Reading Roundup, September 2025

I want to start this post with a few words about reading at Bookends in Pontotoc, Mississipp last Saturday, my last reading of September. It was a busy month with the Mississippi Book Festival and another trip to Jackson to meet a class at Millsaps and read to the MUW Alumni Association. Read on to hear what it’s like to read in a small-town Mississippi Bookstore and learn more about my next reading in Vicksburg on Oct. 4.

It was a beautiful fall day, which meant I had a lovely drive through back roads of Mississippi to get from Columbus to Pontotoc. Alt 45 from West Point, up Hwy 245 to Ocolona, then 41 through Troy to the west side of Pontotoc, if you want to know my route. There were goldenrod blooming in the ditches and fields. The leaves haven’t started to turn (this is the South, after all), but the sun was golden and the sky was a clear blue.

I got to town a little early, not wanting to cut it too close since I haven’t been to Bookends before. That gave me a chance to drive by Pontotoc’s lovely farmer’s market that was just about to close up shop. I didn’t stop to look for anything, since I’d already shopped the Hitching Lot Farmer’s Market in Columbus and anything I got would have to sit in a hot car for a couple of hours. I parked by the store and even had enough time to walk down Main street a bit, where I saw a couple of antique stores, boutiques, restaurants, and the Pontotoc Community Theatre. It would be worth going back to explore when I have a little more time.

Bookends is a lovely little bookstore with two levels of books. I didn’t get a chance to explore all that much, since my signing was set to start at 11 when they opened, but I did see their display of local and Mississippi authors featuring my book, Gerry Wilson, and Robert Busby.

They had me set up at a table with a table cloth made out of pages cut from a book. A little boy ,who came to the store with his mother, asked if those were pages from my book, but I assured him they weren’t. His mother had seen me at Possumtown Book Fest and came by to say hi and to get her copy of Attached to the Living World signed. I’d already signed Tree Fall with Birdsong for her back in August. She and her son and daughter didn’t stay for the reading, though I imagine that would have been a challenge for the youngsters. Maybe next time, when we’re all a little older!

There was a small crowd for the reading: a local woman who’s working on a book of fiction or nonfiction, another local woman (I think) who said she saw my post on Instagram that morning, a young guy who was maybe in college or just out of collete, one of the owners and her husband and the young woman behind the cash register.

This was about what I expected, and in fact, I was pretty pleased to have that many people come out on a Saturday morning in a town of about 5,000 to listen to a poet they don’t know. We had a good conversation both before and after the reading.

The woman writing a book wanted to talk about her book and her writing process, which was fine. She’s doing many of the right things, like interviewing women from her church to get more background on the stories she wants to tell. I suggested she might want to give them copies of what she wrote down, so they would have those stories for their families if they want them. She’ll likely not use the actual stories, but draw on elements from several of them and combine them in new ways to create a fictional past that is reflective of the actual past. It seems like she has a lot to work with, both from her own history and the ones she’s researching.

We also talked a fair amount about working with lines in poetry and what I’m trying to do in the poems I read. And there was interest in The W’s low-residency MFA program, so I was glad I brought along a few brochures.

You never know where a small and intimate reading like this might lead, whether that is someone who gets interested in your writing program, or who thinks about buying one of your other books, or who tells someone else about the reading, maybe shares a poem or gets another copy for someone as a gift. The point, as I said on Saturday, is to get the poems out in the air where they can live and breathe, and where they can take on a life of their own.

I’ll also be happy if these folks become customers of Bookends and maybe send some of their friends that way. I do readings, not just to sell books, but to support local bookstores and develop community, which is one of the reasons the two sisters who opened Bookends decided to open up their store. Both were having a bit of a rough week, with some health issues for a family member, so they couldn’t both be there. I’m sorry about that and hope things will be getting better for them soon!

