By Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Yuni Ramos While sending your writing into the world can certainly feel daunting at times, there are several benefits to doing so. Some highlights include reaching a new audience, boosting your confidence, engaging in the literary conversation, and obtaining professional credibility. Now that I’ve got your attention, you may be […]
By Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Kelly Weber It’s April, which means it’s National Poetry Month, and it also means Portland was beginning to bud and bloom as writers from all across the country descended upon the city this past week for AWP 2019. The smell of coffee and blossoms mixed as people sporting canvas conference […]
by Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Matthew Gorman While many of us are familiar with traditional kinds of publications—newspapers, academic journals, literary journals, magazines, book houses, university presses, etc.—I would like to bring some attention to another form of publishing that has a different purpose than producing name recognition and resume lines: the realm of community […]
By Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Leila Einhorn Like many female-identifying poets, I grew up with what can only be called a kind of worship for Sylvia Plath. Discovering Plath’s poetry among the overwhelmingly male voices of the American literary canon was like finding my way home. I was a teenage girl, aware of my growing […]
By Colorado Review Associate Editor Susannah Lodge-Rigal I am a slow writer. This is something I know to be true: as a student at Colorado State University and in my writing life prior, I have never been quick to come up with new ideas for poems or essays. I admire poets who, day after day, […]
By Colorado Review Associate Editor Daniel Schonning For most of us, the pitfalls associated with writing a modern love poem are nearly too many to count. On one side: the saccharine, the sentimental, the end-rhymed and metrical. On the other: the woe-filled; the creepy; the self-obsessed, erotic magnum opus. Somewhere between exists the razor’s edge […]
Obsession, we’re told, is unhealthy at worst, embarrassing at best. To write about one’s obsessions, to air them publicly, is particularly tacky—or so we seem to believe.
Using trial transcripts, witness testimonies, interviews, medical descriptions, and more, Rukeyser documents a nonlinear account of the industrial disaster through voices both real and imagined. Throughout, she never loses sight of the potential problematics of documentary poetry (voyeurism, appropriation, etc.) and this inquiry into her own method is an integral part of the poem.
One of the things I’ve come to understand about artistic pursuits, or at least about mine, is that they are anything but linear. Sometimes one needs to push the limits only to retrace origins and vice versa. So it is that I began exploring seemingly oppositional forces at play in art in general, and subsequently, in written mediums.
On the faces of my students when I suggest they submit their work for publication: flattery, confusion. And I get it—no one taught me how to submit, how to find journals I admire, how to know when a piece is ready. The prospect can be daunting when you’re starting out.