When does the course run, and what is the modality?

JH: Six Saturdays: October 3 to November 14. Halloween (10/31) will be off. The course will run live, on Zoom, from 1 p.m. EST to 3 p.m. EST. Note your time zones: that translates to start times at 12 p.m. CT, 11 a.m. MT, 10 a.m. PT.

What can I expect from the course?

JH: The course is not a workshop; it is seminar-based and generative. Six three-hour sessions will include lecture, discussion, and writing time. You will receive bespoke writing prompts that respond to each week’s lessons, as well as line edits and commentary from me on all submitted assignments. See the syllabus, above, for a peek at the six course units.

Are assignments required?

JH: No, assignments are invitations only. I have designed the course with the hope that students can get a lot from if even if they just tune in to the sessions. Responding to the prompts and submitting work will enhance your experience but is not required.

What if I have to miss class sessions?

JH: No worries. All sessions will be recorded and distributed internally so that folks who have to miss sessions (or come late/leave early) can watch when they’re able. For privacy, recordings will not be posted or shared publicly and will be deleted after the class wraps. Students who have to miss a class can still submit assignments and expect feedback from me.

Can I participate asynchronously only?

JH: Yes! If you are on a schedule or in a time zone that makes live participation difficult, you’re welcome to watch each week’s video at your convenience, submit assignments, and receive feedback. I will be hosting two “office hour” sessions across the class run where any student can pop in and ask questions; this will be especially useful if you are an asynchronous student.

What if I already took Spring Forms in 2026?

JH: You’re more than welcome, and in fact, you’re primed to succeed in this class! All content, except for a brief return to the Golden Shovel in week 1, will be new and distinct from Spring Forms.

Are scholarships available?

JH: I have tried to make the course as affordable as possible (about $25 per live instruction hour), and I also understand and appreciate financial concerns. DM me if you have questions or concerns about paying for the course, including paying in installments.

Reach out with any and all questions here, and register below.

Register for Fall Forms here

See you in the ether ~

Jane

Here’s my quote from the press release, which you can read in full here:

“In a time when support for artists is dwindling across the nation, I’m thankful to have this opportunity to share my new poems, which emerged across three years of writing and revising. In many ways, Dilemma represents what spilled over the edges of my Ph.D. studies; ideas and responses to ideas that rejected closure, as [Lyn] Hejinian wrote, or simply geared into my lived experience with such mysterious fidelity that they were primed to become poems. I hope readers recognize in the titular ‘dilemma’ the asymmetries of experience and interpretation: mind and body, eros and fear, text and techne, thinking and doing.”

Given the relatively truncated production schedule (the book will be released in March of next year), I am beginning to plan a modest book tour for the new year, one which I am happy to extend into summer, fall, and winter 2027. If you would me to visit your college or high school campus, local bookstore, bar, reading series, conference, etc., please reach out, and we can make something happen. I am open to traveling to your city and/or showing up in your Zoom room. Many of you will recall that back in 2023, when my first book was released, I had to all but cancel my book tour because I got very sick with COVID-19, symptoms of which hung on for many months. I am grateful to be on the other side of that illness and looking forward to using this second book as a reason to visit more places and meet more people.

I’ll be in touch when I have more information regarding the book (cover, preorders, et al.) Thanks again for your tremendous enthusiasm and support for my poetry.

///

Another thing that I would like to share while I have your attention is that my “THINKING TWICE: Revision Clinic” class begins in a few weeks, and there are still a few open seats. This is going to be a highly experiential course, where, in addition to study and lecture, you will be writing in real time, experimenting with one or more revision methods each week. I want students to leave the class with a substantial stack of newly revised poems as well as a more advanced toolkit for revising future poems. I recognize that the timing in late summer isn’t ideal for many who are on the academic calendar and/or who care for children, so I want to assure you that sessions will be recorded and shared (only internally) afterward. If you need to miss a session or two, or if you want to join the course asynchronously (and still receive feedback from me), you have options. Get in touch with me for more info or snag one of the last seats here.

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I am away this week, teaching at the MFA residency at Warren Wilson (where it is 999 degrees but otherwise extremely cool), so all classes and consults are on ice until I return on July 12. I wish that I, too, was on ice.

Sunday Morning Poetry is paused until after my Thinking Twice: Revision Methods Clinic, wraps on September 13. SMP will resume on September 20. There are just a few seats left in that class, so snag yours soon if you plan on joining.

Between now and then, regular SMP students should feel welcome to attend ongoing weekly Wednesday Night Poetry sessions. Please feel free to register for either/both “A” and “B” sessions; these just signify alternating weeks.