Next Saturday, October 4, I’ll be in Vicksburg for a reading at 1pm at the Old Courthouse Museum. I have a feeling that’s a pretty big space, so I hope we get a few more people to come out, though I’m always happy to read, whether there is 1 or 100 in the audience. I’m happier if there’s more than one, but I’ve done a reading when it was essentially the bookstore owner, one friend, and some of my own family who were in the room, so I’m not lying when I say I’ll read no matter the size of the crowd! Thanks to Lorelei Books of Vicksburg who helped to organize this. There’s a Bicentennial Flea Market going on that day, so hopefully that will draw plenty of people and a few will be curious enough to see what a poet has to say!

I’m only sorry that I won’t be reading at the bookstore, though reading at the museum is a much better choice for this day. Lorelei Books has a wonderful space for readings and they are such gracious hosts. I still fonly remember my reading there when Barrier Island Suite came out, so I’m very glad I get to go back. I will definitely stop by the store at some point next Saturday to see how it looks these days, though Lorelei will also have a booth at the Flea Market, so I’ll spend some time there, as well. Stop by and see me at the booth, and if you can stick around for the reading at 1, that would be wonderful!

And if I don’t see you in Vicksburg, maybe I’ll see you at the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium or at another bookstore near you!

Recent Developments on AI for Writers

No, I’m not talking about the newest ways writers can use AI (just don’t, if you ask me), but rather on the latest developments for writers whose work has been or could be used for AI training, including for me. That was too long for a title, though, so apologies if you came here looking for some other news.

I recently signed my first-ever AI opt-in addendum with Bloomsbury for the eventuality that they negotiate a deal or deals to use A Writer’s Craft in AI training. I was a little surprised to get this, and didn’t have a lot of time to consider it, but fortunately, I’ve been aware of what’s going on enough that I could make my decision. This doesn’t mean that my textbook will be used for AI training, but if does mean that my publisher can negotiate subsidiary rights to do that. Likely, this would be one on behalf of all their titles or at least a subset of their titles that the AI company is interested in. Bloomsbury also made it clear that opting in would likely make your title more accessible to AI search and other uses of AI that would make it more visibile in the future.

But why would I opt in if I’m opposed to AI? I will say that I’m not 100% opposed to its use for things like research where it could be very helpful. I am opposed to creative writers relying on it, though. And I’m opposed to the current AI engines because they have been trained on databases of pirated texts. I don’t trust AI, but I also don’t think they should be making billions when they have essentially stolen the content they used to get where they are.

Licensing agreements are one way that authors can get paid for the use of their work. They are also a way for publishers to enforce certain restrictions about how the work can be used, so that it can’t be used to create a competing work, for instance. Because licensing could lead to some income for writers and because it can also lead to some protections for writers and publishers, I support it. The opt-in addendum only means that my book will be considered for this, but it’s a starting point.

The Author’s Guild has advocated for these kinds of agreements, and I can see why, collectively, they see them as the best legal means to protect authors’ rights going forward. They have also been involved in lawsuits with AI companies, and have recently reported a settlement agreement with Anthropic where each author whose work appeared in the pirated databases they used would be paid $3000 compensation per title.

Oddly enough, this could affect me as well. This summer, I was surprised to learn that my third poetry collection Barrier Island Suite was included in one of the pirated databases they used. I suppose I shouldn’t have been, since a Google alert I have on myself had periodically turned up links to pirated copies of the book. I initially alerted my publisher, though I don’t know that they ever did anything about it.

Whether I’ll ever see my $3000 remains to be seen (probably minus legal fees, etc, so it might end up buying me a sixpack or two if I get it). That will depend on whether it is determined that my title was one of those actually used. A while back I reported it as one that appears on a list of titles in the database, but I don’t know more than that. It also depends on whether my publisher ever registered the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office, which I believe they were supposed to do, but some publishers rely on only registering the ISBN and listing a copyright notice in the book. So if Texas Review Press didn’t dot all its i’s and cross all its t’s, I could be out that money. Or my contract may specify that only a portion of subsidiary rights goes to me, and I might not see much, if anything.

