On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves and not a single sparrow. I knew then, somehow, that I would never take my own life...

The body unbuckles the door latch / and stands behind the screen.

Exiled artist and poet Mustafa embarks on a journey home with his housekeeper and her daughter; together the trio must evade the authorities who fear that the truth in Mustafa's words will incite rebellion.

What makes Pablo Picasso such a representative 20th-century artist? Most of it has to do with his particular achievements, such as the visual ground he broke with his Cubist painting, sure, but some of it also has to do with the fact that his interests extended so far beyond painting.

"And kiss the hills for me, just once..." Blair set Emily Dickinson’s poem “Farewell,” found in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (public library), to song — acapella, no less — live at the Detroit Institute of Arts, filmed by Erik Proulx. Blair’s sudden death of heat stroke shortly after this performance, at the age of only forty-three, lends the poem a new solemn poignancy.

The author Jesse Ball discusses Lewis Carroll's ‘Jabberwocky’ and how precise prose doesn't always make for meaningful work. When I spoke to Jesse Ball, the author of A Cure for Suicide, he forged into the dense, alliterative groves of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Carroll’s poem famously relies on a strange, idiosyncratic language—but, Ball argues, it’s far from meaningless.

I was a teenage font addict. On Microsoft Word I’d lovingly scroll through the drop-down font menu: Avenir Book, Baskerville, Goudy, Goudy Old Style. For every story or poem I started to write, I first spent hours choosing the font. The dystopian soap opera could only be in Geneva; surrealist time travel, Book Antiqua.

How could caring for a dying woman be life affirming? Witnessing death confirms our own vitality: the caregiver is living, the cared for is dying. But before long the inevitable question creeps in: vital for how much longer? Kathleen Ossip’s The Do-Over brims with these apparent contradictions in a poetry of bracing both-ness...

The future is treebound in its iron feathers, lazy, possibly indigenous, mute as a roach and as scampery, so I pick up your sunglasses and put them down, I’m enthusiastic about sunglasses and saying your name in full— the high river in me would take a chainsaw to every tree and that’s the part that belongs to you.

The Emily Dickinson Museum will tell you that 'The kitchen appears to be one of the rooms where [Emily] Dickinson felt most comfortable, perhaps most at home.' But the 'many drafts of poems written on kitchen papers tell us also that this was a space of creative ferment for her, and that the writing of poetry mixed in her life with the making of delicate treats.' We still have access to Dickinson's gingerbread and doughnut recipes.

“Immerse yourself in the common ground of the universe so that your true voice — not the egoistic voice that clamors vainly for power (for it will ruin you if you listen to it) — your authentic voice … may be heard.” Why do we humans create — why do artists make art, why do writers write? Pablo Neruda gave a beautiful answer in his metaphor of the hand through the fence. For Joan Didion, the impulse is a vital gateway to her own mind.

Gulls are getting a lot bad press lately I think we can all agree that gulls are unsettling. It happens to be around about the right time of year for a poem featuring the seagull.

Courtney Symons on Medium discusses why she wrote the haikus, what she learned, and the importance of doing something creative every day.

A Literary History of the Pair. By Nick Ripatrazone.

In an ongoing series, the editors, former contributors, and readers of Eclectica have been invited to write a poem containing four pre-chosen words. The words for this issue are azalea, labor, hollow, and loss. Read the 11 selected poems here.

The strange story of how a number sequence that arises from the study of poetry makes an appearance in architecture and repeatedly arises in nature.

A poem written for a high school assignment about a bad day managed to make its way across the pond and then go viral. After a bad day, Londoner Ronnie Joice saw the poem "Worst Day Ever?" on a bar wall and felt so inspired that he decided to share it with his followers on Twitter. Soon it seemed as if everyone was sharing it.

"Love is dead," says the radio talk show host. Amanda, who is ten, considers this, but she is learning to tie knots, and sticks the tip of her tongue deftly to the left...

The Academy of American Poets

Poe’s vision of the cosmos and the art it inspired. By Max Nelson.