Poets & Writers Theater

“I became interested in Black poets writing about the animal as the result of my own work,” says Joy Priest at the beginning of her virtual craft talk titled “The Black Poet & the Deer: On the Transpositional Phenomena of the Line” for the Vermont Studio Center. Priest is the author of Horsepower (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and was a featured guest writer for Craft Capsules, a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing.

“When you’re looking at the transitions in your own poetry, one of the things to do is feel as you’re reading over your poem, ‘Am I bored? Do I feel lectured at?’” says Jane Hirshfield in this video from a 2011 Poets House event. “Take out some of the transitions. Allow more mystery. Allow things to stand on their own two feet.” Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including her most recent collection, Ledger (Knopf, 2020).

In this video for Poets House, Carl Phillips, whose most recent poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, was published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reflects on his process for putting a book together, as well as his journey as a poet, teacher, and mentor. 

“Maybe every talk about poetry is a defense of poetry,” says Tony Hoagland in this 2011 Chicago Ideas Week talk at the Poetry Foundation on the mind of a poet and how poets explain the world. Hoagland, the author of eight books of poetry and a recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, died on October 23 at the age of sixty-four.

In a craft talk at the Center for Fiction in New York City, A. M. Homes discusses the value of having a writing routine, how she approaches novels and short stories differently, and her fascination with Barbie. Homes is the author of Days of Awe (Viking, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Carl Phillips gives a craft talk on poems by Thom Gunn, francine j. harris, and Louise Glück at the 2017 Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Phillips’s most recent poetry collection, Wild Is the Wind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), is featured in Page One in the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"Number 1: Don't write what you know. Start with what you don't know, what you don't understand." In her craft talk at the 2012 Colgate Writers' Conference, novelist Dana Spiotta explains how she wrote Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011) in six (not-so-easy) steps. Her new novel, Innocents and Others (Scribner, 2016), explores a friendship between two female filmmakers.