Poetry

• “...to rule out meter or rhyme as tools available to the poet is far more limiting than the playful, silk-ribbon bondage of the sonnet.” —A. E. Stallings
  Crooked Roads Without Improvement: Some Thoughts on Formal Verse
• “The grander goal is to be as good as Dante.” —Donald Hall
  Poetry and Ambition
• “Another book hits the wall and bounces against my shoulder. It’s by a very grave-looking man-child.” —Naeem Murr
  My Poet
• “One must truly HOLD A SPACE for oneself.” —Kay Ryan
  I Go to AWP
• “In the long run, the only genuine honor for a poet is readership born of love.” —David Alpaugh
  What’s Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?
• “Are we really saying that an artist will abandon a thing because it is difficult? What sort of an artist is that?” —John Whitworth
  Are Poems Still Allowed to Rhyme?
• Those who confuse “rhyme” with “reactionary” should read this poem...
• ...and this short manifesto...
• ...and this article.
• Chaos in Fourteen Lines by Annie Finch
• Sonnet Essays at 14by14.com by various authors
• Harriet, a blog with articles by various poets
• Stallings at Harriet
• Syntactical Arrest by Kate Benedict
• Edgy vs. Nice by Yours Truly
• On Poetry and Perversion by Yours Truly
• Critique Guidelines by Rachel Lindley
• Uncontainability Pours Forth: Rhyme, Meter, and Form in Best American Poetry 2007 by Maryann Corbett
• Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf
• A Candle in This Funeral Procession by Rosalie Morales Kearns
• How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi
• Bad Poets by Randall Jarrell
• Negative Capability by John Keats
• A Few Don’ts by Ezra Pound
• Duende by Federico Garcia Lorca
• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The sonnet: ruminations on form, sex, and history by Anthony Hecht
• Poetic Meter in English: Roots and Possibilities by Richard Moore

This last one isn’t about poetry, but I had to put it somewhere:

• I Am the Cosmos by Molly Ivins

• Poetry News in Review
• Duotrope
• NewPages.com
• peony moon
• Venues for Formal Poetry
• Sonnet Central
• Modern Poetry
• The Discovery of Poetry, by Frances Mayes
• The Book of Forms, by Lewis Turco
• Irish Poetry Forms
• How to write a villanelle
• How to write a roundel
• How to write a triolet
  
• How to write a poem about poetry
• How to write a poem about suicide
• Never, ever write a poem like this!
• rhymezone.com
• dictionary.com
• thesaurus.com
• grammarcheck.net
• Visuwords Graphical Dictionary and Thesaurus
• The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

• Eratosphere - Geared to metrical poetry.
• The Gazebo - More geared to non-metrical.
• The Sonnet Board - For sonnets, obviously.

M. A. Griffiths

David Anthony Kate Benedict Alison Brackenbury Julie Carter Jehanne Dubrow Richard Epstein Angela France R. Nemo Hill Jee Leong Koh Rob Mackenzie Mary Meriam Alfred Nicol Chris O’Carroll Steve Schroeder Mike Stocks Allen Tice Wendy Videlock

Bundle o’ Tinder was selected for the 2007 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by Richard Wilbur. You can buy it from Waywiser Press (preferably) or Amazon.

Here are some reviews you can read online:

• Alison Brackenbury in Iota
• Clay Stockton at amazon.com
• Kevin Saving in The Recusant
• David Holper in The Chimaera
• Ned Balbo in The Antioch Review
• R. S. Gwynn in Able Muse

And here are some poems from the book:

• Neanderthal Bone Flute
• Poor Dolores
• Mortimer

I self-published my second collection, Native Species, in 2013.

It’s also available on Amazon, but I make slightly more per copy on CreateSpace sales.

Sample poems:

• The Lost Continent
• Platypus
• Enlightenment

Here are a few magazines in which I can remember, at some point, reading a few poems with pleasure.

