David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: From the Earth to the Stars Part One
When you’re a diver, you’re only a tourist of the air.
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Posts by: David Biespiel
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Against Our Will
All that floated there was the mystery. In the presence of all that, I discovered too that there are mysteries residing in the consciousness of my own mind that I don’t want to get out of the way of.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Old Friends Or Lovers
I was becoming awed by the wide horizon of the speech that arose out of an individual life lived in a single era and generation. I was becoming attracted to the writer’s creativity.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Pretending to Pretend
Just as a body, like water, retains no constant shape, so in memory there are no constant conditions.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
[Boston] was a map out of the damage of my self-awareness and into some new evidence of beauty.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Couple of Puzzles
This was the first pure poetry I ever knew. Sung out loud more or less to no one on a theme of longing. Wife. Sons. Rags. Snow. Stalks of corn.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Cornerstones of American Poetry
The only way I can put it is, no American poet I have ever met regardless of disposition or poetics has disliked Frank Stanford’s poems.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Shadow Must Be Paid
A poet lives through the writing of poems inside his or her animal or sexual sides as a way to honor that aspect of our humanity.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Midnight in the Century
…today’s poetry apologists for the Iraq war just keep repeating their intelligence error odes. Wouldn’t it be better, however, if they would address the horror of the failed effort in Iraq?
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Brief Inner Happiness
Writing requires sustained attention to what figures, disfigures, and refigures our imaginations and includes a vision that takes every experience into account.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poem as Whistling Father
Isn’t it worth wondering, then, where does a poem take you after it calls you in, calls you from your life into your creative psyche?
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Defense of Conceptual Poetry
My friends, I’m deeply humbled by the opportunity to speak before the most important poetic body in the world, the Internet.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The New Poem
Every once in a while over a period of a few weeks or more I compile some objectives for poetry in the form of a list, something I call one-sentence lectures.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Mask and Dance
Anyone writing a poem knows that you first open yourself and then a poem builds from what you yield. As a poet, you are the carrier of life.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Scream of Consciousness
Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire returns with a powerful take on fascism and violence and postmodernism.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Conclusion
As a poet, you seek to blend your imagination with what you are both witnessing and imagining: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.”
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 11
Becoming a poet means to think about delight and distress with equal poise. Becoming a poet means to embrace the child of your imagination where resentment is understood.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 10
Becoming a poet means locating what images and symbols, what argument and figuration, are best suited to convey the aspects of change you most want to reveal through your writing.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 9
Becoming a poet means writing past the danger each and every time you feel that you’re struggling with writing a poem.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 8
When you trust the wisdom from the art of poetry as a guide to writing your new poems, you put your writing in service of something larger than your own ambitions and impulses.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 7
When you do not allow yourself to follow your impulses, it’s not that you are eluding or destroying those impulses. Instead, you’re converting what was potentially necessary to your imagination into something darker, less stable, and more insidious.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 6
As a poet you are called to be absorbed and aroused and enchanted and intoxicated and beguiled. You embrace occasions that leave you seduced and transfixed, overpowered and enraptured.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 5
There’s a unitary circulation between poet and reader. The poet dwells in the gap between dream and waking, and the reader is offered entryway to become alive and enlivened.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey Chapter 4
While poetry reveals what is fantastic and dangerous, a poem is not a fairytale escape. The triumphs in a poem are foremost triumphs of the imagination more so than the soul.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 3
The ritual of poetic discovery is a reanimation of the whole metaphor of human dream and reason, irrationality and rationality, the ancient and the contemporary, the organic and the artifice.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey Chapter 2
Every time you write a poem, you’re learning to become a poet once again. Your writing imitates not the banal sequence from life to death, but instead imitates a descent into and out of a new womb of clarity.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter I
Poetry Wire continues its exploration of how one might become a poet in the modern world, how one traverses between the creative realm and daily experience.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Preamble
With this column, Poetry Wire begins a multi-part exploration of how you might become a poet in the modern world.
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: In Defense of Derek Walcott
This past Sunday Teju Cole reviewed in the New York Times Derek Walcott’s The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948-2013, selected by Glyn Maxwell and published by FSG. The book is over 600 pages and traverses more than 50 years with one of the world’s great living poets. I can see why the Times asked Cole […]
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