Tag Archive
Experiments in Revision, Final Reflections
by Niki Selken
You know how it feels to write or make a first draft of something, then rework it until it shines like the top of Chrysler Building? You know how you kind of want to burn that first draft, so that no one will ever know the embarrassing wreckage of over-obvious, trite, and self-indulgent. »
Experiments in Revision, Part 4
Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
Synthesis: This is not so much an act of combining as it is an act of harmonizing. Which parts of the previous drafts have shown themselves to be extraneous and unnecessary? Which parts augment and support one another? What is the best flow for these remaining moments? What connective tissue must. »
Experiments in Revision, Part 3
Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
In this series we have thus far presented a long, action-loaded rough draft and then a total scrap-and-revise, tanka-inspired revision. This week’s installment is a list poem—a sister-shadow poem heavy with nouns; a counterpoint to the verb-heavy first draft. Here Niki Selken makes a descriptive list of things her narrator encountered. »
Experiments in Revision, Part 2
Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
Tanka is a Japanese form that can be roughly approximated in English with five lines using a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. When I first began working with it, I found it to be an amazingly tidy container for difficult to contain emotions. So in reading Niki’s first draft, I immediately thought of. »
Experiments in Revision, Part 1
Lisa McCool-Grime
Senior Poetry Editor
In 2007, I was visiting my friend Owen at his art show: portraits on the grandest scale done in aerosol on 8′ x 8′ panels. It was the last hour of the last day of the Durham Art Walk in North Carolina. When all of the passers by stopped passing by, I. »
Features
Poems by Jake Sheff
Inner villanelle of a father-to-be without his Xanax
Father-to-be, you are not a villain.
Hell, black bile does not blackball from mating.
But you know, they’ll be your children. »
Call for Interviews: DO Talk to Strangers
The Splinter Generation is now accepting submissions of interviews with people you wouldn’t ever talk to. Find someone you wouldn’t ordinarily meet, or someone you disagree with on almost everything and have dinner, or a drink, or an email exchange. Record it, transcribe it, edit it down, and send it in.
Why? Remember when you were. »
Poems by Lauren Schmidt
Her Name is Sarah
When Randy drifted in for dinner with her baby
tangled in the rosary scars of her arms,
pressed against the dust of her breast,
everyone wanted to see. They softened
their eyes, their smiles, the way people do
when they look on a baby sleeping,
a baby who has not cried in two days,
a baby whose eyes ooze. »
Megan Hildebrandt Talks Art, Humor, and Cancer at 25
Being diagnosed with cancer and experiencing chemotherapy at age 25 dramatically changed the priorities and course of my work. Prior to this illness, I made narrative-based images about local history and my neighbors. Now, the stories in the work have emerged directly from my own body and memory, and the history is my own. »