Next Sunday, October 11, at 3 pm in picturesque Crockett, California, I’ll be a featured reader at the Valona Deli Second Sunday Poetry Series. Coordinator Connie Post kindly invited me. If you’re in the SF Bay Area and can make it, it would be wonderful to see you! There’s an open mic after the two featured readers, and a terrific jazz ensemble plays at 6 pm after the poetry. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and…
A great title gets us reading with a good title as a good first line. Or maybe just as hard — first lines also bear the full weight of the reader’s entry — and have at times despaired over that blank space where the title should go. When I wrote my article The Challenge of the Title, published by Avatar Review, essays on creating titles have proliferated, along with the need for titles because of…
Photo: Nadya Phillips, Venice 2015 In writing a novel or story a writer gives lots of thought to what happened to the main character before she or he arrived at the beginning of the tale, but have we considered where she goes after the ending? If you’re contemplating a sequel or a series, it’s a natural question. But how to begin to answer? J.K. Rowling planned not only her characters’ arcs, but their futures beyond…
Can writing poetry ever pay enough? And do we need it to? For those of us taking advantage of the fall season to submit work to recently opened journals, there’s a new way to see if any on your target list pay for poems. Most print journal do pay, but only in copies. For online published poems, my stipend is merely the exposure to readers. But why not get at least a monetary token of…
“Hope is the thing with feathers” led me in an interesting direction: a series of poems with birds in them. Inspired in part by Emily Dickinson’s interest in birds and her many bird poems–which I found collected in a book called A Spicing of Birds –I wrote a series to decipher the messages I hear in the silver clamor of morning and evening birdsong. One poem, “Year Year I First Heard Birdsong”, found its way…
I thought of Bernini as a mage and master — a magician and a master of sculpture — long before I saw the title of the article. As I worked on my novel, The Renaissance Club I studied the great Gianlorenzo Bernini and his works. Bernini plays a leading role in my story, along with a young art historian who worships the 17th century artist. I looked at many still images and videos of his work,…
I’m absolutely thrilled to have my poem “Sapphics with Little Rags and Cabbage” appear in the new anthology edited by Annie Finch and Alexandra Oliver, Measure for Measure. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015, the collection is a wonderful way to study the fine points of meter through examples. Annie and Alexandra have organized it by metrical type and added notes on the different meter, which should make it a great way to learn…
What is magical realism in poetry? Possibly it’s defined by what isn’t magical realism in a poem. One might ask what is magical realism in fiction, but in poetry, in a poem, it’s what both is and isn’t. It’s the magical field created around ordinary images with ordinary language. The establishing of an entire field outside of, and at the same time, inside what we call reality. A great example of a magical realism poem…
The Poetry of Magical Where things just happen. The blue-beaked parrot lands on the hummingbird feeder that dangles from your ear and begins singing like Pharrell Williams— a voice that drops veils of gauze
I’m working on a series of scenes in my novel about the great Renaissance sculptor Bernini and his mistress, Costanza, wife of one of his assistants in Bernini’s busy sculpture studio. Bernini had his servant slash Costanza’s lovely face after discovering she had slept with his brother. I found it hard to get into the mind of a character who could do such a thing, so I delved into the story of Costanza and the…