Tag: Deborah Miranda
It’s red, reflecting all our sunsets
Prompt: next time you’re at a meeting or professional event, write down the weirdest things your colleagues say. Using one of those phrases as a title, without permission, close the door or at least conceal your screen and write a poem when you should…
Poetry and the archives by the sea
A lot of poets write from research, and there are myriad ways to explain why. Just a few of the reasons, for me: because the past presses at me as a citizen and as a human being. Because my particular history–of my current region…
W&L Writers Resist
The work ahead of us is overwhelming, so how to prioritize? I’m watching my friends make various choices, and I respect all of them. Some have stepped up their political activism and local volunteerism. Others have turned off social media and are writing their…
Rebalancing hours and relineating Clifton
“How are you doing so much emotional work in September?” I demanded of my friend and office-hall-mate Deborah Miranda on Tuesday, after I’d read this. She’s an intermittent blogger, like me, but lately posts have been pouring through–here‘s another powerful story, from just this morning….
Elegy for a community reading series
Local honey It is 5:31 in Lexington a Monday after magnolia and before honeysuckle the second week of Spring Term’s sugar drip and I am driving the hospital road to Kroger in my dogwood-dirty Hyundai with green dents to pick up strawberries, lemonade, pre-sliced…
“Douchebag” and other rude, not-seasonally-festive epithets
The one time I tried to smoke a cigarette, my friends mocked me: “Cut that out. You look totally ridiculous.” By common consensus, I couldn’t pull off foul language either. I thought the problem might have been some crisp Englishness lingering in my elocution—my…
The Head-Space of Revision
One more day in NaPoWriMo. I’m wondering: could May be NaPoRe(vision)Mo, and June NaPoSub(mission)Mo? Not sure I’m capable of it—the next few weeks are about as busy with teaching, domestic stuff, committee work, and miscellaneous deadlines as they could possibly be—but I’ll try. One…
Poems including history
I asked Robert Sullivan at a recent reading about the role of history in his poems. He replied, “I’m making a genre argument that historians are, like poets, imaginative writers; that poetry is also well equipped for these conversations; and that the historical can…