Still, it’s gratifying to know that some writers are getting compensation from at least one company. And it’s likely more settlements will follow. $3000 per title may seem like a pittance, but with the sheer number of titles included in these databases, which could number in the millions, the payout would be astronomical. Not all titles will meet the criteria for being included, though. Books must have an ISBN or ASIN have been registered with the copyright office in time, and it’s estimated that about 500,000 will qualify. The total payout is reported to be $1.5 billion.

There are, of course, many other AI companies, but hopefully this settlement will set a precedent that authors and publishers need to be paid for the use of their work. I don’t expect to get rich off of selling AI training rights to my work, but I also don’t like to see companies get rich by stealing access to the words and ideas of human writers, especially when they have been stealing that access in order to train a technology that could make our words less valuable.

I personally don’t believe that project will be completely successful, since I believe in the value of human expression over AI-generated expression. But writers will be in competition with AI for the attention of readers, some of whom might be satisfied with the predicatable and formulaic output of a machine as opposed to the often messy, unpredictable writing the emanates from the human experience.

Where in the World Is A Writer’s Craft?

This semester, I am on sabbatical, working on revisions to A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing that will become the second edition. My manuscript is due to Bloomsbury on January 15, so I need to stick to my schedule, but I’ve had a good week of writing (even though Labor Day cut it short), so this morning I got a little distracted.

This week a student wrote me out of the blue with a question about the book, which he’s using for a class at a school in Minnesota. Maybe that’s what led me to search on the book, or that led me to a post I wrote several years ago about a review on a site that no longer exists and that led me to search for more reviews. In any case, when I searched on the book title and my name, a lot of hits came up, mostly to my site or to Amazon.

But as I scrolled through the list, I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Many of the links were to eBay, which wasn’t surprising, but looking closer, I noticed these were eBay listings from different countries, as identified by the address: ebay.ie or ebay.uk, etc. Ireland and the United Kingdom, even Australia, were hardly surprising, since my publisher is Bloomsbury, and before that was Macmillan International Higher Ed. (The imprint is Red Globe Press, which got sold to Bloomsbury a few years back.)

I’ve known that the book is sold internationally, and that the UK, Australia, and New Zealand were part of their distribution. What was more interesting was to see copies showing up on eBay in Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, and France, even Germany, Finland, and several Slavic and Eastern European countries. What this tells me is that there are copies in these countries that have been purchased and are now being sold used, which would suggest that the textbook has been adopted beyond the English-speaking world.

That’s interesting for me to know as I dig into revisions of the book for the next edition. I’ve been planning to add more examples and references to authors, and had already planned to include more international authors. The truly global market for the book reinforces that decision and justifies referencing more writers who wrote in languages other than English (in translation, of course). That makes me happy since besides teaching creative writing, I taught World Literature for many years. I know these writers, and I’m glad to present creative writing from a truly global perspective, and not privilege American and English writers over other traditions around the world.

I’m sure I’ll rely on English-language writers quite a bit when looking for examples, since that will be the easiest, yet bringing in other writers whose work is known and translated into English expands the horizons of what is creative writing that I can think about and talk about in the book. This goes along well with other changes I’ve been contemplating for the second edition, including inclusive writing pedagogy and an anti-racist approach to the workshop.

Advice for MFA Applicants

I’ve been writing about the MFA application process for over a decade, ever since we prepared to launch our Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women in 2015, so of course, I was interested when the latest issue of Poets & Writers (September/October 2025) advertised a feature section on choosing and applying for the MFA, along with other advice for writers. And I’m also not surprised that the articles were disappointing. It’s not that they were wrong, but more that they didn’t go into much depth. I usually like Poets & Writers and value their advice, but this time, they didn’t give each topic enough attention and barely scratched the surface.

Lyzette Wanzer, giving advice on how to choose an MFA program, focused more on things like geography or the weather than things like program culture or the kinds of faculty and students a program recruits. Geography can be an interesting factor to consider, but I would rank it pretty low on my list of criteria unless there are reasons you need to be in a program close to home. Your experience in a program will be affected much more by the people you work with than whether there are mountains or snow or city streets and cafes, though those factors may ultimately play a role in your decision.

