Poets & Writers Magazine

Usually when I get stuck, it is because I’ve gone too long without being able to hear myself. Sometimes that happens because my job (the best part of it) requires me to listen closely to others—my students, my colleagues, my teachers—and it takes work, hard work, to turn one’s attention both inside and outside, to face at least two directions at once. Sometimes my mind is too full of the din of other people to know what I might think. Sometimes I can’t hear myself because I’m avoiding myself.

Scientific studies on vision have demonstrated that rates of myopia, or shortsightedness, have been rising, to the extent that within the next twenty-five years, half of the population of the world will be myopic.

“The mosquito knows full well, small as he is / he’s a beast of prey,” writes D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 poem “The Mosquito Knows,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. “But after all / he only takes his bellyful, / he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.” In this five-line verse, Lawrence presents a pithy portrait of an insect and then points the mirror at human behavior, the mosquito becoming a more sympathetic figure when pitted against human greed.

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Fatimah Asghar, whose poetry collection Daughter of the Mountains is out today from One World. “oh, i always love / where we left the most, the place that begs / to be remembered,” Asghar muses. Across Daughter of the Mountains, they grapple with love, loss, lineage, and searching for a place in the world when you are very far away from the family and land that were once home.

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 275. When I started collecting weekly notebook entries from my graduate poetry students, I noticed that this writing was more compelling, alive, less “written” than the poems they had been submitting.

As a literary agent, I’m often asked what I look for in a book. Over the years, I’ve realized the answer isn’t so different from what I look for as a reader. I want to feel compelled to keep turning pages. I want to stay up too late, promising myself “just one more chapter,” only to realize I can’t put the book down. Recently, I’ve come to understand that this feeling is rooted in curiosity. The books that stay with me—be they fiction or nonfiction—are the ones that continuously pose questions.

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, whose novel, Bone Horn, is out today from Soft Skull. “If you had a horn, where would you keep it? Where in your life would someone find a record of it? An email to a plastic surgeon? In a message to a friend?” These are the questions the narrator, a newly registered private investigator in dire straits, must ask herself. She has just received a mysterious call from an anonymous client who is convinced that Alice B.

“Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free.

As climate collapse transforms our experiences of the natural world, researchers are sounding the alarm that smells and scents will become extinct alongside changes in plant biodioversity, weather-related phenomena, and the evolution of the world’s landscapes of man-made structures.

When my daughter was small, I found very little time for my writing and began to rely on residencies in focused bursts. When I told this to Alice Notley, a key mother-poet in my life, she scolded me and said I should touch in with my work every day, even if for a few minutes.