I will continue doing 1:1 consultations on Tuesday evenings through summer and fall. These sessions can be used in any way that feels useful to you including reviewing poems and discussing publication strategies.

A reminder that Fall Forms, part II of the Spring Forms class, begins on October 3. All students are welcome, whether or not you have taken Spring Forms already. The material will be new.

A general note: If payment plans make my classes more accessible to you, please reach out by social media or email.

See you in the ether.

JH

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Anna Reivilä (Finnish, b. 1988), “Bond 22,” 2017.

I love being asked, Where did this poem come from? Thanks again to Leah Umansky, for selecting the poem for the contest, and to the eds at Midway for publishing it.

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What I love first about Kelly Hoffer’s second full-length collection, Fire Series, a recent release from Pitt Poetry Series, is what is missing from it.

As an enthusiast of “self-erasure” as a poetic practice — a highly dynamic form made increasingly popular since TA Greathouse’s smashing “burning haibun” emerged in the late 2010s — I was delighted to see the artfulness and originality with which Hoffer takes it on.

Several of her own poems, beginning with “Chemical lace / day series,” get the erasure treatment, printed twice in the manuscript: first, in full body, and then with parts grayed out, a second “found” poem emerging from it, as if from ash.

In a collection that proposes that destruction and creation can be equally generative (see: haunting; ego death; prescribed burns; a “slash” of felled trees — a definition that epigraphs the book), it is suitable that these self-erasure poems become ruinscapes. Ruined but not barren.

Susan Stewart reminds us in The Ruins Lessons that the ruin “confuses the interior with the exterior and the transparent with the opaque as it also shows the interrelatedness of those aspects of perception.” So does Hoffer, as she challenges us to read two poems at once, as with a contrapuntal: “ruin riles me,” the emergent poem reads.

Fitting that this poem has two titles, segmented, of course, with a slash.

I would have loved to see these found pieces printed a third time, which would have made each triptych a “series” in its own right. But Hoffer does, perhaps more artfully, take her erasure project a third step, obliterating language all together. Fire Series is punctuated by pages on which only slashes are printed, laid out in lucid, often-asymmetrical patterns. Here are poems reduced to their wiring, their most interstitial parts.

As I know Hoffer to be a talented visual artist in addition to a poet, I was happy to see that her second book has a strong visual aspect. And like the typographic poems of the twentieth century that are these poems’ ancestors, her slashes nearly denote. I page backward and forward, looking for their antecedents in the other poems, but do not find them. Like feeling a few snowflakes on your face but looking up to a cloudless sky.

In a recent interview with Martha Stuit, Hoffer speaks to these visual, asemic pieces (phrase my own) as playing with two definitions of the “slash:” both the “debris left in a forest after logging of a tract, or resulting from high wind or fire,” and punctuation marks, which, for poets, often signify a line break—that which both cleaves, and cleaves.

Dickinson dashed so that Hoffer could slash. These are Emily’s dashes, half-risen from the dead. Whitman’s blades of grass, all leaning.

But in as much as Hoffer demonstrates the capacities of erasure, other poems in the manuscript self-generate, reproduce, and regrow — perhaps these are the “two forms” that “the mind shivers / between.”

The first poem in the book called “flame” begins with “I want him / he finds / me.” The next poem, also called “flame,” riffs on the first, beginning, “I tell him / I want him / want / want / want / he finds / me.” The very next, called “old flame,” is another continuation (“I tell him what / I want I want him / to tell me what I / want”), and the three, together, a palimpsest. I want to lay the three atop one another on tissue paper.

(If you dig this move, read Sawako Nakayasu’s Pink Waves, which takes it to its most extreme).

Hoffer’s “faces of the diamond” poems, a light-scatter of short pieces that utilize repetition, with variation, also feel heuristic in their generative projects. Repetition with variation exercises language’s excess, demonstrating what each word can do, if tended. In one, “Less thing than I realized” becomes “the thing I less realized. In another, “I left her like a jilted bride” (iambic tetrameter, my darling) becomes “like her, I left, a jilted bride.”

Fire Series, at its most blue-hot, is an elegy: a poet contending with the death of her mother — an almost unbearable utterance — as well as the consequences of the utterance itself. (“How do I protect my mother / from my lyric tendency?” she asks. And then later, “how do you protect a body from language?”

