Roripaugh’s craft talk, “Five Uneasy Pieces About (Writing) Anger,” was originally published in The Southeast Review's October 2017 Writer’s Regimen.

1.

During a graduate thesis workshop, your white male colleague (now retired) tells a female graduate student that stories of sexual abuse are passé. That they’ve been done to death. He says this authoritatively—casually, as if noticing that culottes are no longer in fashion. He ad...

I learned a good deal about writing from watching and listening to jazz musicians. More specifically, I learned about the effective use of surprise, play and dissonance from them. I would take—and still do—my older son, who has autism among other things, to hear the bands play live because he loves the music, especially when it’s being made right in front of him. I watched as the musicians, seemingly fearlessly, went off on wh...

When Chekov famously asserted, “if a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third,” he probably did not intend for his dictum to extend into the realm of poesy. But with the first lines of any poem we begin to establish expectations, a primary ground from which the poem will extend, whether that grounding be in prosody, discourse, or imagery. When Michael McGriff begins his poem “Catfish” with the lines “...

Duende has many definitions, but we will focus on Federico Garcia Lorca’s extensive writings on it, looking at duende through the lens of poetry, how it relates to poetry, and how it can be adapted to the art of your poetry. Lorca writes in his essay, “The Theory and Play of Duende,” “So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duend...

1. First off, poems aren’t magical things that plop from the air and onto your plate, fat and greasy like Grandmother’s dumplings. It might happen, but I wouldn’t count on it.

2. Be open for the unexpected, but be so with purpose. If something comes up, don’t think about how you can turn the adventure into a poem; rather, be in the moment. Be aware of the imagery around you, but try to connect with the people you are with and w...

There is no such thing as a poem without imagination. There are poems without metaphors that can work, poems without similes that can work, poems that don’t use rhyme or rhythm that can work and work well, but a poem without imagination isn’t a poem. The imagination is the cornerstone of all great poetry. Period. No imagination, no poem.

In his 1872 essay, “Poetry and the Imagination,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Note our ince...

It’s a very good thing to have poems you admire rattling round in your head. They are schooling figures for the mind and good company, sometimes providing inspiration and, other times, solace. With the mention of just two words, “slumber” and “diurnal,” most poets will recall Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems”–if not the entire string of five mysterious poems written for a child who died young, then at least “A Slumber Did My Spirit Se...