Poetry – Page 2

Poet of the Month: William Wordsworth

For Poetry Month, we chose an old favorite for poet of the month: William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 –April 23, 1850) is one of the most important English Romantic poets. Critics consider Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection by Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Coleridge, to be the publication that began the Romantic era in poetry.

Wordsworth and his Romantic contemporaries valued emotional experience over logic and reason, breaking with the values of the English Enlightenment. Poems like “The Daffodils” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” have become classics because of their eloquent expression of the author’s personal experiences, close observation of nature, and evocative emotional content.

Wordsworth defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and though these spontaneous feelings inspired many of his works, the quality of his poems shows that they were written with care. He began writing an epic poem about his life at age 28, and worked on it for the rest of his life. It was published as The Prelude after his death in 1850, and was dedicated to his contemporary and collaborator, Samuel Coleridge.

In the Classroom:

1. Have students research the fruitful but complicated relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge and use it to fuel a discussion of literary friendship. What can they make of the differences between “Tintern Abbey” and “Kubla Khan,” for example?

2. Some of Wordsworth’s language won’t be accessible to some students, but in his day Wordsworth strove for clear, everyday speech. Use a few lines from his “Preface to “Lyrical Ballads” to talk about how language changes. Ask students to think of examples of common language today that might sound “stuffy” in 100 years.

3. Have students use Poetry Foundation’s great collection of flower poems to find a poem to compare with “Daffodils.” Have students compare their descriptions of nature, the poets’ responses to nature, and the emotional content (or lack thereof) of the poems.

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blog-photo Cecilia Seiter is an associate editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Free Poetry Culture: LibriVox Edition

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Yale Open Courses, and this week I’d like to highlight another great free audio resource online—LibriVox.

A sort of audio version of Project Gutenberg, LibriVox aims to put online audio recordings of all public domain books. This includes the novels of Dickens, Austen, Eliot, most of Conrad, and the bulk of Joyce. (Membership in the canon is not a prerequisite, however; the database also includes selections such as “Selections From General Instructions For The Guidance Of Post Office Inspectors In The Dominion Of Canada”.)

There’s a lot of great poetry in the public domain (by Yeats, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Hopkins, and many others), making Librivox a good resource for recordings of teachable poems. Additionally, LibriVox provides 84 mixed collections of short poetry, perfect for loading on your iPod if you like to prep for class while jogging or commuting.

Volunteers, rather than actors, read the selections included in the LibriVox database, but the quality is generally high. (Even the best recordings of John Donne’s poetry couldn’t match the Richard Burton versions, though.)

If you find yourself intrigued by the project, you may want to volunteer yourself–or your students. (Instructions are found here.) It’s easy to get involved. Readers of this blog may be especially interested in recording a poem for the collections of short poetry.

In the Classroom

Start class by playing a recording of a poem before students read the poem.

Craft a short unit on the principles of reading poetry aloud. Discuss poetry’s beginning in oral traditions. (LibriVox, of course, has recordings of the great, originally oral epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey.) Split students into groups, and have them listen to several recordings and then make a list of what helps and/or hinders their ability to understand and enjoy the poem when they listen rather than read it.

Once students understand what makes for a good reading, have them choose a poem they’re drawn to and add it to the LibriVox canon. They could even memorize it, participating in the oral tradition. (See our post on the virtues of memorization.)

Related Posts

Poetry Speaks!

Memorization and Its Discontents

In Defense of Recitation

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before working at Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

Poetry, Proliferating

Last month, David Alpaugh wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “The New Math of Poetry.” In it he describes the explosion of poetry publishing, particularly online, and what it means for poetic culture. He bemoans the potential loss of a brilliant poet or two in all the poetic static.

Whether there are actually as many published poets as Alpaugh claims and whether we as a culture lose something when a brilliant poet goes unrecognized is up for debate (as the article’s comments section shows). But there’s no denying that poetry, like journalism, prose fiction, music, visual art, and most other media is easier to publish than ever. And poets of all ages and skill levels are rising to the challenge. Whether you like this development or not, it does make it harder to find new, good poetry outside of a few traditional venues like Poetry or The New Yorker.

With that in mind, we’re going to start a new feature here at Teaching Poetry where we round up some of the best poetry journals, magazines, and blogs out there. We’ll have a theme for each round-up, and we’ll try to find the best online examples of different types of poetry journals.

Hopefully this will help you navigate online poetry, and maybe find a new favorite poet. (As of right now, we have no affiliation with any of the blogs we’re going to mention. If we ever do mention an affiliated blog, we’ll disclose it.)