But at its most red, the book is a treatise on desire. Mourning and wanting flare in this collection, twin-flamed. “If I am bigger or smaller than my mother—,” Hoffer writes, “she understands my wanting / language. my mouth opens, cherry-stained, / I am hungrier than she can stand / to provide.”

These poems ache for myriad intimacies: self, other, partner, mother. I feel it especially when their diction breaks down, such as in the “Racket” triptych near the end of the book, where pure sense-making is secondary to sensation and sound. Conventions of rightness are replaced by the poet’s “itch for undoing:”

an opportune

shiver in the concept

am I, aren’t we

how does it feel

to be included

ear an eraser to be

had in the head

Indeed, it is these most “undone” poems, which Hoffer writes with her ear-erasure, following sound like a desire line, her “voice on a high-wire / tight-hope / tongue-tuck / dip-trick,” that undo me the most. The result is a collection that demands multiple re-reads as it rebuilds itself.

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On the other hand, the conference always relights a little fire in me. This time, I saw a small vision of what my life can look like post-PhD, which, I think involves engaging more here, particularly with the micro review series I started last year. I thought I would also try to do a monthly round-up of things I want to share. I wish I could do more, and maybe I will do, eventually, but for now, here’s a few things I’ve been getting up to:

1. I had two poems from my new manuscript in Poetry Magazine, which is always a delight (click to read on your browser/listen to me read them). The first is called “Expression,” and it is, surprising nobody, about coughing. The second, “Vers Libre,” is the opener to the second manuscript, and it is very much an ars poetica, and invocation for this next era of my writing life. An editor once told me that my verse was “constipated,” and metaphorical implications aside, I tend agree, that loosening on the page is necessary to a liberatory poetic practice:

2. I was interviewed by Sean Singer, and was happy to publish this new poem on his blog, “The Sharpener.” I have been writing a lot of poems about writing poems, which I know is well-trod territory, but the creative act has begun to take on new resonances for me. I feel like the more I learn, the less I know, and I am trying to use poems to interrogate the philosophical basics of understanding, being understood.

   

3. Denver Quarterly, for which I serve as associate editor, is currently open for poetry and prose submissions through March 31. What should you submit? We tend to skew toward the experimental, in both form and content, and because that can have so many meanings, I always tell writers to show us what you can do. We might be the journal for the poem that takes that formal risk that you haven’t been able to place anywhere else. We also love strong, surprising images, as well as nuanced approacs to the lyric.

4. Words Like Blades this month will feature Jennifer Militello, Carey Salerno, & Bianca Stone. Click here to register for free to get the Zoom link. It it going to be a wonderful event, and as always, three guests will win copies of the poets’ books.

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More soon,

Jane

Learn more/Register here

Contact me with questions

With the shuttering of my beloved Iowa Summer Writing Festival, I was mourning the widespread loss of online poetry programs in recent years. I counted on my income from teaching for the festival, and was fed heart and soul by my once- or twice-annual teaching experiences there. I know many writers and educators are feeling this way, whether they attended the festival once or fifteen times. And I know that others are feeling the hit in other communities, as arts organizations struggle to keep their doors open.

My remedy is to take matters into my own hands, meaning that I will be running this course on my own, without the scaffolding of a major institution. (My standard poodle, a minor institution indeed). I have been teaching poetry and literature courses in online modalities for almost a decade, including the last six months, when I have launched multiple weekly writing workshops, and so I feel ready for this next challenge. I hope that this means I can offer a truly bespoke, experimental, and affordable course.

We will deeply engage with one poetic form (as well as many of its propagations, manifestations, and spin-offs) each week. Writers of all experience levels are welcome, including beginners and experts. Each session will be three-hours long with a break at halfway. Lectures will be recorded and distributed, in case you need to miss a session, You can expect lectures from me, rich discussion with your peers, generative writing opportunities, and feedback on (optional) weekly submissions.

Reach out here, on social, or by email if you have questions, and register for the class by clicking the button below and scrolling to “Spring Forms.” I hope to see you in the spring.

Register here

As such, I have updated my online scheduler to represent my availability for one-on-one, sixty-minute sessions through December 2025 (January availability will be posted in about a month from now). These sessions are flexible: we can look at new or revised poem together, discuss professionalization (publishing strategies, etc.), and/or do what feels most useful to your writing life. Since starting a full-time job, I have reeled in my availability a bit, so these slots tend to get snapped up fast.

Click here to reserve a spot.

