RING #3: Columns/Interviews/Reviews

Robert Peake, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

Robert has captured 17 “creative exercises designed to demonstrate various “tactics” that poets can use to be “sneaky” with themselves in the creative process–to outwit the negative critic and analytical mind, and keep on keeping on in a free, creative space. While none of these ideas are are “new” in any universal sense, they are all tried-and-true techniques that have helped me along in my own creative process.”

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!

Dave Bonta, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

Dave is a contributor for a new poetry site that is all about reading poetry aloud.

Voice Alpha is a “companion site to the audio poetry journal Whale Sound; a repository for thoughts, theories, suggestions, likes and dislikes and anything else related to the art and science of reading poetry aloud for an audience.”

The site is new, and is sure to bring lots of great material to poets. Add it to your reader, or go visit often. Thanks to Nic Sebastian for creating a(nother) terrific resource. Or repository. Either way it is A Good Place.

Dave Bonta, Big Tent Poetry Sideshow Barker

Dave weighs in on a very recent essay by David Orr in a New York Times Sunday Book Review on the epigraph. Orr posits the epigraph is used to place the poet within a specific canon of work, and Dave thinks it has a place in modern poetry meant for a general readership. Read them both and see what you think. (Dave links to the Orr piece.)

… I’ve always thought that my most valuable attribute as (ahem!) a thinker is my ability to point out the obvious, so here goes: epigraphs are a convenient shortcut to alterity, a way of letting other voices in. They are sometimes integral to the original inspiration, and at other times simply a by-product of writerly enthusiasm, but in either case, they situate the poem not merely in a tradition but also within a kind of network of shared wonder at similar phenomena, ideas, or linguistic perversities.

Click on the excerpt to read the entire article. Check our About page for a list of other Sideshow Barkers, friends of Big Tent Poetry who are generous enough to share with us their columns, interviews and reviews. There is no set schedule for these appearances; willy-nilly is a symptom of creative genius!