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In this event hosted by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, poet and biologist Brandon Kilbourne talks about the relationship between scientific inquiry and poetics which manifests in his debut poetry collection, Natural History (Graywolf Press, 2025), and reads a selection of poems. Kilbourne’s collection is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
According to a recent article in Psychology Today, while most people’s earliest memories are remembered like silent films—rich with imagery but largely void of sound—for a select few who have an auditory first memory, they may also have a “sound-minded” orientation in life, in which the “sensory modality of hearing is inseparable from their way of being.” This week, taking inspiration from these two possibilities, compose a pair of poems with contrasting takes on sound. Choose one childhood memory and write one sound-filled version and one silent version. Take some time to think about the various ways in which sound can be conveyed through stylistic decisions involving alliteration and consonance, typography and punctuation, and rhythm. How might line breaks and spacing on the page contribute to a sense of silence?
“I was little and lost / the season I learned to be still...” In this Charis Circle event, Donika Kelly reads poems from her new collection, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025), and speaks with Jericho Brown about family, home, and her writing process. Read a profile of Kelly by Brian Gresko in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The author of Bright Fear (Faber & Faber, 2023) and Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019) considers what it means to estrange a familiar motif in one’s writing.
In this 2023 Harvard Radcliffe Institute event, Gabrielle Calvocoressi reads from their collection The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and discusses the relationship between the vessel of the body and the vessel of the poem in a conversation with Claudia Rizzini. The New Economy is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In the introduction to John Berryman’s Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, forthcoming in December from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, editor Shane McCrae makes the case that Berryman’s The Dream Songs—a compilation of two books, 77 Dream Songs (FSG, 1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (FSG, 1968)—is an epic poem, pointing to its stylistic concision. “The language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem,” he writes, “and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression.” Another feature of epic poems is the presence of a hero, although McCrae notes that Berryman’s Henry is an “unheroic hero,” variably charming, gloomy, facetious, and colloquial. Begin composing a series of poems that contain these two elements of traditional epic poetry. How does your hero or antihero function to create a binding narrative?
“At a certain point, you just have to make that shift into the difficulty head-on. You have to hit it.” —Emily Wilson, author of Burnt Mountain
The author of Bright Fear (Faber & Faber, 2023) and Flèche(Faber & Faber, 2019) reflects on how queer traces in literature can open doorways of possibility.
Since 2016, Poets & Writers Magazine has showcased authors who have made their literary debuts after the age of fifty in our annual 5 Over 50 series. These are the fifty writers and books that have been celebrated in our pages.
Based in Grinnell, Iowa, and motivated by a mission to support reforestation, Green Linden Press publishes around six titles per year and donates a portion of its proceeds to environmental efforts.
