2021. Welcome. I keep checking out my window to make sure nothing is sneaking up on us, Mad Max style. It’s Day 1. So far, so good. Marking the New Year is supposed to be about resolutions. As writers, resolutions are easy to make and a bear to keep. The Muse is fickle, and despite our best intentions, likes to desert us just when we need inspiration the most. Knowing that makes beating her/him/they at…
One thing we see a lot of here at Gyroscope Review is a good poem—that suddenly goes wrong. In their haste to put a tidy bow at the end of the poem, the poet wraps it up with a cliché. Instead of ending strong and leaving the reader to marvel at the deft wording, the poet tries to evoke the emotion they want us to feel with a stock image/phrase. It doesn’t work. The reader…
Although I’ve been writing poetry as best I can of late, I felt my output wasn’t where it should be. The state of the world had me flummoxed. My poems were scattered in theme and many felt unfinished even when completed— a sort of bookish throat-clearing that happens periodically as I flail about, searching. I needed to move out of the ‘any half-assed written down poem is a good thing’ mentality. As a way of…
The last two times on the Gyroscope Blog, I talked about listening vs. performing poetry. Here’s one last thought on that topic, more along the lines of reading vs performing poetry. Billy Collins. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed Collins’ poems until I started listening to his CD “Live”. I didn’t come to appreciate it until I was into about the tenth listening while driving across the barren Wyoming plains week after week. About…
