May 17, 2017
Beth Bachmann KINGDOM Six-fingered pitchfork, god-speed; I’ve got a field fallow & have you seen my horses? They’re hungry. Death is not a state. It is a property like the smell of peaches on your or my skin. The little book I wear around my neck is gold-filled, mostly brass. It takes an open palm to lift the hay, the hair in sunlight. The tremble of one ...
May 16, 2017
REMEMBERING FRANZ by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright In the ninth month after Franz died, I was asked if I would like to contribute something to a memorial feature in his honor. I was faced with an immediate difficulty involving shared reality. To contribute, I went along with the premise. I slept on the couch for several weeks, facing the chair, the one still there for Franz, to coax out a few of the ...
May 15, 2017
Yesterday was the second anniversary of the passing of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. I've been working for the past eighteen months to assemble a portfolio of work on Wright, one that would include a range of voices (including Franz's own) writing about and to and through his life and poems. That memorial will be printed in the Summer 2017 issue of Pleiades (which you can pre-order here), but this week ...
May 09, 2017
A new archive popped up with a few essays from this blog and elsewhere by writers of color on craft. Here it is: https://www.de-canon.com/blog/2017/5/5/writers-of-color-discussing-craft-an-invisible-archive The ones from the blog are under the Pedagogy section. I wrote about the issue of "pure craft" and why writers of color address race in their craft essays in this ...