poetry advice

This Week’s Tweeted Writing Prompts (October 19-25)

October 26, 2014

Each day, we tweet writing prompts to help writers get out of their shell for the creative process. Follow us on twitter (@TSHighSociety) to be inspired daily, or subscribe to the blog to get a digest of the prompts every Sunday! Poetry Writing Prompts Sunday: Think of a street intersection [...]

Writing Weightless

September 24, 2012

Sometimes it is hard to get yourself to write. You sit in your favorite coffee shop chair, order a warm drink, stare at the reflections on the shop’s front windows, tapping your pencil to the trad jazz in the background. Other times, you sit down and the world dissolves into each sentence you [...]

Tate Street Festival Flash Poetry Contest

September 22, 2012

What a day! Thanks to everyone who joined us for the Tate Street Festival Flash Poetry Contest! We’ll be reading through the poems and announce our winners within the next week. Stay posted! In the meantime, check out our post on other poetry contests for this fall, read about some great [...]

What if Shakespeare Grew Up in Iowa?

July 6, 2012

In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s production, the Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, our favorite farcical Falstaff is a recently-failed presidential candidate who finds himself down and out in Windsor, where the wives are plentiful. So plentiful, in fact, that a few of them are married [...]

Summer Poems

July 2, 2012

July is a rich time for poetry; a time for summer poems. We love the nostalgia of the heat, the summer camps, thunderstorms, the plenty of the farm, tanned legs, and even slugs. Here are a few of our favorite summer poems. Sharon Olds: “The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb“ [...]

The Life of Poetry — Muriel Rukeyser

March 4, 2012

Not a craft book. Not a defense of poetry, either. An inspirational read. “The realization of a poem is an event of belief and experience.” [...]

When the Cicadas Don’t Come Home

May 13, 2011

What’s Broken by Dorianne Laux : The Poetry Foundation [poem]. Since we have yet to see any of the prophesied cicadas, here’s a summer poem from Dorianne Laux, on MFA faculty in North Carolina (not too far away from the TSHS) at NC [...]

Prewriting

February 22, 2011

Click on Eustace to read about his story

There’s nothing like a good article to stimulate “prewriting” (or at least give you something to bring up at dinner with your in-laws). The Anniversary Issue (February 14 & 21) of The New Yorker stood out to us as particularly full of great investigative journalism, [...]

Tight Pants

January 24, 2011

In lieu of the recent rise in popularity of “jeggings,” we refer to the New York poet Frank O’Hara for his philosophies on poetry as presented in “Personism: A Manifesto“ I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing [...]

History

December 7, 2010

Sometimes, TS, it’s hard to keep up with all of the history…but one does one’s best. “Whatever words a writer employs, he benefits by knowing as much as possible of the history these words, of the uses to which they have already been applied. Such knowledge facilitates his [...]