Ember Babiak

So it’s happening this Saturday! A bunch of bands, a bunch of poets, a freaking MOHAWK BOOTH. Incredible pizza. Community. Rowdiness. Come on out. The weather forecast isn’t great, but as much as the madman and his minions have f’d up NOAA, I’m not sure how reliable it is, anyway. I’ll be there, rain or shine, delivering a set that includes some of my old favorites, and some new work, too, all declaimed from memory.

The first sestina I wrote, as part of a class in formal poetry, absolutely stunk. It was more proof of concept than poem. But I was hooked. Something about writing to the end of the line intrigued me, as did the way pairs of the repetons (the end-words that get repeated in a proscribed pattern) approach and depart from each other like lovers. I know this puts me in a tiny minority. I’ve seen sestina… Read more: Poetic Resonance Imaging: Writing To The End Of The Line

I’ll be 59 month after next, and we didn’t realize I was on the spectrum until I was 56. That’s a long time to struggle and not know why. Part of why I went undiagnosed for so long for both ADHD (in my late 30s) and autism is because both of those are terribly misunderstood, especially in regards to how they present in girls and women (I was one of those doodling gifted-program girlies). RFK… Read more: Filling A Need: For Autism Awareness, The Raw Feed

I’ve long admired the oft-anthologized “Atomic Pantoum,” by Peter Meinke, who taught me poetry and mentored me through my time at Eckerd College, where I got my BA in Creative Writing at the writing workshop there (at the time, the only undergraduate workshop in the country). I like it so much I sought permission from his press to republish it when I was serving as Literary Editor for Quarterly Journal of Ideology: A Critique of… Read more: Pantoum for Peace

As someone who has long identified myself as a butterfly/hummingbird gardener, back when I was publishing poems and getting ready to publish my book, it tickled me that poets exposing their work to the world for the first time were considered to be “emerging,” since that’s what we call it when butterflies exit their chrysalis. What do we call it when a poet, after a self-imposed exile of more than a decade, decides to re-enter… Read more: Re-emergence