I also have built out the pop-up poetry workshop schedule for the months of December and January, with offerings on Sundays (Sunday Morning Poetry, SMP; Sunday Afternoon Poetry, SAP), a few Mondays (Monday Night Poetry, MNP), Wednesdays (WNP), and one Thursday (TNP). If you’ve never come to a pop-up class, here’s what to expect:

• Friendly: Supportive, rigorous twice-monthly poetry workshops for intermediate to advanced writers that meet on Zoom in evenings and on weekends

• Flexible: No commitment required! Come when you can, pay when you come

• Affordable: $30.00 per session, payable online via PayPal or debit/credit card. (Venmo and Zelle are also available, upon request.)

• No gag order: I lead workshop using a version of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, which ensures that artists are part of the conversation during workshop, not passive recipients of critique.

• Get feedback: Send a poem 24 hours ahead of time to be included in the course packet; price includes line edits from me in the two weeks between sessions, sent over email.

• Grow your network: Connect with new poets and friends across the country.

Click here to sign up.

Hope to see you in the ether.

Jane

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I was also happy to publish a poem in the new-to-me online literary journal, Community Mausoleum, titled “A few notes on a passage from Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness.” It is one of a series of reading-response poems that will appear in my second book; they are poems that appeared to me while reading other authors, though they only obliquely tie into their source material. I’ve been fascinated by response and homage poems for a long time, as I think of all creative writing as being connected via an underground network of roots. (I just recently learned about Colorado’s quaking aspen tree: singular, tree.) Thank you to editor Zach Peckham for taking a leap on this poem, and for the wonderful work the journal is doing.

Poem is based on a true story. Above: My waterlogged paperback in question.

Thanks for reading. More soon ~

Jane

I love the English language when it is mediated by Dora Malech. Mediated, by Dora Malech, into a specific closeness, where words bump into like and unalike words, creating new, open, susurrating systems of meaning and sound: “In saying, saying skews to light makes (slants to) sight.” Buckle up, buttercup.

I am a longtime fan of Malech’s acuity with wordplay, which, in her most recent collection, trying x trying, out this week from Carnegie Mellon University Press, is a reward, dense as poundcake. In the poem, “verum factum,” Malech writes: “a flaw I follow seems / seam’s source sutured // soldered line of scar-shine’s / old itch good as knew,” and her confident, connotative, musical ear, playful as a monkey wrench (and just as dire), shines through.

But as it is with many of her collections (and like the poetry books I tend to love most) trying x trying is a moving target: no feeling, and no form, is final. The book’s enigmatic title, and its second poem (“Attempted Haiku”), suggest at the onset what the book is: a trial.

Indeed, poems like “verum factum” do populate txt (an apt initialism), and I am excited by Malech’s distinctive un-sprung sprung verse, which I have come to know from her previous collections; phrases and lines that are homophonic to an extreme degree — xylophonic! “[…] each ornery orrery” on its “ autopsy-turvy / table.”

But this is just one of many poetic modes present in the book. Two pages later, in “Living Situation,” Malech writes with relative narrative clarity — a tall drink of water, and a very different kind of poem: “My roommate would return home late / from Bible study group at Denny’s, / smelling of syrup, saying prayer’s // what matters most right now.” It is this swerve across modes and musical registers that delights me most about trying x trying, “the “swerve that one / good turn // deserves. another // riven swivel, / pivot fodder.” Instead of feeling distracted or held together with tape, these different modes offer a spectrum of angles from which Malech can look at the world.

So what is trying x trying trying to do?

It is in many ways, it is a book about pregnancy: the body’s alien indignities, body as “microclimate,” and, subsequently, about parenting: “I turn from a line’s easy awe / to endless demands, sticky hands at my hem.” And it is a book about the American political moment, the “news” that is always on, never new. Malech writes of babies: “Just one’s inside me, but another’s ascending to the throne our nation prides itself on not having.”

Thus, “lineage,” in both manifestations (child, nation), resonates across the collection. And in a third way, as the book considers poetic inheritance, both in how systems of language are made, passed down, translated (“Our journey hangs on a letter’s hinge”), and in poems written in homage to and after Venezuelan poet Vicente Gerbasi, “Father of my loneliness and of my poetry.” These poems slingshot the lyric “I” through history (see, Malech’s writes, the “slingshot” of the Spanish “y”).

Many churning rivers confluence in trying x trying, which, beautifully, never finds its footing (recall the idiom about the same river, twice). But it tries, each poem standing in the doorway between reticence and perseverance, of the wholeness and partiality of any single subjectivity, alert to the world and at odds. “To try to build a resting / place is restless business,” Malech writes in the poem, “Nesting,” “unfinished, always / an errant twig, an open mouth.”

