About Dorianne Laux: Dorianne Laux is an American poet.
We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffe...
Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.
You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.
Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.
Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in lang...
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously a...
Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.
The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago my mother's necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken the rose stem, water into drops, glass knob on the bedroom door. Last summer's pot of parsley and mint, white roots s...
Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry a...
Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from ...
Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.
