Deputy managing editor of talent, culture and development at The Boston Globe/founder of A Beautiful Resistance she/her/hers Jeneé Osterheldt is a culture columnist who covers identity and social justice through the lens of culture and the arts. Her work centers Black...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I first encountered poetry when I was in elementary school and then got more exposure to it in middle school. I enjoyed it. Poetry assignments were fun. But that was it. It...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My mother learned many poems by heart and still, at age 92, can recite poetry she learned when she was a child. I am only now realizing how much poetry was a part of my childhood...
Writing While Parenting is a collection of essays that explores the connections between poetry and parenting. How did you discover that you wanted to write about the overlap of these two subjects? Many of these essays come from a monthly column that I started writing...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Both my parents read aloud to me and my siblings when we were small, and so my first experiences with poetry included children’s verses with strong rhymes and narrative...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My mother read poems to me, When We Were Very Young, “James James/ Morrison Morrison/ Weatherby George Dupree/ Took great/ Care of his mother/ Though he was only three” and...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I’ve always loved words, and while I worked professionally as an editor for many years, I didn’t discover until decades later that I might have something of my own to say and a...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I first discovered poetry in middle school. I was drawn to the delightful strangeness of e.e.cummings’ language, the quirky sage voice of Emily Dickenson, and the vivid, dramatic...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? When I was about 18, I developed a weird hunch that I wanted to write poetry, but I didn’t really know how to get started. One problem was that I hadn’t found any poets whose...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I fell in love with poetry in high school but as a reader, not a writer. Over the years I would read poetry, primarily what I think of as the “classics” for well-educated...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, when I was 18. It spoke deeply to something within me that lit this proverbial lamp of remembrance, something about the metaphysics of poetry...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My earliest encounters with poetry were through the Bible. As a young person raised Catholic the poems and songs of that ritualistic life were my first major exposure to...
“What excites me most about Unheard Whispers, my collection of poems on growing up in an alcoholic home, is that part of the proceeds is going to the Robert F. Kennedy Community Alliance here in Massachusetts and their division that helps children and families affected by addiction. In the disease of addiction, so much funding and support go to the addicts themselves. While this is needed, the children of addicts often are forgotten.” — Dianne C. Braley
“IN/DESIDERATO is a book-length poem that, at its heart, is a meditation on the nature of the world we’re leaving behind, both in terms of our collective successes and our failures. The title is a Latinate mangling of my own that loosely translates to ‘un/desirable,’ meaning both the light and dark opposites of that phrasing, and the book is dedicated to and largely addressed to my children.” — Jon D. Lee
“Dear child of the near future, / Here’s my permission. Take it. It’s alright to replace sirens / with the light shot through them. / All the old gray gods have fallen / in a field of decapitated corn stalks. / I’m trying to tell you that the world is beautiful.” — Erica Charis-Molling
“I fell in love with words; they ran away with me. Discipline followed, born of delight—in ‘getting the words right”: a slow apprenticeship. It takes time to learn how to name your gait, ask for a lead on a canter, command a lope, a trot, a fourteener, scuttle the chatter to trip a tetrameter, settle back into ballad measure.” — Martin Edmunds
poem with only a little bit of sacrilegeMyles Taylor I wanna be like the heroes in the moviesbut every time I drop something I instinctivelyjump out of the way / I don’t know how to re-wireself-preservation but without it I might not survivelong enough to be in the...
Now Approaching Porter SquareAmy M. Clark On the Kendall Station platform,I leave a dollar for the young womanplaying an accordion while stomping one footharnessed to a pulley that sets to dancingher dressed-to-match marionette doublestrung inside a...
![J.D Debris’ “[New thorns, 2020]” and Ezana Demissie’s “the US is on the brink of war and i’ve just taken a chem test”](https://stg.masspoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/JD-Debris-800x800.jpg)
[new thorns, 2020]JD Debris from CHALINO SÁNCHEZ: A SEQUENCE Pull the thorns from this borderline‘til barbed wire runs smooth against a palm,‘til coils of concertinafold back inside the accordion with a sigh. Write the crimestory of this borderline & paper-planeit...
“When I was your age the girl I loved dumped me the night a ball went through Buckner’s legs and the Sox would lose the Series and she kissed Dave. Is a broken heart still a hurt all over the skin?” — Matt Miller
“Writing poetry for me is a kind of meditation. I try to access this strange place in my brain, and I don’t always have the key. I think my better poems are when that door opens and I start piecing phrases and thoughts together.” — Kate Hanson Foster