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David Biespiel

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.

Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Aug 12, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Jul 29, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Jul 15, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Jul 1, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Jun 17, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Jun 3, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

May 20, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

May 6, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Apr 22, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Apr 8, 2014

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.
Poetry, Rumpus Original

David Biespiel

Mar 25, 2014

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.
Poetry

David Biespiel

Feb 24, 2014

David 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…