P.H. Crosby: “A response to yet another story about school shooting, this time a story about law enforcement itself apparently frozen, seemingly incapable of acting, just as we as citizens seem incapable of taking the measures needed—and proven—to reduce gun violence.”
Devon Miller-Duggan: “After 25 years of teaching everything from a class on Fisher King mythology to comparative lit. surveys, I am finally (having at last gotten a book out) teaching creative writing, and for all the debates about whether it’s good for writers to teach writing and whether it can be taught at all, I just plain love it. That being said, my most recent ‘accomplishment’ is probably having gotten up in time to start the monastic day at 4:00 a.m. at Christ in the Desert, and having done the whole cycle, including singing antiphonally in Latin and weeding the hops field—all of which only added a layer of certainty to my conviction that I am about as unfit for a monastic life as it’s possible to be.”
Danusha Laméris: “I write because I am trying to get closer and closer to the marrow of it, whatever the It might be. I write to try and find order in chaos. And sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do.” (web)
“Curriculum Vitae” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by Rattle
Image: “Cold Sun” by Jeanne Wilkinson. “Curriculum Vitae” was written by Dante Di Stefano for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the artist, Jeanne Wilkinson: “I have many favorites in this group of poems. Some of my friends read also, all coming up with different choices, making me go back and read again, again, again; this was a very pleasurable problem. Several of the poems gave me goosebumps, but I kept coming back to one that made me shiver every time I read it, and still does. It’s ‘Curriculum Vitae’ and I love the mood, which seems to me infused with luminous sepia tones, matching the atmosphere of my photograph: bleak, lonely, but not without hope. Bottom line, this poet had me at Blake’s angel.”
Linda Kunhardt: “After the bee stung me, I had a strong sense of being secondary. I wanted to explore various aspects of alienation, as well as the interplay of physical and emotional pain.”
Francesca Bell: “As Stephen Dunn says, and as I tell my mother, the fact that something actually happened would be the very worst reason to write a poem about it.” (web)
Matthew King: “Like Stephen Dunn, I started writing poems to get girls to like me. (He says ‘that’s the glib answer,’ but it doesn’t sound glib to me.) All these years later, I’m still trying to write love poems, though where love is not of the kind that I’ve come to think of as a ‘narcissism of two,’ with lovers gazing upon themselves reflected in each other, but where it’s a shared, responsive reception of the being of things, from different perspectives, in which speaking and hearing lovers—whether together or apart—reciprocally, deepeningly, open themselves and the world to each other.” (web)