For our inaugural round-up we offer you one site that has the content and power of a thousand: Web del Sol. David Alpaugh mentions WDS at the beginning of his Chronicle article, and for good reason—the home page is teeming with literary content. Founded in 1994 by Michael Neff, and only the second organization to put a poetry journal online, WDS now calls itself the literary locus of the Web. It’s a collaborative cultural effort that includes several journals, reviews, and zines, as well as links to hundreds of other literary sites.

Feeling overwhelmed by the WDS home page? Click on eSCENE to narrow down your options a bit. eSCENE is a digest of highlights from fiction, poetry, and new media journals. They publish the editor’s selections at least six times a year—which should be enough to keep you reading all year round.

Of course, please let us know of your current favorite poetry sources in the comments below—we’ll be sure to mention you if your recommendation winds up in a post.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Poet of the Month: Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde, born on February 18th, 1934, was just as admirable for her activism as for her poetry. Indeed for Lorde the two were inextricably connected.

A native New Yorker born to Grenadian parents, Lorde attended high school and college in Manhattan. As a child she dropped the “y” from her given first name, “Audrey”, because she liked the symmetry between the “e” endings of her first and last names. What poet wouldn’t do the same?

Starting in the 1960’s, Lorde became a civil rights activist. However, as a black lesbian woman, she struggled with racism in the feminist community, sexism in the black community, and heterosexism and homophobia everywhere. Her essays urge her readers to stop fearing the differences between individuals—the fear leads to exclusion, and one group almost inevitably declares itself superior to the other.

In the late 1970s, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 1980 she published The Cancer Journals, a nonfiction memoir of her cancer experience. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in the same year. In 1991, she was named poet laureate of New York state. She continued to write poetry and essays until her death from cancer in 1992.

You can read Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider on Google Books.

Listen to a 1977 clip of her reading “A Song for Many Movements” at Poets.org.

The Poetry Foundation has a biography and full text of eleven of Lorde’s poems.

Lorde’s poems and life can show students that not all poets are on a Search for Truth, or trying to Create Beauty, or Express their Innermost Feelings. Sometimes these pursuits are abstract to students: what do they have to do with the real world? Why should anyone study them?

Audre Lorde used her search for truth, and the beauty of language, and her personal experience, to tell people about injustice and try to change American society.

As she said to poet Mari Evans in “Conversations with Audre Lorde,”

“So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either/or position…I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

Happy Birthday, Audre Lorde!

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Celebrating Poetry in Black History Month

Terrence Hayes reads at Cornell University, April 15, 2009

With the arrival of February comes the celebration of Black History month in the United States and—on this blog at least—a recognition of the pioneering work of writers and artists of African descent in this country.

There are a lot of great Web resources to help you appreciate these innovators and to structure activities for your students.

The Academy of American of American Poets has compiled a wealth of material for Black History Month and invites readers to “[c]elebrate and explore the rich tradition of African American poetry through essays on literary milestones, intersections of music, poetry, and art, and profiles and poems of historical and contemporary poets such as Harryette Mullen who continue to pioneer new ground while keeping an eye on the past.”

Highlights include classic recordings, such as Langston Hughes reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Gwendolyn Brooks reading “We Real Cool,” along with overviews of poetic movements like Slam and Negritude, essays, videos, and biographies.

Langston Hughes reads, “I, Too.”

The Library of Congress has provided an equally impressive collection, though its focus is broader, covering the whole spectrum of politics and culture. Of special interest to readers of this blog will be videos of poet Sheila Moses at the 2006 National Book Festival, David Kresh discussing the poetry of Langston Hughes, and poet E. E. Miller giving an interview.

The Smithsonian’s Web site for Black History month features a host of resources for educators including a Harlem Renaissance reading list.

And, on that topic, the History Channel offers a brief video overview of the Harlem Renaissance—the surge of creative activity in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s that involved poets such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.

The Biography Channel’s Web site features a lengthier, written introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, with links to biographies to major writers, artists, and intellectuals associated with the movement—including, of course, poets.

About your classroom:

How will you celebrate Black History Month in your poetry classroom this February? How do you celebrate all year round?

Send in your exercises and ideas and we will feature them here on Teaching Poetry.

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before coming to Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

P. K. Page: 1916-2010

In 2005, my high school in Canada invited me to give a poetry workshop and reading. After the workshop, the instructor who’d invited me—one talented Mr. Terence Young—took me along on a social call to none other than literary giant P. K. Page. It was an unexpected pleasure during my visit to Victoria.

