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To write their latest book, People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press, 2025), Tom Comitta used data compiled from a specially designed national public opinion poll on literary preference and composed two novels: a formulaic, fast-paced thriller and an experimental epistolary sci-fi romance with elderly aristocratic tennis players as protagonists. Responses to the poll included preferences and aversions to attributes such as characters’ identities, genre, verb tense, setting, and point of view. Taking a cue from this project, jot down a brief list of what you would guess to be the most and least desired attributes of poetry, including rhyme, length, diction, and imagery. Write a “Most Wanted Poem” and “Most Unwanted Poem” based on your list. How do your own idiosyncrasies and thoughts around literary taste infiltrate each piece?
The author of Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025) encourages writers to consider how music albums are introduced as they craft the beginning of poetry collections.
CD Eskilson celebrates the release of their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), in this reading and conversation with poets Ashia Ajani and Preeti Vangani at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.
The poems in Charity E. Yoro’s debut collection, Ten-cent Flower & Other Territories (First Matter Press, 2023), largely circle around the political history and her personal experience of the Hawaiʻian islands. Her poem “postcard from rome” takes on the feeling of a postcard that arrives unexpectedly in the mail—a surprising and sudden intrusion of an exotic locale. This week, write a poem titled “Postcard From…” and think back to your memories of visiting a new place. Try to reach far from what’s currently at the forefront of your mind, as well as the themes and topics you typically explore in your poetry. Allow this poem to drop in to your current body of writing like a short, evocative glimpse of another time and place—a gentle disruption to your usual flow.
In this Button Poetry video filmed at SubText Books in Saint Paul, Danez Smith reads their poem “Dede was the last person i came out to,” which appears in their fourth collection, Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024).
Writer and translator Elizabeth T. Gray considers the craft of integrating foreign objects into poetry.
In this video, Heid E. Erdrich reads from her collections Verb Animate: Poetry and Prompts From Collaborative Acts (Trio House Press, 2024) and Little Big Bully (Penguin Books, 2020), and answers questions about hope, memories, and revision for this Jensen Lecture Series event hosted by Western Oregon University.
