Legacy – Rage Hezekiah Legacy is a new series in which poets and writers reflect on a writer or writers who inspired them, whose works spoke to and influenced them and whose legacy continues to inform their work. Curated by…
Browsing: Craft
By Ana C.H. Silva One of my poetry mothers, Sharon Dolin, once gently challenged me, “Who are you reading right now?” I appreciated what she was really saying: to be a good writer, you need to be a great…
I have never been one to put off work. Quite the opposite, really. I complete tasks weeks, sometimes months in advance. I am organized, a self-starter, ahead of the game at all times. (When I try to arrive fashionably late…
It’s probably a small miracle that I am even writing this. Time to write has become an even more precious commodity in motherhood. Yet, there is a need to write that did not go away when I became a new…
An Interview by J.P. Howard, MER VOX Editor-at-Large, of Mireya Perez-Bustillo and Patsie Alicia Ifill I’ve been thinking a lot about friendships between women, and in particular between women writers, and how we often sustain one another. Not only do…
These craft pieces are the direct result of a new collaboration between Continuing and Professional Studies (CPS) of The City College of New York (CCNY) and Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon (WWBPS). Our Interactive Poetry Workshop “From Page to…
Begin with a free-writing exercise of the plot of the narrative. After reading what you have written. Circle or highlight the areas of the story that you think are poignant. Next, create short haiku-like verses for each of the areas…
This piece explores using family photos and other personal items as a way to enter poems. Writers can use journals, family photos, oral histories and/or a combination of the above as writing prompts to enter poems. Questions that often come…
Poets and Performance Whether you are doing a performance of your poems or reading them – you the poet want to present your poems as best you can. Right? What does that mean? Once a friend who was a jazz…
It starts with a whisper. An image. A single word. An idea so subtle that if you don’t sit still, it will evaporate by the time you blink. That is poetry. More than any other genre of writing, I feel…