Then approaching 90, P. K. showed no signs of slowing down. She mixed us stiff cocktails and talked a blue streak. She drank more than I did. When I expressed an interest in Brazil, she talked about her two years there in the 1950s and grilled me on my Portuguese. She was sharp and amusing and easy to like. But I, for one, was also a little afraid. She was full of fire.

On January 14, Canadian poet, essayist, and visual artist P. K. Page passed away at 93.

Patricia Kathleen Page was born in England in 1916 and moved with her family to Alberta, Canada, when she was quite young. Her parents were both creative, artistic people, and she grew up surrounded by the arts. She was a prolific writer, publishing two new books just two months before her death.

As a young woman living in Montreal, she belonged to a group of poets who founded the magazine Preview (1942-45), associated with then-prominent Canadian poets F. R. Scott and A. M. Klein. While not a card-carrying member, she sympathized with Quebecois Communists who resisted the Anglo-Canadian establishment in Montreal, a French city. Her work was interested in language play as well as concepts from psychoanalysis.

Her first book As ten as twenty was published in 1946 and in 1954 her collection The Metal and the Flower won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Canada’s highest literary prize. She had a strong sense of social justice and believed in practicing literary form. As she said,“I make myself sit down and write sonnets and villanelles and sestinas because you need bones. If you don’t know all that, you have a very shaky scaffolding for your art.”

Working as a scriptwriter for the National Film Board of Canada, she met her husband Arthur Irwin, who at the time also worked in film. Thanks to his later diplomatic career, she lived for several years in Australia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Brazil.

While living in Brazil she painted often, and kept track of her daily life in a diary later published as Brazilian Journal. (I took her journal on my second trip to Brazil. It was an insightful and often hilarious companion, navigating the absurdity of a northerner in a tropical country without enough of the local language.)

In this 1983 CBC interview, she speaks about her experiences in Brazil, and reads “Traveler’s Poem.”

The CBC Web site published a poignant remembrance of Page’s life written by her friend and fellow writer Rosemary Sullivan. The page includes a video of " target="_blank">Page reading her most popular poem, “Planet Earth,” which the United Nations selected in 2001 to be read simultaneously in several locations around the world to celebrate the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

Upon her death, the Premier of Canada, Gordon Campbell, issued this statement: “As an author, poet, teacher, scriptwriter and painter, P. K. Page was an extraordinary and varied force in promoting and developing Canadian culture. Her efforts helped to set the stage for decades of cultural growth in our nation. Her long and illustrious career saw her achieve great heights including eight honourary doctorates as well as being named to both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.”

Poet and friend Lorna Crozier said in a 2004 profile in Victoria’s local newspaper, the Times-Colonist, “Her engagement with the world is obsessive, passionate and totally clear.”

Some of P.K. Page’s poems are available online:

“Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree”

“Cullen in the Afterlife”

“After Rain” (inspired by Rilke‘s “Autumn Day“)

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Poetry Speaks! Now Online

Reading poetry aloud in the classroom is a great idea. Sometimes, however, you ask for volunteers to read and get…total silence. Sometimes even students who are willing to read don’t do the poem justice. Sometimes you have bronchitis. Luckily, PoetrySpeaks.com is here to help.

PoetrySpeaks.com, officially launched November 4, 2009, aims to “create a space where poetry can be discovered and rediscovered.” The brains behind it, Dominique Raccah, is the founder of Sourcebooks, Inc. and the publisher of the New York Times bestseller Poetry Speaks, (the book), which included three audio CDs of poets reading their work. From the success of that book, she knew she had the fan-base to support the Web site. Online, she’s able to provide many more audio and video resources that foster interest in reading, writing, and listening to poetry.

The site, in the works since 2005, is always adding new features and content. It’s also been developing alliances in the poetry and performance work. A few publishers (Naxos AudioBooks, Tupelo Press, Marick Press) have partnered with the site, and its advisory board includes Anne Halsey from the Poetry Foundation, Bruce George, co-founder of Def Poetry Jam (HBO), and Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States.

The site has three main sections: PS Voices, which has text and audio for poems by well-known poets (some read by the poets themselves); SpokenWord, devoted to slam poetry; and YourMic, which allows user-poets to upload and share audio and video files of themselves reading their own works. Right now, the site features a short poetry film called “The Captain,” which features the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, read by Allison Janney (one of my favorites!). You can watch the film and read the poem here.

The site also has a PoetryMatters blog and a Poetry Store.

