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Now with Four Full Pages of Poetry!
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General Poetry with Suzanne Robinson
Haiku with Kevin McLaughlin
Formal & Rhyming Poetry with Vera Ignatowitsch
Translations with S. Ye Laird
Featured Poem of the Month
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Visiting a Farmhouse as Children

 

Our fears roam in the other

part-of-house that seals

breath behind a cold door.

 

The angels of some dead wife

string wisps of cotton candy

to fringe the rag rug and leave

sugar prints on the dresser. 

 

We feature them as who, how,

and why that goes on beyond

that door cut off from cob.

 

While angels’ bony knives

ply sprinkles to phantom air,

quilts of butterflies cheer us,

their eyes winking at fright.

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Jan Wiezorek

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Wiezorek teaches writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and has poetry forthcoming at The London Magazine, Panoplyzine, and Schuylkill Valley Journal online. He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011) and holds a master's in English Composition/Writing from Northeastern Illinois University. 

...and now....

poetry magazine, editor, Anthony Uplandpoet Watkins
Michael Burch, Michael Burch Interview, poetry magazine

The BTS Interview with Michael R. Burch

with Vera Ignatowitsch

Vera: What inspired or impelled you to become a poet? Was it tied to a defining event in your life?

Michael: I think the first influence came very early in my life, when my mother would recite "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes to me and my two sisters. This was when I was a very young boy, perhaps six or thereabouts. I later learned that Noyes died the year I was born, an interesting synchronicity. But I didn't think much about poetry, in terms of writing it, until my early teens. I had some friends who were in a rock group, but I had no musical ability. I had, however, become a fan of poet-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. Then one day I started leafing through the pages of my high school Literature book, reading the poems independently, and something clicked. Some of the poems, by poets like William Blake and A. E. Housman, seemed quite magical to me. If I couldn't write songs, perhaps I could write poems. That was the beginning of my love affair with writing poetry, because it seemed to me that I did have a talent for writing poems. I remember sitting in the break room of a McDonald's where I worked to earn money for college, looking at a poem I had written, thinking, "Did I just write that?" It seemed that I had produced something a bit magical, at a fairly early age. Now that I have been published around 2,500 times, it seems that I may have had some talent for writing poetry.

 

Vera: You are known as a Formalist, yet you also write free verse. Do you have a preference between the two?

Michael: In one way no, in another way yes. I don't think that one genre is superior to the other. There are great metrical poems, and there are great free verse poems. As a reader, I simply like great writing, and it doesn't matter to me how poems are constructed. However, as a writer I find myself writing more metrical, rhyming poems. And I think most readers still enjoy meter and rhyme. For instance, most popular songs are metrical, rhyming poems set to music. Why not give readers what they like? If a poet who claims free verse is "superior" to metrical, rhymed poems is asked to name his top ten songs with words, chances are that all ten will have rhyming lyrics. And I remember reading a book called Touchstones in which a number of free verse poets discussed their favorite poems. If I remember correctly, most of the poets named rhyming poems. And the three best-known founders of English free verse -- Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot -- all wrote rhyming poems. Ironically, Walt Whitman's best-known poem may be "O Captain! My Captain!" The world is full of those sort of ironies. In short, I value both genres equally, but when I write poems they usually end up with meter and rhyme.

If you know a literary sort, a poet, an author, a teacher of literature, or just a truly all around interesting character, and you think it might be fun to  get their thoughts down on "paper". Let us know, if you have contact info, all the better, but we have our ways....

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