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Prompt: What You Missed In School

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Prompt: What You Missed In School

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All of us missed some things when we were in school. Maybe you are still in school. From kindergarten through graduate school, we all have been absent in body and mind sometimes, and other times you were there in body but not in mind. When I searched on "what you missed in school," I got more than 40,000 hits,

Thoughts on Winter

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Thoughts on Winter

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Although Henry David Thoreau wrote little poetry, I find his essays and journal to be inspirational. He advised in his journal that we should �Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.�I am a

Poem Inspires Oscar-nominated Animated Short Film

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Poem Inspires Oscar-nominated Animated Short Film

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With all the Oscar buzz this week, a nominated animated short film this year has a poetry connection. Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata's Academy Award Nomination for Best Animated Short with "Negative Space" is based on a poem of the same name by Ron Koertge.Ron's prose poem (flash fiction?) begins:My dad taught me to pack: lay out everything.

Prompt: Poems and Song Lyrics

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Prompt: Poems and Song Lyrics

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Having gone through high school in the late 1960s, several of the younger English teachers brought popular song lyrics into our poetry lessons to entice us beyond Keats, Frost and the rest of the anthology club.One of my teachers was a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, as was I. I still recall a lesson reading  "Richard Cory" by

Finding Poems in Prompts

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Finding Poems in Prompts

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Years ago, I was in a haiku workshop where the teacher gave us a find-a-word puzzle as a writing prompt and asked us to look it over and write down the first three words we saw. We were then to use each of those words in a different line of a haiku.Many writing prompts seem "artificial." You are

Stanley Kunitz's 'Touch Me' and Love in the Garden

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Stanley Kunitz's 'Touch Me' and Love in the Garden

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Our December prompt on pilgrims and pilgrimages talked about my own short journey to the garden of Stanley Kunitz and I want to his final poem from his Collected Poems.I was at the reading captured here on video at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held at Waterloo Village in New Jersey. There was an electricity that ran

Getting rid of social media, one at a time

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Getting rid of social media, one at a time

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After being on almost all major social networking sites from last thirteen years I realized it's been too long for such a thing. I first learned the idea of social networking sites in 2005 and it began with Orkut in it's golden days. Lots of groups and communities which shared tons of information, old time games and scarps

Prompt: Pilgrimages

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Prompt: Pilgrimages

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Canterbury Pilgrims by William Blake, 1808A pilgrim (from the Latin peregrinus) is a traveler. Literally, it is one who has come from afar and commonly it is someone who is on a journey to a holy place. Though we generally think of this as a physical journey, often on foot, to some place of special significance, it can

Who Reads Poetry?

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Who Reads Poetry?

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Who reads poetry? Poets read poetry. Students read, not always by choice, poetry they are assigned. Who are the other readers of poetry?Certainly, people get things from poetry that they don't get from reading novels, non-fiction and news.�It is difficultto get the news from poemsyet men die miserably every dayfor lackof what is found there.�That's what William Carlos

Review: Audio Technica M50x

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Review: Audio Technica M50x

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I usually don't write product reviews because I have a strange set or parameters that never meets most people's needs. However, this time I am writing one for Audio Technica M50X studio monitor headphones, which I have been using from last one month. I don't qualify as an audiophile, but I do have average understanding of music and

Getting Published

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Getting Published

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One of the perennial and difficult to answer questions that writers get in a Q&A is "How can I get published?"When I was in a week-long poetry workshop about 20 years ago with Tom Lux, I asked him that often-asked question. He said he always had a dozen poems "out there" at magazines and journals, and he had

National Book Awards in Poetry

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National Book Awards in Poetry

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The National Book Foundation have announced its winners of National Book Awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people�s literature. Each winner will be awarded $10,000, and each finalist will take home $1,000.For Poetry, the winnner is Frank Bidart for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 FINALISTSLeslie Harrison, The Book of Endings (University of Akron Press) Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (Graywolf

Poets Online Offline

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Poets Online Offline

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You may have noticed that the main Poets Online site went offline for the past 24 hours. This was due to server issues with our host. It is back, hopefully stable and complete.  This and the ending of the year is a good time for me to consider the future of the site in 2018.  More to follow... I may be