Indeed, Malech toys with errancy: her poems waver metrically; they trick the ear: they quaver, short-circuit, stop short; they spill over the edge; they change their minds (especially the book’s penultimate poem, “Travelogue,” which spans seven manuscript pages and experiments with a gorgeous irregularity of line and stanza structures, dictions, and moods). trying x trying is a book of self-consciousness, a trying-out, as if for living itself — a trying-on, of answers that don’t quite fit. And yet, “inside the accident,” Malech writes, “our secret hands shake.” (It’s almost Keatsian.) Brilliant in its trial, and error.

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At the jump, I love Kelsi Vanada’s new poetry collection, Optional Saint, a new prinsesstårta-green volume from Bench Editions, because it rewards my desire to find in a poem signs of its making. “I believed in the impatient, runaway phrase,” she writes in her first poem, “Increase in Us True Religion.”

And yet, Vanada’s poetics are decidedly patient (though, “runaway” I accept, as many of these poems sprawl across the page in long, unbroken lines. Many are nearly prose poems if not for their decisive right margins cutting against the prosaic impulse at the last minute: a chicken game.)

Or, if the collection is not patient (and perhaps there is an artful impatience in Vanada’s leaping, connotative imagination), then it is decidedly considered: Vanada’s translator’s hand, careful and creative in its laying down of words and phrases to specific ends, is demonstrable in the intentionality and strangeness of her diction. The poems often torque familiar grammatical structures and constructions into that which is less familiar. The reader re-reads, double-takes.

For example, the phrase, “More inclined to suffer has a door” turns “More inclined to suffer” into a noun, a subject, a thing that “has a door.” It is linguistically strange but emotionally available moments like these that distinguish Vanada’s poetry: as it traces the poet’s motion of mind across topics of sublimity, consciousness, sex, god, family, art-making (big themes that in Vanada’s hands feel as intimate as “baptism in a blow-up pool,” which is to say, very) the book circles the drain of what language does, and doesn’t.

(I’m borrowing, here, Vanada’s artful leniency with the power of the contraction, a move that delights me across these poems: “My best posture’s when I’m on the move.” “The best shot’s shot right through;” “What I need’s a small good word.”)

And yet, for all of its depth of intellect, the collection’s diction often resembles the jotted-off, spoken language of modern life: bits of dialogue, heard, overheard, and quoted (which Vanada makes known in her notes page; even Susan Howe makes an appearance “on her webcam.'“). Her poem, “Nothing Too Crazy,” exemplifies this; one line reads, “Hope you’re fine and the storm just something on the news” and what is elided gives it the diction of a text message, giving it a casual urgency.

Indeed, what “plain” language can accomplish is at stake in this collection. Everyday English is interrogated for its odd priorities and categories (“Just as following is simple, it isn’t easy;” “A bag I wear like a purse;” “The word’s a name, she’d say”) as is the play between homophones and homonyms: (“Did my air alter the air in his room?” “We stood in the yard. We stood a yard apart.” “My kitten’s a little bit horse.”) In a Vanada’s own words, in these poems, “English / like a caterpillar just lies down.”

Such is the beautiful tension of Optional Saint: even in this book of strange proclamations (which, the poet admits, are “hard to make”), deft accuracy of feeling and experience, and curiosity toward the flexibility of language, the poet’s expertise continually flickers. “All we say is grasp,” Vanada writes. Her poetic approach is one of grasping: at conveyance, exactitude; at utterance, translation; at the image (which flickers, too); at the present (“now, now now;”) and at truth, something “far-flung enough / to be trend suspicious.”

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I am delighted to share that I have built out a website for my twice-monthly Pop-up Poetry Workshops, which I piloted in April and have been holding on Zoom, weekends and evenings, ever since. The program is growing swiftly, and if you are a poet looking for useful feedback and expanded community, I would love to invite you to join us.

Register for a session here

What makes this programming unique?

• Friendly: Supportive, rigorous twice-monthly poetry workshops for intermediate to advanced writers* that meet on Zoom in evenings and on weekends

• Flexible: No commitment required! Come when you can, pay when you come

• Affordable: $30.00 per session, payable via PayPal or debit/credit card. (Venmo and Zelle are also available, upon request.)

• No gag order: I lead workshop using a version of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, which ensures that artists are part of the conversation during workshop, not passive recipients of critique.

• Get feedback: Send a poem 48 hours ahead of time to be included in the course packet; price includes line edits from me in the two weeks between sessions, sent over email.

