BOA Blog

In a recent interview with Matthew Guenette for Southern Indiana Review, poet Michael Waters discussed his own stylistic progression and some of the factors that he feels influence his writing. When asked about the evolution of his own aesthetic, Waters stressed that structurally, he has moved from loose free verse to a style that centers "more and more on the integrity of the line... One reason I haven't attempted much prose fiction is that the sentence as an integral unit interests me much less than the line does." The line, Waters continues, is an essential, complete component of the poem,...

"Have you noticed how clean and glistening the cobblestones are after the rain? Real works of art! And flowers? No words can describe them. One can only exclaim “AH!” in admiration. You must learn to understand the ‘AH!” of things.” --Matsuo Basho [caption id="attachment_1786" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="author photo courtesy of jacketmagazine.com"][/caption] In the writings of 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, poetry exists as  a process of recognition and transformation: of Oku no Hosomichi, "the narrow path to the interior" that is accessed through the subtle, delicate experiences rooting us to the present. No better exploration of these experiences can...

[caption id="attachment_1778" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="author photo courtesy of citylightspodcast.com"][/caption] Together with renowned poets Jane Hirshfield and Mira Rosenthal,  Litany for the City author Ryan Teitman participated in a Live! From City Lights poetry reading this past April, and the podcast is now available and ready for your ears! Litany for the City was selected as the winner of the 10th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from over 600 manuscripts by Hirshfield herself, who has written six previous collections of poetry and has been celebrated by the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the...

author photo courtesy of blog.pshares.org In a recent interview that goes straight to the heart, Wendy Mnookin (author of What He Took, The Moon Makes its Own Plea, and To Get Here, etc.) and Patricia Caspers of Ploughshares Literary Magazine, are bound by a unique and unfortunate commonality: both of their fathers were killed in car accidents. Caspers says she first came to this realization when hearing Mnookin read her poetry at AWP, and while the details and circumstances surrounding their fathers' deaths are very different, they both share a similar (ongoing and insatiable) impulse to reflect on, analyze, and...

photo courtesy of loft.org Anyone in or heading out to the Midwest this weekend? Your leading "must-go-to" event is a sensational reading by three-time Minnesota Book Award winner and BOA poet Barton Sutter, a FREE event open to the public, as he shares from his new book The Reindeer Camps and Other Poems. The Reindeer Camps has been said to "restore your faith in the drumbeat of your own heart" by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and has been called by the late Bill Holm "unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before." There to compliment the readings of Sutter's...