I’m often asked this question at symposiums and writers’ conferences. It also pops up constantly in email queries. The answer, of course, is yes and no. From the poet’s point of view, the answer is a qualified yes, for the simple reason that in America alone there are well over 200 major contests that offer [...]

How is great poetry created? This is one of the first questions I address in my poetry class. There are probably as many answers to that question as there are poets in the world, but for me it starts with this:
Lets start with our sense of sight. Is that just a tree in the front [...]