Why Craft Talks?

Frederick Judd Waugh, “Sunset Rock”

Lately, I’ve been feeling the tension of loving other poets, and talking about poetry, and yet feeling the need to suppress that, since I made a commitment to myself that my main poetry newsletter Lanterns in the Dark would be just the creative work itself: just poetry, for everyone.

Over time, I became committed to specifically writing accessible poetry at Lanterns in the Dark, that can be enjoyed, or at least fairly easily grasped, by anyone, even my old high school and college friends who stumble upon it, even the X followers who occasionally show up and mention they rarely or never read poetry. The inward-turning, specialized nature of most of the MFA and the MFA writing world is not something I want to emulate; I deeply admire poets like Frost and Whitman who wrote poetry for everyone.

It might be a bad growth policy - there’s a very active and bustling network of other poets and most people are growing their audience through both writing about poetry as well as writing poetry. But I’ve wanted to have one place where I feel like I’m providing something, however slight or tiny, at best one brief moment of beauty in someone’s life if I’m lucky, as they scan through a poem quickly while going to the grocery store or going about their lives.

However, as I’ve seen or connected with lately some superb, particularly but not exclusively, Christian poets who are putting excellent work out regularly here, I want to have a space to boost their work, and engage with, and to riff and analyze poetry and the modern poetry landscape. So, that’s what this newsletter is for!

I may occasionally use it as a space for overtly faith poems, or more serious poems that I don’t feel fit Lanterns, but mostly I’ll just be writing about poetry, and hopefully more directly and frequently featuring and spotlight other people’s work, including guest contributors or poets!

Here are some topics you can look for me to talk about soon:

-Why has modern poetry stopped using personalization?

-Which lit journals are actually good?

-Why is Scott Cairns so great?

-What metaphor or analogy best matches the experience of writing poetry, and separately, reading poetry? What does it actually feel like?

I hope you’ll stick around!

~love Claire