Similarly, Wanzer mentioned that some programs are fully funded, while others are not, but she also made a distinction between “fully funded” programs and those with graduate assistantships and other forms of aid, which is a little misleading. While it is true that there are some programs that fully scholarship some students (I’m thinking of the Michener program at the University of Texas at Austin and a few others), these are exceedingly rare and extremely competitive. Most programs that are called “fully funded” do rely on assistantships to fund their students, which means that students teach classes, do research (rare in creative writing), or work in writing centers to work their way through grad school. These assistantships come with a stipend and (usually) a tuition waiver. The stipend often isn’t a lot, but will usually allow a person to live without a second job. It’s probably not going to be enough to support a family or live a lavish lifestyle, but you can get by, maybe by renting an apartment with room mates or limiting how often you go out to eat.

You also get valuable teaching experience while on an assistantship, which can be important if you want an academic career. And you should have health insurance and other benefits as an employee of the university. When weighing an offer from an MFA program, it is important to look into the financial implications: what is the cost of living where you will be, what kind of apartment could you afford, will you have other expenses like travel, and what kind of stipend and other benefits does the university provide? These issues get little mention in the Poets & Writers piece on choosing an MFA program, though to be honest, they could have probably added another article just about weighing the offers you get, assuming you’re lucky enough to be accepted into multiple programs.

The choice of where to apply and the choice of which school to choose in the end is very different, though the first influences the latter. The choice of where to apply is aspirational. You probably want to apply to different kinds of schools, some that are close and some that are far, some that are in uban areas and some that are rural, some that are prestigious and some that are hidden gems. Your choice of which one among the programs that have accepsted you to actually attend is much more pragmatic. May you all be so lucky to have two or more to choose between!

Wanzer did mention the differences between traditional MFA programs that involve taking classes on campus and low-residency programs that don’t. She didn’t go into why not being on campus often means that low-residency programs don’t offer much in the way of financial assistance. However, low-residency programs do allow students to keep their current jobs, which often are more lucrative than graduate assistantships. We allow students to live close to family or to stay where they are for all the reasons that you might want or need to do that. There are benefits to both models, as I point out in my post Low-Res or Fully Funded, an MFA Decision. It is also important to think about how you will afford your MFA, especially if choosing a low-res or fully online program.

I don’t mean to be too critical of Wanzer either. She gives some valuable information; there is just so much more to say. But I’ve written on these subjects a lot, and Poets & Writers only gave Wanzer a page in the magazine. Hers is the most detailed of any of the advice articles, which may be why I had more things that I wanted to react to.

Rene Steinke, who I admire greatly, gave advice on how to write your personal statement, though she focused primarily on how to think about and brainstorm to answer the question “why do you want to be a writer?” and by extension “what kind of writer you want to be?” Her piece is pithy, well written, and enigmatic, which befits the challenge of trying to answer those questions. Yet I have argued (more than once) that the statement about why you want to be a writer is often the least interesting or informative part of the personal statement. That might be why Steinke focuses on it, since that is where so many letters fall short. Yet, it’s also important to talk about how you’ve prepared for an MFA in writing or what you’ve written already, and to answer questions like where have you worked, have you published or at least attempted to publish, have you taken workshops, and what kind of writing do you like to read?

Similarly, Dan Beachy-Quick, a poet whose craft essays I’ve often taught, when writing about “How to Matke the Most of Your Time in an MFA,” focuses on immersing yourself in language and learning to value things about literature that your younger self may have scoffed at. Great advice, though I would like to add that probably the best thing you can do to make the most of your time is to develop community. Make lasting friendships and get to know your mentors as people, not just as writers you can learn from and network with. These relationships will stay with you for the rest of your life, which is why when choosing a program, more and more I think you should consider the people and the culture of a program more than anything else.

