David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Not That Town
Times like those lead you to believe that writing is, before it’s anything else, about simply getting it straight.
Posts by author
David Biespiel
115 posts
David Biespiel is a poet, literary critic, memoirist, and contributing writer at American Poetry Review, New Republic, New York Times, Poetry, Politico, The Rumpus, and Slate, among other publications. He is the author of numerous books, most recently The Education of a Young Poet, which was selected a Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers, A Long High Whistle, which received the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction, and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen for Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat
It never occurred to me to try to write poems without the guidance of other poets and poems.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Texas Roses
It’s a matter of self-composition: Keep concentrating, type faster—take a breath and hold it—and do it again.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Nighthawks
We live in a moment, we have an experience, and we demand to understand what is happening.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Be Wise, Drink the Wine
Be it Latin or poetry, or whatever it was—I was feeling woozy by then. If I couldn’t love what I was reading, I took it, it was better to have never read at all.
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: From the Earth to the Stars Part Two
Our understandings of our experiences are sometimes shapeless. Like shadows, they move on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.