News & Poems

Writing a poem is unpredictable. A poem may be delivered by the muse to receptive ears within hours. These are a gift! Another poem may take decades to complete. Once completed, a poem's destiny is uncertain; it may never be heard by anyone other than the poet's sleepy cat or tolerant friends. Very few poets attain such stature that they have a ready audience for their work.  

Journalists, on the other hand, usually work quickly and know their work will be widely read. Their stories are archived.

Mary Akers, editor of r.kv.r.y. quarterly, invited journalist Matt Weiser and me to have a conversation about the processes of writing news and poems. Click here to read the exchange. Mary has a field for comments if you want to weigh in.

Eliza Griswold is a contemporary poet and journalist.

"Blue without boundary"

An excerpt from "Cells of Solitude," just out in r.kv.r.y.

7. With journals as portable studios, we make things and make up things. We strive to make up to the world for our limits, each new creation–poem or painting–another hat tossed into the ring of the attempt to understand the depth and breadth of the human condition.8. By studying what happens when the sound of a jet disrupts their chorus, biologists learned that the songs of spade foot frogs form a musical camouflage that protects them from predators.9. Each person’s poem or picture enters a biophony of interrelated soundscape across time and space, like Yeats’ song of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;/There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,/And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”10. Art is our ant farm, our honeycomb, labyrinth, the anthology of infinite pages; each poem is a rain drop on its way to an ocean.