krissie

***Tips For the Novice (and otherwise) - Editing*** The blanket statement, "Editing/revision harms poetry," is simply wrong.  It's akin to a photographer claiming that focusing the lens ruins the emotion of the photograph.  It is the details, and the appropriate attention paid to them, that separate a photograph from a snapshot.  Imagine a film maker slapping every frame he shot up on the screen without editing for continuity, for pacing, for effect.  What a disaster.  That is not to say that editing can't be destructive - there is such a thing as poor editing, just as there is poor writing.  But done correctly, done well, it is one of the m

______________________________ She has become one remarkable appendage. Among the slop of barstools we were introduced; had her pulse, perhaps, become any sadder I'd have thought her a reptile. "But this is about mammals," slunk from me, suppressed by the stature of my sweating tumbler; and I boiled to beat my extinction out the door, then very swaggered, watched a swallowtail swirl on the landing of an arid alleyway to tatter its wings, so pasted to a piece of warm gum. "A correct assessment, butterfly." "But this is about mammals." * Though I wish, I am not exempt from interaction. I've been writing about her for mo

. I met her in daylight, when I was still a young man. She was nine years of drought; nine years of strawberries the size of dimes.   A kitten was slumped over her shoulder and she wore him like a mink stole, she wore him out like a blue collar in the yard. I saw the patience of her church steeple brow; the way she stretched honey across our fence for the ants.           They would have found their way home         anyways; ants always do.  They don't leave the hill         with carpetbags and hope someday the place their parents turn         in graves won't be the place they rest their heads.    I would have kissed her when

. The first time I went to jail, I remember waiting in line.   I worked in the laundry, stirring orange jumpsuits and white sheets in cauldrons.  The colors of a flightless bird. I read the bible in the library and memorized the first three words of every chapter. And when     Bellow, a black man from St. Louis, traded me a carton of cigarettes to read a letter from his daughter,     I made up the words so he would never know how little she cared that he was dying a young man.  How little she knew at all. Jack and I always sat in the first pew at Chapel.  I'm not a Christian, or anything, but it's nice when somebody