Yes, a poetry store. Of course, there are plenty of places online to post text, audio, and video files of poetry. PoetrySpeaks.com, however, charges for poems: You can buy the text, the audio, the video, or a combination package. And your payment helps to directly support the poet. The set-up is similar to iTunes: a 30-second professional audio recording is free, but the whole poem in MP3 format is 99 cents. (A recording of “The Raven” is nine minutes long; “Ozymandias” is only one minute, forty seconds; both cost 99 cents.) If paying for poetry makes you balk, think of it as breaking the tired-out tradition of the penniless poet.

Do you like to use recordings of poetry in your classes, or do you prefer live readings? Would you consider asking your students to post their own poetry on a site like this? What other resources could a site like PoetrySpeaks.com provide?

Related Posts on Teaching Poetry

In Defense of Recitation

Who’s Afraid of Teaching Poetry?

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Poet of the Month: Rainer Maria Rilke

“Now the hour bends down and touches me
with its clear, metallic ring;
my senses tremble. The feeling forms: I can—
and I grasp the malleable day.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours, as translated by Edward Snow

This is approximately how I felt as I settled in to write my post this morning. Rainer Maria Rilke is Teaching Poetry’s Poet of the Month for December. Friday is the 134th anniversary of his birth in 1875, and December 29 is the 83rd anniversary of his death in 1926.

Born in Prague, René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke had an unhappy childhood. Until he was old enough to attend school, his mother dressed him in girls’ clothes and treated him as a daughter, possibly because her first child, a daughter, died at only one week old. Rilke’s parents sent him to military school at the age of nine, hoping he would become an officer and improve the family’s place in society. Although Rilke was drawn to the glorious aspects of the military and war stories, he was more interested in becoming a poet than an officer. Even as a child, Rilke showed an interest in reading and writing poetry, which followed him to military school and beyond to university studies in Prague and Munich. He published his first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs), at his own expense in 1894.

René became Rainer at the suggestion of Lou Andreas-Salomé, an intelligent and influential woman whom Rilke met and fell in love with in Munich. Her marriage to Carl Friedrich Andreas did not stop Rilke from traveling with her (twice) on long trips to Russia and continuing their affair until 1900. In 1902 Rilke came to Paris with his wife, the sculptress Clara Westhoff, to write a book about Rodin. Rilke was always interested in the visual arts, having studied art in Prague and Munich and developed a practice of art criticism. After meeting and studying Rodin, Rilke eventually became his secretary and helped promote Rodin’s sculpture in Europe. Rodin encouraged him to write every day about anything that caught his attention instead of waiting for inspiration to strike. Rilke also loved Cézanne’s paintings, particularly the still lifes. They expressed an intensity that Rilke had tried to capture when describing a single object in poetry—seeing the object fully, knowing it completely, and capturing its essence in one short, well-crafted poem.

Throughout his career, Rilke consorted with intellectuals and aristocrats, though not always well; he was prone to anxiety and melancholy, became ill often, and was rarely happy in one place for long. He was not always liked, but required patronage to continue his writing. One of his patrons was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis; she welcomed him to Duino castle where he began the Duenieser Elegien (Duino Elegies) in 1912. They were not completed until 1923, due to the First World War and Rilke’s poor health and emotional state. Rilke also published Die Sonnete an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) in 1923, just three years before his death from leukemia. These two works are his most famous, and widely considered to be the height of his poetic achievements.

Today, The Rainer Maria Rilke Foundation (est. 1986) hosts a museum, lectures, and celebrations of Rilke at the Maison de Courten in Sierre, Switzerland, the town where Rilke spent the last five years of his life (before you start planning your trip, be aware that their Web site is only in French and German). Much of Rilke’s poetry is available online in German and in English. The quality of the English translations varies, particularly online where anyone can offer a translation. It’s worth it to look up and compare a few translations, both for the sake of judging the poem fairly and for the sheer linguistic fun of it. The Poetry Foundation has several Rilke poems in English and some interesting articles considering Rilke and his poetry.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

SPAMku!

by Carolyn Lengel

Poems can be fun, and sometimes they can even be funny. For proof, look no further than the haiku collected in the SPAMku archive.

Most of the poems on the site are really senryu, which is parodic, rather than haiku, which includes a seasonal reference—both types, however, require the same five-syllable/seven-syllable/five-syllable form.

Curated by John Nagamichi Cho of MIT, the SPAMku archive grew from a collection that filled a small paperback (SPAMku: Tranquil Reflections on Luncheon Loaf, Harper Perennial, 1998) into a gelatinous, porky giant with more than twenty thousand contributions.