When I was reading with another poet recently, I was reminded of this when she told a story about a faculty member who criticized her poems for being too personal and who refused to serve on her thesis committee because he couldn’t handle “confessional” poetry, even though she would argue (now — maybe she didn’t have the experience to argue it then, she didn’t say) that her poems weren’t confessional. We’ve all been there, and I understand the stigma that anything with a slight scent of “confessionalism” faced a decade or more ago. I went through something similar with one of my grad school professors, though he didn’t use the term “confessional” with my poems. He was a lit professor, poet, and translator, and I learned only after I graduated that he had said some quite negative remarks about my poetry, not that he ever taught me in a creative writing class or had any reason to even think about my poems (I was in a PhD in Comparative Literature at the time). These are experiences no one needs. It may be true that they are unavoidable, though choosing a program that is a good fit for you can help, and having good and supportive mentors can help you make it through when the nay-sayers inevitably come your way. Having a community of writers can also help you develop the thick skin you will need to handle rejection and to keep writing until you begin to see the successes.

That may be one reason I value Molly McCully Brown’s piece on “How to Think about the Value of a Creative Writing Degree.” She understandably focuses on the writing you will do, the deadlines you’ll face, and the progress you’ll make as a writer, yet she also thinks of it in terms of the readers you will have, the questions you will ask of one another, the community you will build. She does not emphasize the final output, and maybe rightly so. Though an MFA typically leads you to a thesis, which is a book-length project, she ends her piece thinking about all the other “beginnings” you have created during your time in a program. Arguably, one of the main points to the MFA is that thesis, and learning to wrestle with a project that is as unruly and unpredictable as a book is probably going to be your crowning achievement, and may be the main thing that writers seek to get from their MFA. But the value isn’t only the thesis, the publishable manuscript itself, but is learning enough about yourself and about finishing a long project like this that you can do it again—and again and again.

The value of the MFA is not in learning how to knock out a novel or a collection of poems quickly and more efficiently. As McCully Brown suggests, it is to learn to complicate things, to ask more challenging questions, to dig deeper and to push yourself further, and to come through that wilderness to achieve a finished product: novel, collection of poems, stories, or essays, a play or collection of short plays, etc. which you can be proud of and that no one but you could have written. And then to be prepared to take on a new project with equal rigor. And to do it with the friends and other writers whose advice and words you value. Yes, I’m thinking of both the living, breathing community of writers you begin to accumulate in your MFA experience, and those writers you have read who may be long dead or may be the writers you admire from afar but haven’t met yet. You can discover your tradition, your canon, and your compatriots in your MFA journey, which will stay with you and sustain you throughout your writing life.

Can you do those things without an MFA? Of course. Many writers have and many writers will. Can you do them in the same way and with the same level of intensity outside of an MFA experience? Possibly, though it is very hard to replicate on your own. If you’re able to earn your MFA and you’re ready to do it, nothing should hold you back. But financial concerns, life challenges, and other roadblocks often do get in the way, and there should be no stigma against writers who don’t hold the degree. But for those who can make it happen, as my students say over and over, it is a transformative experience when you dedicate those years and that effort to the study of writing with others who are with you on the same (or a parallel) journey.

I’m grateful for Poets & Writers for including this feature section on advice on the writing life. There are other essays that go beyond the MFA experience that I won’t respond to here. All are well-written and provocative. I only wish they were longer. But the nice thing about a magazine format is there is always another issue, and with it the opportunity for more advice. And on my blog, I can keep returning to these same subjects, hopefully with new insights and updated information.

Orpheus in Serbia

Over on Substack, I wrote a post with this title, detailing the backstory of how I came to know the Greek cabaret (music) group StarWound. I won’t repeat that here (because you can read the post for free on Substack), but suffice it to say that they are performing my poem “Orpheus” along with others from their project “Interiors” at the Nisville Festival, one of the biggest alternative music festivals in Europe under the direction of the legendary Maja Mitic.

