Ten Questions for Raquel Gutiérrez
“You have to learn to write when you don’t feel like it.” —Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Southwest Reconstruction
Tags:
Genre: Poetry
The Long and Rolling Line
The author of Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025) considers the lineage of his own loping lines and encourages poets to try them.
Tags:
Perhaps the World Ends Here
Caption:
“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” In this video that originally aired in 2012, poet Joy Harjo reads her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” which appears in her collection The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Norton, 1994), for PBS NewsHour.
Genre:
Unnatural Habitat
Write a poem that begins with the image of an animal arriving where it should not be, such as a whale in an office space or a Zebra in a suburban backyard. Allow this surreal scene to take you to unexpected places and metaphors. Is the animal an omen or is it concealing a secret? Focus on the literal and symbolic dimensions of the encounter, drawing out the scene to illuminate overlooked truths, inner stirrings, and the quiet absurdities of the world around you.
Plotting Form Ahead of Time
The author of Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025) considers the benefits of planning elements of a poem before its composition.
Tags:
Margaret Atwood on 60 Minutes
Caption:
In this 60 Minutes interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about her response to book banning, her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025), and why she says the popularity of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is “not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly the twists and turns of history.”
When Objects Dream
In “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a new survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among the many works on display are over fifty of the artist’s “rayographs,” photograms made in the early twentieth century by placing objects on or near light-sensitive photo paper that is then exposed to create dramatically silhouetted images with high contrast. In these works, everyday objects—a comb, bottle, lightbulb, eggbeater, key, and wrench—become defamiliarized through Man Ray’s manipulation of placement and movement, capturing what poet Tristan Tzara described as the moment “when objects dream.” Browse through some of the rayographs and select one image that particularly resonates with you. Compose a poem that imagines the dreams in your chosen image. In your deciphering of the objects, ask yourself what do they dream?
Ten Questions for Devon Walker-Figueroa
“It can take days, months, years for me to know when notes pass into the arena of poem or story.” —Devon Walker Figueroa, author of Lazarus Species
Tags:
Harryette Mullen: Regaining Consciousness
Caption:
In this event hosted by City Lights Bookstore, Harryette Mullen reads from her latest poetry collection, Regaining Consciousness (Graywolf Press, 2025), and talks about how her poetics remain playful even in the face of disaster in a conversation with Tonya M. Foster.
Genre:
Catching the “Chune”
The author of Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025) reflects on the practice of poetry as one of both composition and listening.
Tags:
Pages
