Poetry & Practice Writing Activities

“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...

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...

Sandra Cisneros, when speaking about her poetry-writing practice during a long pause between published collections, describes the liberation in writing for the self: “Poems were to be written as if...

Read Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Punk Half Panther” out loud at least twice. Keep a list of any language that stands out as you read and listen. Questions to consider, on your...

Read “LeaveTaking” by Rita Dove several times, out loud or silently, or listen to Dove reading the poem. Questions to consider, on your own in writing, or in discussion with others: This...