by joannezc | Feb 20, 2022 | My poetry, Thoughts
Seventeen days after the first U.S. state went into lockdown, I was suffering from extreme anxiety, and I experienced my first ever five-hour episode of atrial fibrillation and tachycardia. I hadn’t left my house in 20 days, but I was sure I was going to die as a...
by joannezc | Apr 7, 2020 | My poetry, Thoughts
Living with the Coronavirus Curve In an era of the curve, a measurement for the overwhelming number of deaths caused by a rogue virus, it seems appropriate to discuss why poets write about death, grief, and loss, and why readers are drawn to these themes. We all know...
by joannezc | Apr 23, 2019 | Thoughts, Writing poetry
In my junior year of college, I wore my favorite pair of hip-hugger bell bottoms—soft denim, salmon in color—with an orange sad face patch on the right back pocket. The patch was my protest not against the Vietnam War that raged at that time, but against optimism,...
by joannezc | Oct 1, 2018 | Thoughts
Interpreting poetry is analogous to exploring the layers of an artichoke blossom. My least favorite way to analyze a poem is to consider the elements of rhyme, meter, form, and sound devices (alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia), so let’s categorize...
by joannezc | Jun 28, 2018 | Poetry review, Reading poetry, Thoughts
Did you ever think of drawing a straight thematic line from a passage in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge? As every reader of Coleridge knows, his poem is a fragment of the several hundred lines he had composed in his...
by joannezc | Jun 25, 2018 | Poetry review, Reading poetry, Thoughts
A theme that courses through the poems in The Art of Darkness section of my book is the desire to decreate myself, to experience a “soft retreat of senses/And a slow dance to/Self and lessness.” In “Prelude,” I write of my “discovery/And subsequent/Shedding of...
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