I have three poems featured in The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship, Volume 1, Winter 2020 Special Issue. These are three “letter poems” from my chapbook manuscript-in-progress: Letters from Spickert Knob. You can read the issue here – thenorthmeridianreview.org/past-issues
With experience as a writer comes certainty about clichés (and their exceptions). Don’t use ’em exclamation point period. These worn-out formulas add nothing to the writing. Setting aside characters like Hamlet’s Polonius who spout clichés as a way of demonstrating that very fact. Yet I have students in upper level...
I uploaded a remix today. My performance of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” with the addition of a new cello track. The trio features me on acoustic guitar/vocals, Andy Mosholder on cello, and Aaron Lambert on cahon/percussion. Andy, of Harper’s Ferry, VA, arranged the cello part. I’m grateful for my...
Here’s Major Jackson reading an amazing poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, “Negro Hero.” The reading is part of a series celebrating the 110th Anniversary of the Poetry Society of America.. Check out the series here: poetrysociety.org/features/reading-through-the-decades.
Here’s a track I forgot I had. Recorded a couple of years ago at TNT Studios in Louisville. Personnel: The Bourbon Sidecars with: Michael Jackman (acoustic, acoustic lead, vocal), Erich Stem (fiddle), and Tim Haertel (upright bass). Added some photos of pre-pandemic music life because I miss it so much....
I think poets should avoid certain kinds of titles. Particularly one-word titles such as, for example, “Claustrophobia” or “Illness.” Now, not all one-word titles are a problem. I mean the kind that explain or broadcast the poem’s “theme” to the reader. By “theme” in this case I don’t mean literary...
So many of my intro to creative writing students can’t get out of the habit of writing poems like papers, planning a “topic,” and outlining the “points” they want to make. They think of poems as “meanings” decorated with pretty, poetic language. No! The purpose of a poem is to...