• Grow your network: Connect with new poets and friends across the country.

  
  *Inquire directly with questions regarding your preparedness; the answer is almost always yes.

A testimonial from a recent poet-participant: “Jane is thoughtful, brilliant, and insightful, and she cultivates an atmosphere of curiosity and connection among the participants that leads to close reading of the work and meaningful discussion focused on improving the poem's craft. Honestly, a 2-hour workshop with Jane is a steal at only $30.” ~ , author of .

The sessions are first-come, so snag a seat if if you want one. Hope to see you in the ether.

JH

Writing Soundly: Fine-Tuning the Acoustics of your Poetry

Jane Huffman, Instructor

Dates/Time:

Saturdays, May 3–31, 2025

11:00 am – 2:00 pm Iowa/Central Time

12:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern Time

9:00 am - 12:00 pm Pacific Time

10:00 am – 1:00 pm Mountain Time

Course Description

Poet Ishion Hutchinson writes, “I can hear the poem before it arrives.” In this class, this concept will become the focus of our exploration. Students will deep dive into the sonic, musical, and other sound-based aspects of poetry writing. Each week, we will explore a set of acoustic tools—assonance, consonance, syllabics, and meter––as these appear in both received forms and free verse poems, and work to expand our toolkit to include rhyme, chiasmus, repetition, and other rhythmic and musical possibilities on (and off) the page. All of these terms will be thoroughly defined in class as we go.

Half of each session will take a seminar format; students will engage with reading materials from living, modern, and pre-modern poets and thinkers and participate in lively class discussions. The second half of each session will be a workshop. Students will be invited to share new work that responds to lessons learned, giving and receiving feedback via Liz Lerman’s “Critical Response Process,” a highly approachable, artist-focused workshop method that the instructor will introduce in the first class session. The instructor will also provide an array of custom, optional writing prompts each week, based on our source texts and emergent curiosities, to guide students’ writing practices.

This course is open to writers of all experience levels; no prior experience with poetry writing is necessary. This workshop also includes a 30-minute one-on-one conference with the instructor.

Register for the event for free here. All registrants will be entered into a raffle to win copies of our readers' books.

About the series: During this dark time for the country & the world, poets and scholars Jennifer Franklin, Jane Huffman, Nathan McClain, and Ren Wilding have come together with the goal to gather once a month to listen to poets read their new work as an act of refuge and an act of resistance. Our series is founded on James Baldwin's belief that, "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... If you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it." The four curators plan to pair a diverse group of established poets & emerging poets (with new or recent collections) and, when possible, focus on Mentors and Mentees reading together to calm, center, and inspire activism and positive change. At its core, this series will focus on inclusivity and celebrating connections.

Hope to see you there!

More soon,

Jane

Artwork from the film Across The Universe.

I recently reread W.S. Merwin’s collection, The Lice, and was struck on this read by his smaller poems, especially those that employ various three-part structures (some overt, some subtle). These poems have a haiku-ish quality, even when their “threeness” is obscured by their larger formal structures. What I love about a traditional haiku is the way it unfolds across three gestures, its observational powers often gaining complexity—building towards something, breaking something down, or pivoting all together, to highlight contrast—as it does. In The Lice, this quality is perhaps most evident in the poem, “Wish,” whose three couplets present three obliquely tied, but still tied thoughts:

Wish

The star in my
Hand is falling

All the uniforms know what’s no use

May I bow to Necessity not
To her hirelings 

*

Each of these stanzas suggest a failing quality, a faltering, or a givingupness, but it does not totally succumb to despair, and certainly not to stillness or stiltedness. Across its three gestures, it moves from the lyric first person in the first stanza; (“my / Hand…”); then to the close(ish) omniscient point of view in the second, when the speaker looks outward at “the uniforms;” and back to the first person in the third stanza (“May I bow…”), though that person has been changed in the process of thinking. If the star has fallen out of his hand, and those in charge (perhaps) indicate that there is no hope, what can one do but return to simplicity, back to the basics, what is essential and nothing more? “Necessity,” that which one much ally themselves, rescues the now-starless, verging hopeless speaker. In a sense, the poem operates formally in the shape of problem-problem-solution, or meditation-observation-dedication, which vaguely resembles some of my favorite haiku, such as “A World of Dew” by Kobayashi Issa:

A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.

And “The Taste of Rain” by Jack Kerouac:

The taste
Of rain
—Why kneel?

