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Archive April 2012

In collaboration with Miami Dade College, the thirty-four-year-old National Poetry Series has established a new book award to accompany its five annual prizes, for a collection of Spanish-language verse.

Trio House Press, a new poetry outfit in Staten Island, New York, is accepting entries for two book awards.

Look through your poem drafts, notes, and writing fragments. Choose one line that you like and refine it until it feels as complete and polished as one line out of context can be. Use that line as a refrain in a new poem. When you've completed a decent draft, try writing an additional draft of the poem without the line, using it instead as the title.

Think about big and small regrets you have in your life—things you wish you had done, people you wish you had treated better, directions you wish you'd gone. Draw a chart that represents a hierarchy of your regrets. It can be simple or decorative, straightforward or complex. Then write an essay that explores what you see when you look at it.

Conjure someone you haven't seen or talked to in over ten years. Imagine you receive a phone call from this person today. Why are they calling? What do they want? Write a story about it.

Take a walk that you know well—through your neighborhood, around the block where you work, or your route to the train or bus. Study this familiar landscape carefully, and try to find a detail that you hadn’t noticed before—a piece of graffiti, a certain row of trees, the pattern in which the sidewalk is cracked. Write about this new observation, small as it may be, starting with physical description and then allowing your thoughts to wander.

The website Brain Pickings posted a video version of Kurt Vonnegut's eight tips for how to write a great short story. Choose a draft of one of your unfinished stories and apply Vonnegut's advice during the revision process.

For the month of April, P&W–supported poet, playwright, and presenter of literary events Robert Francis Flor blogs about his writing life and role as co-founder and director of the literary organization Pinoy Words Expressed Kultura Arts.

In honor of National Poetry Month, commit to memorizing one poem a week during April. Allow the experience of inhabiting each poem in this way feed your own poetry.

Archive April 2012

National Poetry Series Launches Spanish-Language Book Prize

Ross Gay, Michael Waters Judge Two New Book Contests

One Line

Hierarchy of Regret

Blast From the Past

Find the Unfamiliar

Tips From Vonnegut

Bob Flor: Pinoy Words Expressed

Commit It to Memory