“When you like a woman, / you talk and talk. / One night you kiss. / Another night you fuck.” “After their tumult, as they quieted, / She breathed into his ear / The tunes she loved to sing.” “When love empties itself out, / it fills our bodies full. / For an hour we…

At my local yarn shop, we were sitting on the couches talking about what knitting means in our lives. As the conversation revved up, with everyone tossing out comments about how knitting can be at once meditative, creative, solitary, and communal, one knitter threw in, “It’s like we all have a yarn to share.” As…

When I first began to think of myself as a writer, a few decades ago, I’d type onto file cards the wisdom of writers I wanted to emulate and thumbtack the cards to the bulletin board above my desk. I had several lines about the writer’s vocation by Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton. But the…

As I was biking today, a squirrel ran across the road with a big nut in its mouth. Squirreling it away, I thought. Then I thought: sign of autumn. Then I thought: that means packing up for Tucson. Which means (I sighed to myself) leaving behind my shelves of poetry books for five months. I’m…

When I first heard of T.S. Poetry Press, I assumed that the T.S. was drawn from Eliot fame. But a visit to their website corrected my impression. Behind the Press’s founding was a game started by some inventive poets called “tweetspeak.” It’s a “Twitter poetry party,” a one-hour bash where everyone tweets a 140-character poem…

Part of the delight of preparing my new course on Poetry as a Spiritual Practice for the Glen Online has been returning to some favorite interviews with poets in past issues of Image. I enjoy reading what contemporary poets have to say about their art almost as much as I enjoy reading their poems. I love, for…

My husband and I are in a flurry of dealing with the “stuff” in our lives. Had to replace the old stove, then the broken couch. Then discovered that the old table lamps next to the old couch were too low for the higher replacement couch…so off we went to shop for new lamps. And…

Say the word “Muslim” these days, especially “American Muslim,” and many people get jittery. The antidote to this jitteriness, I’m convinced, is to get to know lots of American Muslims, in all their variety, all their individualities. And there’s no better place to start—or to continue—than by reading Kazim Ali’s new book, Fasting for Ramadan.…

We know her simply as “Maureen.” She has become a treasured member of the Good Letters community with her frequent and always thoughtful comments on our posts. But now we can know her further: through her own poetry, recently collected in the volume Neruda’s Memoirs. Now, too, we meet her by her full name: Maureen…

I shouldn’t admit this, but my introduction to tweeting was the eighteen-day Egyptian revolution. Of course, I’d heard of Twitter, but had dismissed it as of no interest to me. Yet, as with so many of my disdainful preconceptions, experience forced me to change my view. As I surfed TV channels and internet news sites…