Print

• 32 Poems. Slim, stylish. (Here’s a review of their Fall 2010 issue.)
• Able Muse. Metrical poetry, on the safe side. The print layout is surprisingly beautiful, considering how busy the website looks. The editor also runs Eratosphere. (Here’s a review of their Winter 2011 issue.)
• Anon. UK-based journal with an anonymous selection process.
• Atlanta Review. Much better than their cheesy-looking website might lead you to believe. (Here’s a review of their Spring 2012 issue.)
• Measure. Metrical poetry, skewing towards accessible blank-verse narrative. They also publish the Howard Nemerov sonnet award winners and finalists. (Here’s a review of their 2007 issue.)
• New Walk. A spritz of Brits.
• The Raintown Review. Metrical poetry, engaging articles. (Here’s a review of their September 2011 issue.)
• Rattle. Diverse, but with a penchant for plainspoken, hard-hitting free verse. (Here’s a review of their Summer 2012 issue.)
• River Styx. Not as deathly dull as the name suggests. (Here’s a review of their 2011 issue.)
• Poetry. Famous old magazine with a gazillion subscribers; you can read their back issues online. Good articles and Letters section. Occasionally they also print a good poem (just often enough to make me feel bad about all the times they’ve rejected me).

Online

• Angle. “Acute, possibly oblique, but never obtuse.”
• Anti-. Eclectic, contrarian.
• Kin. Eclectic, friendly.
• Lavender. Poetry by, about, and for lesbians.
• Mezzo Cammin. Women formalists.
• Now Culture. Weirdo hippie stuff. Awesome new web design for each issue.
• The Shit Creek Review. Defunct, but the archives are worth checking out. (I co-edited Issues 11-14.)
• Shot Glass. Short poems.
• Snakeskin. Accessible, smart, occasionally bawdy, a fun read.
• Verse Daily. One new poem every day.

Here are some good poems. Pick one at random and enjoy.

In the desert Not Waving But Drowning The Panther Small Song Sleep Stout Infantfish Arrest Making Bones Walk The world of dew Souvenir The Expert Manicure Sea Rose Fuschia Current ATM/Cashpoint Haunted by Waters The Lie Ghost Story Tattoo and Piercing Parlour Easter Sunday, 1985 Rounding Up the Mimes Don’t Freuden the Children Taking It All Off The English Are So Nice Amnestos Flashback Counting Out Rhyme North of Mist Made of Gauze Childhood Punishments My Papa’s Waltz My Papa’s Twist Those Winter Sundays This Be the Verse Strange Fruit A Refusal to Mourn the Death... The Force that Through the Green Fuse... Conestoga Bark Arrowhead Hunting Ephesus The Relics For All the Saints Prayer Iconography The Viking Terror Here Be Dragons Richard Corey Cacciatore Epic At Wounded Knee Witness This Advice to Young Ladies I, Being Born a Woman... What lips my lips have kissed... Why I Am Attracted to Men with Dyslexia You Anna Karenina (Or Like, Most of It) Meditation on a Bone The Fight Down Nocturne The Underground Attention Nothing Is Far Courage equals fever Ode to Gray The Paragon of Plants Bavarian Gentians The Mandarin Orange Tree The Man Who Wouldn’t Plant Willow Trees A Lemon You and Me and P. B. Shelley A Disappointment To Us All Normalization Ceasefire Death of an Irishwoman Sea Fevers A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford Root Cellar Dolor The Meadow Mouse The Two-Headed Calf The Cat with its Blue Collar Rabbit's Foot The Hare The Ram Crays Pigs Snake To a Dying Rat An Ancient Dog Grave... Explaining an Affinity for Bats Bat Meaner than a Junkyard Dog The Dogs of Ushuaia Stingers At the Burial of an Abbess The Second Coming They Feed They Lion The Tyger Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience Lady Pu-abi the sirens answer Sea Floor Sea Change The Eyes of the Drowned Watch Keels Going Over The Fish The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit Angel Shark The Dark Ray The Lorelei The Abortion My Baby Fell Apart Ultrasound Empty Confessional Still Life with an Addict For a Relapse Crazyjane & the Crack Pipe Our Lady of Perpetual Help Factory Sacrifice Bells of Rhymney Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio The Shipfitter’s Wife Meat Packing The Man with the Hoe Waiting for the Watch So They Would Not Steal Bites of Sugared Cake The Famine Year Gone Living Lochinvar In a Nearby City (Pockets on Coffee) In the Well Résumé Bric-a-Brac The Deep End Mortal Stakes Glass Machines We Tend to Sleep Better... My Land Lusus Naturae Candle Hat Workshop Wind Bells Foghorn Dover Beach The Consuming Angel The Sonnet Fist Reply to Your Impertinent Request Caricature of Lord Hervey You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered Bob Maledictus Requiescat An Essay on Criticism Men and Their Boring Arguments Fighting Words His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell The Explosion Two Boys On My First Sonne Mid-term Break Surprised by Joy And Then There Is That Incredible Moment... Why Publish? Practice Bittersweet Song Beauty in Trouble An Act of Final Beauty Pied Beauty God’s Grandeur God’s World Spring Sonnet Number 13 Somewhere in Africa Behaving Like a Jew The Mower Dirge Without Music Evening Benediction Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art After the Sun Rose The Harleys Beneath Thy Cross Christmas on Rhodes Dulce Et Decorum Est In Foreign Fields Musée des Beaux Arts Minor Character Ode to the Maggot I dream of you to wake... She was too kind... Cynthia on Horseback All in green went my love riding... In a Desert Place Being that Exquisite Weaving Pretty Barcelona Stories of Snow Hufsa The Snow Man Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening A Ballade of Suicide Acquainted With the Night With how sad steps, O moon... because the cut your presence Since there’s no help... More than most fair... Sweet warrior... French Braids There Was a Woman Once I Love You Sweatheart My mistress’ eyes... Late in the forest... A Taste of Ginger Not in a silver casket... Night is my sister... Nina’s Reply A Refusal to Sign the Zoning Petition A Rainy Morning The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise Batter my heart, three person’d God... Archaic Torso of Apollo The Love that Dares to Speak its Name The Sailor’s Hymn

