The Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by David Biespiel
Biespiel offers a number of best practices—not just for writing poems, but for living a creative life.
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Posts Tagged: Poets & Writers
What Poets and Writers Want
The staff at Poets & Writers put out a call to writers—“some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens”—to share their perspectives on important issues for the next US president. Fifty writers weigh in, including Javier Zamora, Mira Ptacin, and Ocean Vuong. Rita Dove writes: “If we are ever to attain our forefathers’ aspirations for ‘a […]
...moreSinful Bookmarks and Western Prejudice
What is it like, in post-Tahrir Cairo, to run a bookstore or a publishing house? What is it like to be a reader or a writer? For Poets & Writers, Stephen Morison, Jr., writes about the Egyptian revolution from a literary angle. “A critic last Monday said he wanted to kill himself [after reading my latest […]
...moreBetter Living through Storytelling
One of the hardest parts of developing artificial intelligence, writes Frank Bures for Poets & Writers, is trying to teach computers causality: how and why one thing follows from another. Humans don’t have to be taught: We see causality constantly, incessantly, and effortlessly: when we read the news, when we gossip about neighbors, when we watch […]
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Bruce Lee’s Advice to Poets
Who isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry. And one of my favorite quotes is by Czeslaw Milsoz: “Poetry is a dividend from […]
...moreQuestionable Ranking Systems for MFA Programs
Poets & Writers recently ranked the country’s MFA programs, and as rankings often do, it is being received with some hostility. Their hierarchy of MFA programs is based on the word of mouth of MFA applicants, rather than the US News-style algorithm (which has got its own controversy). Though the ranking did come with a […]
...moreThe (Optimisitic) State of the Book Review
Book reviews sections in newspapers and magazines began shrinking a couple years ago, or being folded into other sections, even disappearing altogether. In 2007, a band of culturally dedicated authors started the National Book Critics Circle’s Campaign to Save Book Reviewing and now “we remain a nation of passionate readers—even during a time when movies […]
...moreIn Praise of the Indie Bookseller
Poets & Writers has a new series, Inside Indie Bookstores, by Jeremiah Chamberlin, associate editor of Fiction Writers Review. Each month, according to Chamberlin, the series will feature an interview with a bookseller, one of many “entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.” This month, the […]
...moreThe MFA Rankings Wars
Last week in my Poetic Lives Online column, I wrote a little about the immediate reaction to the Poets & Writers MFA program rankings. Well, it’s blown up a bit more in the last week, with the Association of Writing Programs weighing in on the matter. Seth Abramson, speaking for himself, responds quite capably here. […]
...morePoetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Can you tell the difference between E. E. Cummings and a YouTube commenter? (It’s really not as hard as it looks.) Caroline Guinzio has been guest blogging at Unstressed this week, and I enjoyed this piece very much in light of the long interview we recently published with Rebecca Wolff. Her blogging all week has […]
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