What is your process of creating a poem?

Big Think has a series of videos available online from an interview with Edward Hirsch, Poet and President Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The one above discusses the process of creating a poem. Other videos discuss the space and survival of poetry, whether the MFA hurts of helps poetry, if we are generating more poets than the system can absorb, as well as Hirsch's emphatic belief that what you really need to be a poet is to read poetry and read deeply. That you need not read everything but that you find that which you care about.

What the Editors Are Reading

We read all the time. When it comes to submissions to the magazine, we only read certain months of the year (see website), but on a day to day basis, the editors are constantly reading published work. Some of it's new, some of it's classic, some fiction, some theory, some poetry and some of it blogs.

Here's what we're reading in this month:

• Emily Hamilton and other writings by Sukey Vickery, with an introduction and notes by Scott Slawinski -- a recovered 1803 epistolary novel by an early American author
  
• Werewolves in Their Youth, short stories by Michael Chabon
• Patricia Hampl's memoir The Florist's Daughter
  
• Wallace Stegner's collection of essays Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
  

Blogs of note:

• Ward Six -- always thoughtful; the February 1 post "Throwing in the Towel" approaches an issue similar to intern Nathan Norton's blog post here about revisions and knowing when you're done, only on Ward Six, we approach the discussion of when to give up.
• Rarely Likable -- a particular favorite are the "linkbucket" posts on this blog. The linkbuckets provide readers with direct access to more interesting material than could possibly be read in one sitting ... but that won't stop you from wanting to try.