Grasshopper: The Poetry of M. A. Griffiths Anything by Bill Knott In Company Rain Hapax Folly When Men Bow Down Breath Control Occupation pseudophakia The Optimist Life in the Second Circle The Deed of Gift What’s That Supposed to Mean Torched Verse Ends The Everyday Uncommon Equal to the Earth Word Hot This Way to the Exit Head Lands Facing the Remains Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems Coelacanth 0°, 0° The God of This World to His Prophet The Bird Artists

Hide Dances Learned Last Night Absence Has a Weight of its Own The Bell The Secret Language of Women Jazz Funeral Elephant Rocks Diary of a Cell This Bed Our Bodies Shaped Olives Smoke The Hardship Post Winter Light Where Horizons Go After the Revival Big-Eyed Afraid Here from Away An Alabaster Flask Anatomically Correct Shadows and Gifts The Harvest The Countess of Flatbroke We Internet in Different Voices Holding Patterns Graceways Aquinas Flinched Prospero at Breakfast Shakespeare’s Marijuana Easy Marks Words to Say Unholy Sonnets The Laws of Falling Bodies Body Grief

Free E-Books

• Time Was by Philip Quinlan
• A Game of Graces by Philip Quinlan
• Tarn by Mark Allinson
• Man Overboard by Alan Sullivan
• I Sing the Sonnet by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin

“Art is the lie that tells the truth.” —Pablo Picasso

“We must have the courage of our peculiarities.” —Marianne Moore

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” —Sigmund Freud

“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” —Randall Jarrell

“Prose tells you something, poetry does something to you.” —René Daumal

“The chief pleasure of rhyme is the rage it inspires in its opponents.” —Paul Valéry

“To write personally as a woman is to be ‘confessional’ but a man is ‘insightful’ or ‘soul-searching.’” —Eloise Stoneborough

“Your ‘I’ can become the universal ‘we’ if you dig deep, deeper than is comfortable, for the kernel of truth in your subject.” —Judith Barrington

“When I was in my twenties and writing iambic stanzas, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was a living reproach. For a while I denigrated Allen: ‘If he’s right, I must be wrong.’ Such an either/or is silly and commonplace: restrictions are impoverishments.” —Donald Hall

“It’s all good... unless it’s bad.” —K.R. Copeland

“I regret everything I had to do with poetry in my life. My involvement with it has brought nothing but unhappiness and bitterness.” —Bill Knott

“Poetry is like crack for English majors.” —Tom Jones

“It is a pyramid scheme.” —Janice Soderling

“It’s all a load of wank.” —Rob Godfrey

• Shop at EXOT Books, a chapbook press run by R. Nemo Hill
• Remember grasshopper, aka M.A. Griffiths
• Watch a video of Tim Murphy reading from his and Alan Sullivan’s translation of Beowulf. (Requires RealPlayer)
• Check out this collection of poems about wrestling, with artwork