"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
2015 has been a wonderful year for publishers and readers. My “Best of 2015” list consists of the books that I am most likely to read again. In the memoir category, Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fourth volume of My Struggle is part of a series that I believe will be … Read More
So often, I see my students take an adversarial stance when they sit down to write. They use phrases such as “grinding it out” and “forcing it” to describe how they work. Sometimes that’s been my experience, too. But does it have to be? What if we looked at the … Read More
Today is Thanksgiving Day — the perfect time to acknowledge with gratitude The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry, and the Poetry Foundation. These organizations email poems to thousands of people like me who wish to read new work by new poets every day. I wouldn’t have heard … Read More
Zbigniew Herbert was 15 when Germany invaded Poland. It’s hard to imagine what it was like to grow up in the resistance. He became one of the most respected poets of Poland, and had a tremendous influence on younger writers. He advised them to detach themselves from “this truly … Read More
This is the last line from the poem “Vocation” by one of my favorite poets, William Stafford. He was an advocate of the process of discovery. In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, he writes, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who … Read More
This metaphor is simple, and yet it packs a punch. It’s from the poem “The Town Where I Belong” in Faith Shearin‘s new collection Telling the Bees. Part of its power comes from the way three of the five senses are used in these few words, a feat … Read More
The poem continues: “It is onions and potatoes . . . it is obvious. . .” This is how Philip Levin conceptualizes truth in the poem “The Simple Truth.” I’m often reminded of this gritty, elegant poem when I scrub potatoes for dinner. He writes, “Some things you know all … Read More
An extra punch — which distinguishes the extraordinary poetry of Kay Ryan — hits us in the title poem in this collection, “The Best of It.” At first, it seems that she’s telling us to make do, but then the poem gets darker, and then we realize that she’s … Read More
With his wonderful metaphors and his trademark compassion, Ted Kooser is a poet with many gifts. The gift that I appreciate most is his ability to look at ordinary things — rain, clouds, trees — and see what no one else sees. “Spatters of raindrops cold as dimes, and … Read More
The premise of Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden is this: great poems can be dangerous. They can make you question your assumptions, change your direction, and find the courage to start over. I believe that reading can lead to reflection that inspires transformation. In fact, I’m … Read More
What is work? This is the question that poet Philip Levine, who died last Saturday, asked many times. He started working in a Detroit factory at age 14. He believed that his work as a poet was “to name and recover,” and to stand up for the “victimized, the … Read More
Faith Shearin is a master of metaphors. Here are some of my favorites from the poems in Moving the Piano: “We let the deer come to us like secrets, their legs made of silence.” (93) “…the water, which has grown colder, like a man’s hand at the end of … Read More
This is the first line of a poem by Billy Collins, who believes the “signature” of a poem is its tone. In an interview with George Plimpton for the Paris Review, Collins said, “The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone … Read More
No blog about books would be complete without a year-end “best of” list. For me, the best are “books that I am most likely to read again.” For fiction, I predict that I will turn to Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch many times in the years to come. For non-fiction/memoir, I’ve … Read More
One afternoon about twenty years ago, someone on NPR read the poem “On the Island” by Elizabeth Spires. I was driving my car, and I was so moved that I almost went into the ditch. This poem is infused with tension between the past and the future. Here … Read More