields of briars to the neighbor-lady’s house with all the aquariums. We were home on the range and [...]