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. »

The Trials and Triumphs of Editing

Greetings from the Poetry department!

We’re coming to the end of what quickly became our largest submission cycle ever. To those of you still waiting for a response, I promise we are working as hard as we can…

It would be a lot easier if most of the submissions sucked. Unfortunately, you folks are pretty damn good poets.
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Lisa McCool-Grime

Lisa McCool-Grime loves to write alone about Sappho and wallflower women and to write collaboratively about anything. She loves to read everything (including tea leaves). Her wallflower women are or will be appearing in Splinter Generation, PANK, Solo Novo, Phantom Kangaroo, DIAGRAM, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere. Her collaborative work can be read at Poemeleon and elimae. Tupelo press awarded one of her poems first place in their Fragments of Sappho contest.. »

Q&A with Featured Poet Lisa McCool-Grime

“I wish that my relationship to my poetry was all skinny dipping and swashbuckling,”

“I’ve been amazed at how willing the Muse is to squeeze into a new mother’s chaotic schedule. There’s no time to sit around waiting for her arrival.”

“I would like my art at its core to be a statement of faith: faith in my own artistic impulses and faith in the capacity of humans to honor expressed creativity.”. »

Poems by Lisa McCool-Grime

Are You Kidding Me? Are You Kidding Me:

from BBC interviews with the Westboro Baptist
Church members under the ministry of Fred Phelps

The ultimate smash-mouth in-your-face insult
to God Almighty. He can’t help but lie about the scripture
every time he opens his mouth. No tears for queers.
Not one word falls to the ground, not one of. »