Although the SPAMku archive no longer accepts new verses, the poems contributed by volunteers and enthusiasts are a revelation. Everyone, it seems, loves a poetry challenge—and what could be more challenging than crafting a poetic ode to a prosaic canned meat?

spam1

Here are some favorites among the archive’s many, many delights:

Roseate pork slab,
How you quiver on my spork!
Radiant light, gelled.

—L. Sheahen

Zen Buddhist SPAM quest:
“What are the ingredients?”
What do you desire?

—Alex Dunne

Activity:

Give your students the poetry challenge they crave. After a class discussion of the appeal of combining formal Japanese poetry with a not-very-dignified pork product, ask every student to write a SPAMku. (Vegetarian/vegan students can write Tofuku if they prefer.) Who knows—perhaps you’ll end up with a SPAMku archive of your own.

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Carolyn Lengel is a senior editor for English at Bedford/St. Martin’s, where she works mainly on handbooks. She is not a poet (although she did write a YouTube sonnet about Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan for the National Day on Writing), and she generally does not eat Spam, though she admires Spam both as a word and as an aesthetic object.

The Art of Revision

By Sage Cohen

One of the trickiest—and most liberating—aspects of poetry is that there is no Gold Standard against which we measure its worth. Without this standard, it can also be difficult to evaluate when a poem is finished. Because each poem is trying to accomplish something different, it is up to us to decide when the poem has arrived. This is not easy to do, even when one has been writing for decades, but it sure is satisfying to practice!

The important thing to remember about revision is that it is a process by which we become better acquainted with the poem and push it farther toward its own potential. In the revision stage, we revisit and may reinvent the choices we’ve already made with language, image, voice, music, line, rhythm, and rhyme.

The tricky balance involves wildly experimenting with what might be possible in a poem—beyond what we first laid down on the page—without losing the integrity of idea or emotion that brought us to the poem in the first place. This is a skill that develops over time, through experience and largely by feel. If it seems like you’re groping around in the dark when revising, welcome to the club!

The process of revising poems is unique for each poet; often, each poem has its own, unprecedented trajectory. I’ve had a few “whole cloth” poems arrive nearly perfectly complete in one contiguous swoosh of pen to paper. And I have other poems that have taken me more than fifteen years to finish. More typically, I work on a poem for a few weeks or months. Sometimes, I think a poem is finished, but years later, it proves me wrong, demanding a new final verse or line structure or title.

For the purposes of establishing a revising practice, I recommend that you divide writing and editing into two completely separate acts that happen at two different sittings, preferably on different days. The goal of this checks-and-balances system is to give yourself the space to let it rip when you’re writing without fearing interference from your inner editor. Don’t worry: If it’s bad now, it will still be bad next week; you can fix it then.

Once you feel you’ve exhausted every last drop of poetic possibility in the writing of the first draft, or any time you get stuck and don’t know where to go next, put your poem aside for a while. The next time you return to it, you’ll be wearing your editor hat.

In my experience, time is the greatest of editors. The longer a poem sits untouched, the more likely you are to have a sense of how to proceed when you sit down to revise.

Activity:

Don’t know where to start with your revisions? Try asking yourself the following questions:

What is most alive in your poem? Underline the line(s), word(s), phrase(s), stanza(s) that seem to be the kindling feeding the fire of this poem so you can easily reference what’s working throughout the revision process.

Is there introductory information at the beginning or summary information at the end that could be trimmed?

Who is speaking? What would the poem be like if told from a different perspective? (For example, if a poem is about an experience shared by a mother and daughter, and told from the daughter’s point of view, try telling it from the mother’s point of view.)

Where is language weak and flabby? How can you give it more energy and muscle? Can passive verbs become active? Can modifiers be cut? Should “dropped” be changed to “plummeted”?

Verb tense: What would your poem be like in a different tense than it was written? Even if it happened in the past, try the present, and vice versa. See what gives it the most power and energy.

Does the shape of the poem (line length, stanza breaks, white space) mirror the emotion and rhythm of its content? Should it?

Are punctuation and capitalization consistent?

Is there good music of repeating sounds throughout the poem?

Does each line break create the desired interest, pause, movement, and focus on key moments or words?

Does the title serve the poem? How can the title take the poem further?

Remember that only you know the best way to craft your poem. Have fun, be willing to experiment, and you’ll learn a little more about revision each time you try.

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Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. An award-winning poet, she writes three monthly columns about the craft and business of writing, publishes the Writing the Life Poetic Zine and serves as Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Sage has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She curates a monthly reading series at Barnes & Noble and teaches the online class Poetry for the People. To learn more, visit www.sagesaidso.com. Join the conversation about living and writing a poetic life at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com!