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Craft Essays

Long-form essays on craft — endings, beginnings, revision, voice, and tradition.

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Endings Beginnings Revision Rhythm Imagery Voice Titling Line break Submission craft Tradition Reading as craft Other

3 essays

Imagery

The clichéd and the fresh image

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.

7 min read

Imagery

Metaphor as discovery

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.

7 min read

Imagery

Imagery that does work

When an image earns its place in a poem, and when it is doing only what abstraction could do faster.

5 min read