Why I Write: Jenna Wysong Filbrun
In the wake of her new collection, Away, we reached out to poet Jenna Wysong Filbrun to find out more about her motivations and process.
In the wake of her new collection, Away, we reached out to poet Jenna Wysong Filbrun to find out more about her motivations and process.
BY BETH SHELBURNE
This is for you, he says, dropping the wet, glistening shell into my open palm like a coin.
Like the Zen poets of China and Japan, American poet Mary Oliver’s work is deeply rooted in nature and her physical and ephemeral experience of the wilds that surround her. In Morning Poem, she communicates a deep optimism about the human condition; that even in the midst of heavy suffering, we can recognize a rightness… Continue reading Mary Oliver’s Morning Poem
“Attention is the beginning of devotion” is the last line of Upstream, Mary Oliver’s first essay in a collection of shorts that express her life’s trajectory towards nurturing and developing her creative spirit, always in intimate conversation with herself and with nature. The minute details of the self and the world that she outlines in… Continue reading Mary Oliver – May I Stay Forever in the Stream
Marie Howe’s different, highly sexual vision of transitioning out of life through a double-take on ‘la petite morte,’ the experience of orgasm as ‘a little death.’
Jericho Brown’s poem talks to the weight carried by black Americans who live under the constant threat of police violence and injustice.
What we all read and loved on The Dewdrop in 2020.
Fang’s beautiful and complex poem addresses the questions of sin and redemption against the background of a young monk entering a monastery.
BY MARY DINGEE FILLMORE
You listen all the time to the whispers of faraway stars’ radio signals. They barely flutter, but you’re more sensitive than any other telescope in the world.
Declared ‘a poem worth framing’ by one reviewer, Susan Barba’s How Should We Live Our Lives? dips into a stream of questions and musings reminiscent in style of Mary Oliver’s simple and probing verse. She starts with love and trepidation and ends with an all-subsuming sea that contains motherhood, memory and consciousness too. Susan Barba… Continue reading Susan Barba – How Should We Live Our Lives?