The Chapter One Project from Marsh Hawk Press features the memoirs of outstanding poets from diverse backgrounds, recalling the ways by which they found their start as writers. While creative writing programs seek to develop the talents of maturing writers, essential information about the development of the writing craft will be discovered in the early memoirs—the Chapter One’s—of established poets published in this series. Each month we’ll post a new Chapter.
For more on the Chapter One Series read our Project Proposal
January 2022: Barbara Novack: Influences: “Thanking Mr. Cohn”
December 2021:Denise Duhamel: “On Emily Dickinson”
November 2021: Donald Wellman: “Heilbronn or How I Became a Poet”
October 2021: Julie Marie Wade: On “Meditation XVII” by John Donne
September 2021: Sheila Murphy: “Sound. Silence. Privacy. Confidence.”
August 2021: David B. Axelrod, with a Note by Alfred Corn: “Advice from Rilke”
July 2021: Kim Shuck: “Hopscotch and Bank Robbers”;
June 2021: Phillip Lopate, Poetic Influence, John Keats’ “When I Have Fears”;
May 2021: Gail Newman: “Alphabets of a Lost Tongue”;
March 2021:Sandy McIntosh: Writing Influences: Joseph Heller: “Why Should I Write Another Book?”
February 2021: Philip F. Clark: “Sustain Wonder”
January 2021: Denise Low: “The Womanly Lineage of Writerly Mentors”
December 2020: Dennis Barone: “These Hills, This Mountain-Laurel”
November 2020: Tony Trigilio: “Passing Through Our Brief Moment in Time: A Poetics of the Ordinary”
October 2020: Alfred Corn: “A Writer’s Beginnings”
September 2020: Poetic Influences: Eileen R. Tabios: “Angela Manalang Gloria”
August 2020:David B. Axelrod: “The Value of the Local: Red Meat for the Poets On Long Island”
July 2020: Julie Marie Wade: “Small Doors”
June 2020: David Lehman: Poetic Influences: Ben Jonson’s “My Picture Left in Scotland”
May 2020: Denise Low: “The Fourth Dimension of Writing”
April 2020: Stephanie Strickland: “Late To the Party”
March 2020: Barbara Novack: “Singing the Melody”
February 2020: Geoffrey O’Brien: “WHERE DID POETRY COME FROM: Three Early Encounters”,
January 2020: Amy Gerstler: “Ships In Bottles”
December 2019: Poetic Influences: Mary Mackey on John Keats’s “Negative Capability”
November 2019: Basil King: “The Past is as Present as I Want the Future to Be”
October 2019: David Lehman: “Opening Shot”
September 2019: Daniel Morris: “Reading Spivack/Reading Myself”
August 2019: Indigo Moor: “A Long Overdue Apology”
July 2019: Lynne Thompson: “Father Tongue”
June 2019: Kim Shuck: “Maybe the Pepperwood Tree Taught Me to Write”
May 2019: Sandy McIntosh: “Two Bookstores and Two Capote Intrusions”
April 2019: Eileen R. Tabios: “My First Book”
March 2019: Jason McCall: “Who Are You?”
February 2019: Burt Kimmelman: “My Tutelage”
January 2019: Jane Hirshfield: “A Continuously Accidental and Precarious Thing”
December 2018: Mary Mackey: “Fever and Jungles: On Becoming a Poet”
November 2018: Phillip Lopate: “The Poetry Years”
October 2018: Denise Duhamel: “Mr. Rogers and Me”