I’ll let you read in the Substack post about this performance and how they came to Columbus and performed at Mississippi University for Women. Instead, here I will add a little anecdote about how after their performance in Poindexter, as we were coming back to Puckett House after a slight detour to look for something to drink and to snack on, we encountered a deer ambling across College Street and onto the campus of Mississippi University for Women right by Whitfield Hall and the main gate. Now, we have quite a few wild animals on our campus, but I usually see feral cats, squirrels, and groundhogs, maybe the occasional armadillo, but never before (or since) have I seen a deer. It was a quiet night, so maybe he felt safe enough to explore (I’m pretty sure I remember right that it was a buck). That was just one of the magical moments that happened with StarWound during their visit. So far it hasn’t made it into a poem, though who knows.

There apparently will be a video of at least one of their upcoming European performances that I’ll be able to share. And I’m hopeful I’ll get to see video from tonight, though I’m not sure it will be sharable, at least not online. I’ll be doing a benefit reading later this month for a CD project with a selection of songs from StarWound’s US tours. More on all of this soon!

There’s lots going on, even when I’m not actively participating — but maybe one day I’ll be able to get over to Greece to see StarWound where they live or see them perform again in person. In the meantime, this fall, they’ll be touring several campus in the Northeast.

Writers Resist AI with Human Interaction

I’m on book tour, which means that wherever I go and whenever I can line something up, I’ll be giving a reading at bookstores, libraries, schools, and other venues, even virtual ones. As I do this, it has occurred to me that this may be one of a writer’s best defenses against the abuses of generative AI. Here you see me heading into Three Bells Books in Mason City, Iowa, with a box of physical books. We had a nice small crowd for an intimate reading that Saturday evening. I’ve had bigger and smaller turnouts in recent weeks, but the one thing that remains a constant is the human interactions I get to have.

That’s one thing, AI bots will never achieve. No matter how much the bots’ voices might improve or how convincing their interaction might become as they learn to mimic us better and better, they will never be more than a shallow copy of human experience. They will rely on reconfiguring and regurgitating the human experiences they take in through their large language models (including the unauthorized use of my last book, apparently), but they will have no direct experience of what it means to be human, to read or listen to a poem and feel the impact of those words resonnate with your own experience. They can only learn from us, but can’t become us (at least not until an AI is implanted in a living, breathing human body, which is a very scary thought (sorry)).

As a teacher, I’ve learned that one of the best ways to combat AI use by students is to develop a personal relationship with them, to work with them on their writing at every step in the process, to guide them, yes, to ensure that they are working on their own, yet also to let them know that what they write will utlimately be passed on to a real human being who values what they produce because I value their experience and their thought. Writing can no longer just be about the final product. It has to become about the journey that the person who wrote has gone on to reach that final product. That might be their intellectual journey, but is also and equally their very physical journey as an embodied person whose self gets poured into a paper, a story, or a poem.

As writers, we embody this principle when we give a reading. We are a living, breathing human being who obviously cares about the impact our words could have on the living, breathing human beings in front of us. The poems are no longer just about a final product, they are about the ability to communicate our experience (of life, of image, of language) to people whose lives or language or imaginations may be impacted by the experience. By reading (and talking about what we read), we not only prove that we wrote it, but we engage in conversation with those who gather to hear it. A reading is not just about the poems that were read; it is about where those poems take the room and how the people in that room react and give back to the writer through the conversation.

This can happen, too, in a virtual reading, but I predict there will be more and more emphasis on in-person literary events: readings, workshops, or salons of all kinds, as the public thirsts for more human interaction in response to the unfulfilling interactions with our increasingly technology-centered world (from the self-checkout at the grocery store to the customer service bots we all encounter online or on the phone).

What is most valuable about literature is its humanity — something we are in serious danger of losing right now — and what better way to show humanity than to show up in person, read from your work, and open yourself up to the vulnerability of taking questions. By doing so, we reaffirm the value of human interaction at a moment when so many forces seem to be moving away from the human in favor of the automated, the regurgitated lowest common denominator, and the predictable. By giving readings to a crowd of one or one hundred, writers can resist the tech-bro billionaires pushing a technology on us that most people didn’t ask for and don’t even want, simply by being human and putting our humanity out there through our words.