As I was reading the Merwin and considering the brilliance of “The Wish,” that poem became a lens through which I began reading other poems in the book. This kind of haphazard, intuitive, or coincidental kind of scholarship is some of the most generative for me (don’t tell me my dissertation committee). Suddenly, I started seeing groups of three everywhere, even in Merwin’s monostitches, such as “Early January:”

Early January

A year has come to us as though out of hiding
It has arrived from an unknown distance
From behind the visions of the old
Everyone waited for it by the wrong roads
And it is hard for us now to be sure it is here 
A stranger to nothing
In our hiding places

On first glance, this poem doesn’t operate in a set of three, but consider the following reanimation, with new stanza breaks I implemented (as the poet rolls in his grave):

     Early January

     A year has come to us as though out of hiding     
     It has arrived from an unknown distance

     From behind the visions of the old     
     Everyone waited for it by the wrong roads     
     And it is hard for us now to be sure it is here     

     A stranger to nothing     
     In our hiding places

Merwin’s lack of punctuation gives the monostitch a fluid quality, which creates tension when experienced alongside his stable, relatively complete sentences. But if you dissect the poem into three parts, like I have done above, it is easier to see the motion of mind from one subject to another. In the first reconstructed couplet, the subject of the poem is “A year;” it has “arrived,” has “come to us,” “out of hiding” and” “from an unknown distance.” In the second stanza, Merwin more vividly portrays the scene and raises the stakes: he writes that “everyone waited: for the “year” to “come” “from behind visions of the old…” “by the wrong roads.” It is a more meditative stanza, ripe with uncertainty that resonates with “unknown distance.” It feels like a step further into, or out of, clarity. The third stanza, then, is more summative, more resolved, more like a volta against the previous two stanzas.

I did the same blasphemous work on the poem, “The Room,” which I think crystalizes Merwin’s sense of three-ness as I see it across his shorter works:

The Room

I think all this is somewhere in myself
The cold room unlit before dawn
Containing a stillness such as attends death
And from a corner the sounds of a small bird trying
From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark
You would say it was dying it is immortal 

My reanimated version:

     The Room

     I think all this is somewhere in myself

     The cold room unlit before dawn
     Containing a stillness such as attends death
     And from a corner the sounds of a small bird trying
     From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark

     You would say it was dying it is immortal 

I love how this poem takes its reader on a journey from the first person to the second person, as if handing off the responsibility for the utterance to the reader. The first line, “I think all this is somewhere in myself,” the “this” gesturing back to the idea of a “room,” has the mood of a spontaneous meditation. Then, the poem literalizes the idea, the “room” is “cold,” it contains “a stillness,” and inside of it, “the sounds of a small bird,” “a few beats in the dark.” These images imagine the experience of standing in a real space, while simultaneously constructing a metaphor of the internal world; remember, “all this is somewhere in myself.” And then, in a stunning final gesture, the “room” in the poem falls apart, like a box collapsing, and the poet is looking directly at us, his reader. The second person “you” implicates us, puts us in space next to him. His final thought, the most cryptic in the poem (and one of the most mysterious moments in The Lice, in my opinion), mashes together two contradictions: “it was dying it is immortal.” This is indeed a reference to the “bird,” but the bird, of course, is a metaphor, perhaps a metaphor for thought—“from time to time to fly a few beats in the dark—or the inner world at large.

I found it tremendously useful to “break down” these Merwin poems this way, especially because (and in spite of) the characteristic lack of punctuation in The Lice that often gives the poems a feeling of running together. I like this tension, how, formally, these poems have a a quality of wholeness, but when read carefully, and, perhaps “incorrectly,” you can see their seams.

This interview was first published in the “Grants & Awards: The Writing Contest Newsletter” written and distributed by Poets & Writers Magazine. It appeared in the “Writers on Winning” column, but I owe it to editor Luciano Grigera Naón for asking me questions that allowed me to reflect on the publication process more broadly. I wanted to share it here, for those not (yet) subscribed to their newsletter. I hope you enjoy reading some thoughts on the beast that we aptly call “submitting.”

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In this week’s installment of Winners on Winning, Jane Huffman discusses the extensive process of revising her poetry manuscript before publication and the importance of remaining levelheaded when receiving both positive and negative feedback. Huffman is the winner most recently of the Honickman First Book Prize, which offers a prize of $3,000 and publication by American Poetry Review for a debut poetry collection. Her winning collection, Public Abstract, was selected by Dana Levin and will be published on September 26. The deadline for the 2024 contest is October 1.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Huffman is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry at the University of Denver. She is also the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2019, and her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, and elsewhere. [Bio edited in March 2025 for accuracy.]

