“Kinstugi is the japanese art of mending precious pottery with gold” Mending the broken. Sometimes it’s simpler just to throw away the fragments and find something new to love instead. Sometimes, though, on those monumentally rare and precious occasions, the kinds we treasure forever, we find something worth fixing. Not just worth the trouble and…
Serifs, I say. I like serifs. I like serifs too. They’re stable, constant, waiting, trembling, a boat. Bookends, I like to think, tape stretched thin across all four canvas-sides, quivering under the weight of three layers of oil, three layers of thick piled-on paint. It’s the curl on the end of a lowercase g, the…
Famous poet, Brad Leithauser, wrote “A Good List” while lying awake in his bed in Iceland one evening. The poem provides a humorous and lighthearted list of things Leithauser has “never done wrong,” as it describes, among other things, how he has neither stolen gnomes from anyone’s garden nor forged a winning lottery ticket. At…
Michael Dickman’s “From the Lives of My Friends,” published in The New Yorker in 2009, is a coming of age tale that explores the impact of childhood friends on our lives as we grow old with them. Dickman grew up in Portland, Oregon, is the author of three books, The End of the West, Flies,…
Poems have the ability to connect people to the power of the written word in a way that books cannot. Often times, a shorter poem can result in a more thought-provoking the message, as the reader can spin a million interpretations and connections. I chose three very different poems from the 2009 volume of Best…
I think I chose Howard’s “A Proposed Curriculum Change” because I was flipping through the 2012 edition of “The Best American Poetry” and I saw the words “Fifth-Grade Class” and I just had to read on. The words feel soft and warm and familiar and recognizable and even the poem’s structure compels me further forwards,…
I sat down this morning with the 2014 version of “The Best American Poetry”, flipping through the pages, hoping to come across a poem that would toss a match onto my thoughts and light the flame of ingenuity. For a while I sat and flipped, and then flipped back again, and again. In the process…
Stephen Dunn was born in 1939 in Queens, New York and went to college at Hofstra University where he played basketball on a scholarship. After college, Dunn worked in the advertising business. After a few years in the business, Dunn decided to quit his job and traveled to Spain to write his first novel along…
Even though Brad Leithauser attended Harvard Law and had a career as a lawyer, he never lost his love of poetry, one that began in high school. He then traveled to Japan to work in a law office but wrote while he was there. He never was really as interested in law as he was…
Matthew Zapruder is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor who was born in Washington D.C.. He studied Russian Literature at Amherst College and then received an MA in Slavic Languages from the University of California, Berkeley as well as an MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His works are very well-regarded…