Thanks, Tennessee Williams: on the importance of blogging

Let me take a minute to explain the title of this post. Now and then, I search on myself to see what might be out there: to see where my latest book is being sold or whether there are any new reviews, for instance. Yes, I have a Google alert, but it doesn’t always catch everything, and searching can pull up some older references I’ve forgotten about.

That was the case today. When I search on my name, I often get a ton of results from this blog, most of which I ignore, but this morning one was a reminder of the time in 2020 when I participated (virtually) in the Tennessee Williams Tribute. I wrote about the poem of Williams’s that I read, “Orpheus Descending” and the poem of my own that I read with it, “Ishtar.” I also mentioned that this had led me to write “Orpheus” and “Eurydice,” two poems in Tree Fall with Birdsong. I’ve been reading these poems, and I remembered why I wrote them, but had forgotten the connection to Tennessee Williams. That cycle of poems about myths of the underworld became important to how Tree Fall with Birdsong reached its conclusion, and therefore important to how I found a publisher.

If I hadn’t blogged about it in the first place, and then if I hadn’t found that nearly five-year-old blog post, I would probably never remember the debt I owe Tennessee Williams.

This year, I’ll be participating in Friendly City Books’ Possumtown Book Fest, leading a poetry workshop. Now that I’ve retrieved this memory, maybe I’ll try to find a way to incorporate it in the workshop: either by reading another Tennessee Williams poem or by bringing in another poem for participants to respond to.

Of course, I could write a journal instead of writing this blog, but that might be a little harder to search. I would have to know to pick up an old journal and start reading in it for inspiration. If you don’t want to put all of your thoughts online, that is still a great option. Let this be a reminder to pick up those old journals and flip through them periodically. You never know what you might be reminded of or where that journey might take you.

How to Read a Book of Poems

This question has come up at some of my readings this month for Tree Fall with Birdsong, so I thought it might be worth blogging about. The question usually arises from my discussion during a reading about how some of the poems are related or about the section of the book that a poem appears in. I often talk about a book section as a poem cycle, and that leads people to wonder: should they read the book cover to cover in order, or is it okay to skip around and read poems individually, which seems to be a common practice, at least of those who ask the question.

My answer is, yes. It’s okay to skip around, and yes, many poetry collections are meant to be read in sequence. That is to say, most poets spend a lot of time and thought on arranging a collection in a particular order. It is not just chronological, though with my collections there is often a somewhat chronological order to the sections of the book. Individual poems, though, might have been written at very different times. I might write one poem early in a book’s history, and then come back to that theme again much later and write poems that go with one or more earlier poems. Or I might move poems around between sections to weave certain themes together, rather than having all of one theme in one section.

When putting a collection together, I think a lot about how one poem might lead into the next poem, and I want them to speak to one another in an order that is consciously arranged. I’m a poet who wants the experience of reading the collection in order to be meaningful and to lead to new insights that you might not get if you read poems individually. Yet I also acknowledge that many readers prefer to read that way (or do that out of habit), and that is all right.

After all, poems are written as individual pieces. They are meant to stand on their own and often appear initially in a completely different context, in a literary magazine, for instance. As editor of Poetry South, I also spend time thinking about the order of each issue and how poems speak to one another in that context, so I hope some readers will the magazine in order, too. I’m always mildly annoyed with magazines that organize their contributors alphabetically — that’s convenient, both for the editor and for the reader who wants to find a poem by a particilar poet (but that’s what the table of contents is for) — but I still like to curate the experience.

I like to think of a poetry collection and even a poetry magazine as analogous to an art exhibit. If a gallery owner hung paintings alphabetically by artist or by title, that would be within their rights, but it would also be somewhat disappointing. There’s so much more to discover when art or poetry is arranged intentionally so that the individual pieces can be in conversation with each other.

