Tag: poetry

Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
  • “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
  • Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
  • “Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
  • Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash

Friday Five: Q&A with poet Agnes Vojta

‘You don’t need anybody’s permission to be a poet. You just need to love it.’

Agnes Vojta
Agnes Vojta

Continuing this blog’s celebration of women authors throughout Women’s History Month, and furthering my desire to use this platform to highlight other authors, I’m delighted today to share this email interview with Agnes Vojta, a poet who happens to live in my neck of the woods here in Missouri and who also happens to teach physics at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

A native of Germany, Agnes is the author of three books of poetry — Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams — all published by Spartan Press in 2019, 2020, and 2022, respectively. More recently, she and eight other poets from Missouri and Arkansas collaborated to create the anthology Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry, published in December 2022 by Cornerstone Press. Agnes also serves as an associate editor for Thimble Literary Magazine and hosts Poetry at the Pub, a local reading and open mic event. She and her husband, Thomas, a professor and chair of physics at Missouri S&T, are avid hikers and kayakers who share their passion for the outdoors and information about Ozarks trails and more at RollaHiking.info.

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