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Voice Lessons
To those of you who have ever spent time in a high school English class, I’ll lay odds that you can recognize, “Once upon a midnight dreary,” or “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” Yes, Poe and...
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Here And There…Or Maybe Just Not Anywhere
by Ron Hayes Recently I opened a poetry contest to celebrate a historical event’s bicentennial here in my town. Entrants were invited to address and/or interpret the contest’s theme as broadly as they...
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Ma? Ma! We’re All Crazee for Negative Space
by Ron Hayes Thirty spokes meet in the hub, but the empty space between them is the essence of the wheel. -Lao Tzu When I was just a young lad, rooted still in the halcyon days of high school life,...
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A-Listers and B-Sides: When to Abandon Your Poems
by Ron Hayes The late French poet Paul Valery (1871-1945) is credited with having said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” which, in my experience, is about as profound a concept as I can...
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Confessional and Contemporary: Poems, Life, and Elizabeth Bishop
By Dominique Traverse Locke 5Writers is pleased to welcome back Dominique Traverse Locke, author of The Goodbye Child and No More Hard Times for her second guest blog appearance. “Read this,” I say to...
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On Words Alone: Can A Man Survive Solely On Poetry?
by Ron Hayes Poetry doesn’t pay. Let me be the first to welcome you to Planet Earth if that happens to be news to you. (Welcome! May I suggest buying a book or two while you’re here?) As writers, we...
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Death Poems: Peverse and Pedestrian Ways of “Making it New”
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Macbeth Act IV Scene 1 by Ron Hayes Recently I was speaking with a colleague new to our school. He had just learned that I was the...
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What Truth Is
by Ron Hayes for Philip Levine, 1928-2015 It’s a common affliction among us poets that early in our formative years we put pressure on ourselves to swing for the fences. We obligate ourselves to...
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National Poetry Month and Jake Arnold
Two Poets Left!! Our celebration of National Poetry Month at 5writers.com slowly winds down with our penultimate poet, Jake Arnold of Denton, Texas. As a reminder, 5Writers is celebrating National...
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Every Line A Break, Every Break A Transition
by Ron Hayes In poetry, transitioning from idea to idea in a poem (or scene to scene, or between characters’ points of view, or what have you) seems a lot less complicated than in other genres of...
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When The Muse Is Elusive
by Ron Hayes What does research have to do with poetry and why in the world would a poet ever need to do research? Ever been asked this question? Ever asked it yourself? When the term “research” crops...
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