In my interview in Southern Review of Books with C. T. Salazar, we got into a discussion of how the poems in “Tree Fall” echo one another with certain lines or phrases coming back recursively in each. If you don’t read the poems in order, then you likely won’t catch this use of repetition, and you won’t see how the phrases evolve over the course of the sequence. Sometimes I think of a book as one long poem in several movements. The composition of the book took place individually over a long period of time, but the book coalesces when the connections between poems begin to emerge and an order gradually emerges.

But in the end, it is your book once you buy (or borrow) a copy. If you want to skip around and read the poems that strike your fancy first, by all means, go ahead. I would encourage you to reread it at least once by reading cover to cover, but maybe you want to do that only after you’ve discovered your favorite, so you then can see them in a new light upon rereading. Or read it cover to cover once, and then go back to your favorites to read again and again. A poem should stand on its own and be meaningful without any additional context. A collection adds to and deepens that meaning by arranging the context and providing the reader more to go on, if they are willing to read it in order.

At least my poetry books are arranged this way. I’m sure there are other poets who don’t do that as much. I see more collections these days that don’t include sections and simply present the reader with a single series of poems with no pauses or breaks. Maybe some of these poets expect readers to read out of order, so they don’t worry about sections or cycles. Or maybe they care equally about the order, but don’t want to indicate where to pause or how to group the poems. Poets are not a monolith, after all, and we all have our own ideas on how a collection can come together.

July Update: Book Events and Interview

This is a quick post to let people know how my July is going. I’ve had a great time in Iowa at three book events in Osage, Charles City, and Mason City. I got to know the owners of two local bookstores, Prologue Books and Wine and Three Bells Books, which were new to me, and also connected with a store in Osage, Create, that will calso arry my books. They promote local authors and also sell art and other creations. Each has its own niche and is doing quite well by the look of their stores.

Today, the interview in Southern Review of Books went live. Thanks again to C. T. Salazar for his insightful questions and for Southern Review of Books for agreeing to do the interview.

Finally, when we get back to Mississippi next week, I’ll be gearing up for my reading at Lemuria Books on July 24 at 5pm. I’ll also be signing books, so I hope to see anyone whose in Jackson, Mississippi!

Other upcoming events that are confirmed include the Possum Town Book Festival in August and the Mississippi Book Festival in September. It’s going to be an exciting summer and early fall, and I’m looking forward to announcing more news soon.

Heading Back to Iowa

I’ve always looked forward to our summer pilgrimage to Osage, Iowa, which we usually take this time of year, arriving in time to go to the annual Fourth of July Parade and stop down to the fairgrounds later that day for some locally made ice cream from the Dairy Association. This is the time of year to make rhubarb jam and rhubarb pie, and if we’re lucky we’ll be around for an ice cream social or two.

But this year will be a little different, since my Mom passed away in January at the age of 97 and half. The house will be empty of her presence when we arrive, though we also have a lot of cleaning out to do: sorting, reminiscing, and deciding who will take what and how much we will leave for the estate sale. My brother will be in town, and our son is joining us. My neighbors, Martha and Joel Dorow, will both be there for part of the time, and my brother-in-law will also be there for a while before we all go to a family reunion. It will likely be the last time we are all together, at least in the little brown house on Poplar Street. So it will be bitter-sweet in many ways.

Since Tree Fall with Birdsong is just out, I have also set up some readings, first with the Alpha Writers and the Fine Arts Council of Osage on July 10 at Our Savior’s Lutheran at 6:30 p.m. in the Fireside Room, and then July 11 at Prologue Books and Wine in Charles City and July 12 at Three Bells Books in Mason City, both at 5pm. It will be great to be able to see people from Osage and get to know these fairly new independent bookstores, which I’m always happy to support.

By the end of the month, I’ll be back in Mississippi for The W’s commencement and a reading at Lemuria Books in Jackson, July 24 at 5pm.

So far, the reception for Tree Fall with Birdsong has been great. I’m very happy to have five bookstore readings scheduled already, as well as the poetry book club at Friendly City Books on Discord tomorrow night, July 1, at 7p, and hopefully more news on the way. I’m busy lining up more events for the fall starting in August with any luck. Watch here for more news soon!