Poetry & Practice Writing Activities

Whenever a guest drops by unexpectedly, my eye goes to the pile of mail on the counter, the tumbleweeds of dog hair roaming freely across the kitchen floor from our...

The poet Ruth Stone is known for sensing a poem thundering at her over the landscape and running like hell for home to write it down. Sometimes, she’d catch it...

As a visiting teaching artist for the Poetry Foundation, I facilitated a workshop titled “GLYPH-cation! Learn & Create Hybrid Poetry.” We created graphic poems and also explored how visual elements...

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” —James BaldwinWriting poems can be the articulation of a kind of listening. We listen to the poems we’ve dog-eared in...

In college, I would count the syllables in my sentences. Turns out, I run between 18 and 22 syllables per sentence unconsciously. Didn’t matter if the paper was about evolutionary...

Read Douglas Kearney’s poem “Every Hard Rapper’s Father Ever: Father of the Year.” Then, listen to the poet reading this poem out loud at least once. A few questions you...

Read or listen to Kimiko Hahn’s poem, “Likeness: A Self-Portrait,” several times. A few questions you might consider, either in writing or in conversation with others: The title instructs us to...

What I didn’t know before reading Ada Limón’s What I Didn’t Know Before is where research—scientific, philosophical, historical, or any other kind—belongs in the poetry writing process. What I learned after...

The roots of the word exhibition are instructive: from ex "out" + habere "to hold." An exhibition holds out a particular narrative, a thesis, and framing of a subject. A...

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.  It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.  My language trembles...

“Which of us has not,” writes Charles Baudelaire in the introduction to Paris Spleen, “in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or...

Look closely at a typical map, and you will notice that it is covered in language—the names of countries, types of rivers, cardinal directions. Language helps shape geography and vice...