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Long-form essays on craft — endings, beginnings, revision, voice, and tradition.
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11 essays
Imagery
An editorial reading of inherited phrasing — the cliché test, the dignity of avoiding the obvious without trying to be clever, and how working poets renew stock images.
Voice
An editorial look at voice not as a pose to adopt but as what accumulates when a writer pays sustained attention to a particular set of things over years.
Imagery
An editorial reading of metaphor not as ornament but as the means by which a poem finds out what it actually means — Frost, Lakoff, and a working test.
Endings
An editorial reading of endings — the difference between a poem that concludes and a poem that stops, and what makes the last line worth waiting for.