What do you generally look for in a contest?

I think it is most important to send your work to presses/journals that you respect and admire and that you know will take good care of the writing. I also think casting a wide net is a crucial factor; I don’t have to tell your readership of poets and writers that the field is very competitive. For many years I sent my manuscript out to several different open reading periods and contests at presses. But in every scenario, I was sure to do at least a bit of homework on the press, its process, and its masthead.

I was excited to send my manuscript to the Honickman First Book Prize, sponsored by American Poetry Review, because I have held the magazine and small press in high esteem for many years, enjoyed the books selected in previous years, and admired Elizabeth Scanlon’s good work as editor. I also have long admired Dana Levin’s poetry and her vision as an educator, and she was judging the contest in 2023. That made it an exciting prospect for me—and all the more wonderful when she selected my manuscript. During the process I was very happy to work with Elizabeth and the book designer, Gopa Campbell, who understood my vision for the cover and interior and realized it beautifully. Dana also helped with final decision-making for individual poems and the ordering of the book, which was above and beyond her call of duty. I felt like I was supported by a team.

How do you select the writing you’ll submit to a contest? How do you know when your work is ready? Do you have trusted readers you send your writing to beforehand?

I don’t know how any artist knows when their work is done. Just that it evokes a certain feeling, a snapping into form, a bit of a brain tingle, when it has reached a sense of completion. (I am using loose terms like “sense” because that is really how I experience it.)

Yes, I have a handful of trusted mentors and friends who I like to share my work with before I send it out. That is an important part of the process for me, as I know I benefit from outside vision.

In terms of selecting what writing I send out, it is worth noting that the book manuscript that eventually won the Honickman First Book Prize saw many revisions and existed in many (sometimes radically different) versions. Before I won the contest, I had been sending out versions of the manuscript for around five years, and it changed massively over the course of time. In those years, I grew and changed a lot as a writer and person. I was publishing somewhat frequently in literary magazines during that time, which also helped me hone my process and voice on the page, both of which have been very fluid. I relied on many people—teachers, friends, and mentors—to guide me. In retrospect, the manuscript as it stands today wasn’t ready until it was, and I’m grateful I stuck with it despite a pile of nos.

There’s also a question of cost; contest entry fees can be very expensive. Every year, I set a submission budget for myself and try to stick to that.

What have you learned from submitting your writing to contests? Has anything changed about your approach to finding and entering a competition?

I think I am a bit more selective now than I was before in terms of where I send my writing, but I am also very busy pursuing a PhD, which explains why I am producing less work and submitting a lot less than I was in previous years, when I would often have more than 25 packets in the Submittable ether. (Right now I think I have only three!) I say that I am “selective,” but that does not mean that I just want to see my work in what we might call “high-caliber” journals. I love small, online journals (I ran Guesthouse for years) because they tend to take excellent care of your work and promote it widely on social media. I have learned that finding an audience for your work, however small, is the truly fulfilling part of publishing. It sounds trite, but it is true. My advice for anyone just starting to submit to magazines and contests is to not worry about the perceived clout of a venue or contest. If you trust the people working there, enjoy the work they publish, and appreciate the aesthetics of their presentation (which is also important to me), then send your work there. If you can bear being on social media, share your work there as well.

Submitting to contests can be an emotional rollercoaster. Do you have any advice for how to handle the ups and downs of writing contests, including the inevitable losses as well as the successes?

Some might disagree, but I think the best way to survive the writing and publishing life with some degree of sanity is to minimize the emotional distance between its peaks and valleys. I learned this from the poets I most admire, particularly Diane Seuss, who was my teacher in undergraduate and remains a friend and mentor. I work hard to remain levelheaded about what comes my way––a rejection is not the end of the world, and an acceptance (even winning a book contest) is not the end-all, be-all. It also helps me to think of all these communications––because that is really all they are––as part of a greater picture, as signs of life or proof of my doing the work. This way of thinking also helps me resist (as much as possible) the demand (or urge) to commodify my poetry. It keeps me returning to the writing itself. My relationship with the poems is more essential than any publishing accomplishment or lack thereof. It is not easy; I am an emotional and highly anxious person. Nobody who knows me would describe me as “lighthearted” or “easygoing.” But over the years, I have gotten good at absorbing the hits and celebrating the good news, but neither in excess.

How do you see contests like the Honickman First Book Prize fitting into the bigger picture of your writing career?

I am grateful to have published my first book, and for the enthusiastic audience it has found. It gives me encouragement for the next project

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