Wanted!

by | Oct 8, 2019 | Bubbler, FSR

I’d cross any river if a poem or a story were on the other side, and that’s one reason I lobbied to become an editor for Free State Review in 2011, and eventually the book acquisitions editor for its publisher, Galileo Press. Being an editor lets me walk...

Where Have All the Demons Gone?

by | May 1, 2018 | Bubbler

The trouble with poets is that we don’t have any urban myths. No story of the mad sonneteer with hooks for hands sneaking around Lovers Lane. No legend of the cannibal food poet who ate his extended metaphor garnished with his victim’s liver comfit. Try doing a survey...

Breaking Lines

by | Mar 1, 2018 | Bubbler

a commentary on craft, by Barrett Warner  My buddy E. J. loves his iambic apartment in Catonsville. “Ten feet to the kitchen, ten feet to the bathroom, ten feet to the living room,” he says, grinning like a baseball in October. It’s the sort of home where everything...

Cover Letters

by | Feb 1, 2018 | Bubbler, FSR

 I was so nervous submitting poems to the Carolina Quarterly in 1981 that I composed four slightly different versions of a cover letter, and—overcome by terrific anxieties and wanting to be done with the whole affair—hastily included all of them with my...
Take a Shower with Your Poem

Take a Shower with Your Poem

by | Jan 1, 2018 | Bubbler

When you care about someone there’s always a better way to word a complaint. Instead of saying, “You stink,” you might say, “Let’s take a bath together.” Think of it as revision. Nothing says “I love you” like a little editing. Recently, my editor asked me to spend at...