You’ve come to grips with it: no one’s in the audience. Every day, you hear yourself, reverberating in the mic, saying the same things in different ways, repeating your truths like mantras, your words like they came from the mountain. You must be doing something wrong, though. Nothing is happening. Nothing is changing. Nothing nods […]
Open your notebook. Log the times you think you failed. Read it to the wind. -Katherine Gotthardt
This is my advice: slice the morning. Make wedges out of hours, minutes where you could be writing poetry. Carve the fleshy part of day, the time when words mean exactly what you think, exactly what you want, exact like a sharp, expensive tool you bring out for the big jobs. Poetry was made for
5 a.m. on a Sunday and I accidentally wake my husband. “Poetry piled up overnight,” I explain. He murmurs, “Death by poetry,” and rolls over. But I am here thinking how Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and great poets I don’t know enough about have carried me through the night— this most recent night, one that
If it wasn’t for the way early light met me on the street that morning, or the way April rain’s fingers tapped lightly on my shoulder, or how that warm mist and sudden sense seeped through to my very skin. If it wasn’t for a voice familiar to my better self, the one that snuck
Today, in the battlefield’s forest, Manassas gave us gifts: a stream for our dog to swim in, a wooden bridge for us to cross, a path for hikers and horses. Through trees reached the arms of the sun, resting its hands on the back of our necks. Not even a hint of soldiers or Civil
Crave is a five letter word, same as power. The world knows no peace. -Katherine Gotthardt Praying for peace.
