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I am happy for my friend and toast, “here’s to fine people who are bringing in the harvest. Here’s to the good earth. Here’s to Rusty!” We raise our glasses and drink heartily, just the way Rusty would were he among us.
Seth Haines uncorks a new Monday wine and beer poetry prompt.
Observe the space you work in. No matter how simple and plain or how complex and luxurious, it contains poetry. Can you find it?
Much is made of the pairing of food with wine or beer. There’s nothing like a hearty Cab with a thick cut steak. It’s a smooth Guiness that best foils the crisped fat of a hamburger. And though there are volumes written about which white wine plays best with curried chicken, there seems to be […]
Poetry asks for your intelligence and spirit. It is hard work, but good work. Come along with Kim Addonizio and enter poetry by working on your lines…
Wilkommen in Oktober! What’s with the German accent, you ask? It is the last week of Oktoberfest, that German celebration commemorating the marriage of the Crown Prince Ludwig to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen in October of 1810. It is said that the royal wedding party was so grand that the citizens of Bavaria decided […]
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 first fall drizzle blew into Fayetteville this weekend, and though it wasn’t yet cold enough to kindle the fireplaces, someone in the neighborhood tried. The smoke came wafting down the road and through my open window. There is a gathering up in Autumn, and not of leaves. I smell it in the fires and […]
Diving headlong into the world of tea can be disorienting. I know this firsthand. Last week I decided to kick the coffee habit for a month and opted to replace it with a more refined and elegant beverage—tea. But as I visited the local market’s tea aisle, my head swam with the options—black teas, green […]
Last week I received my shiny, colorfully bird-laden copy of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. Books like this don’t usually show up at my house: I’m a poet, through and through. But I’ve also had this little fling with fiction on the side since attending the Midwest Writers’ Conference, where I practically skipped out […]
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 […]
tribes save me from the little tribes the us and them tribes that say who can’t marry who that make you take up a gun to defend them give me those sisters and brothers in the bigger family to link arms with to cluck and strut together to head off somewhere not knowing precisely where […]
There is a long-standing metaphorical marriage of rain and sorrow. Painters, film-makers, musical artists — they have all used tempestuous imagery to denote loss, grief, and sadness. In 1933 Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler penned “Stormy Weather, ” the quintessential breakup song first performed by Ethel Waters. Covered by greats like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, […]
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 […]
Everyone knows writing conferences can get a little crazy. In fact, this normally prim poet was just caught flashing at the Midwest Writers Workshop. Fiction flashing, that is. I should have seen it coming. I hadn’t written fiction in nearly two decades, was let loose in Muncie, Indiana, without my husband and kids, and was […]
The heartland is ablaze. The five-o’clock news anchor tells us that Tower Mountain was kissed by lightning, that it went up like a harvest bonfire before emergency crews responded. “There have been more than 1, 000 wildfires in Arkansas this year, ” he says, “mostly in rural portions of the state.” He makes some awkward […]
I found Paul Chowder at the Tip O’Neill building. He was in the passport office cajoling the bureaucrats into renewing his travel documents just days before his departure to Switzerland for some big international poetry doings because he didn’t realize he’d expired. I was there for my once-a-decade passport renewal even though I had no […]
I scheduled a date with Paul Chowder on Friday. We were supposed to hang out and talk about Sara Teasdale. He’d been going on about how some poets spend too much time thinking about death, like going to a movie and just waiting for the credits, which my dad taught me are very interesting if you […]
In the summer of 2008, the local Barnes & Noble invited Geoffrey Brock to read from his first book of Poetry, Weighing Light. Metal folding chairs were placed between the do-it-your self section and the clearance picture-book aisle. I’m not sure whether it was the ideal spot for a poetry reading, what with patrons whizzing through […]
I moved upstairs to the kitchen to work. I don’t like the kitchen much. It reminds me of all the times I have to cook, and cooking is not something I enjoy. Sometimes when I cook, there’s a fire, and I’m not sure the fire extinguisher was recharged after the last one. It wasn’t my […]
