trying to paint

She loved poetry. She loved making. She loved painting. She loved “mucking around.” In answer to a question one of my students asked after a reading about process, she said she thought when she was writing she was actually trying to paint. Sometimes she did think it might have been better to be working with her hands. In later years, in the many readings she gave throughout the country, she read equally from her own work and the work of others which sometimes annoyed those who had invited her to read. When I last heard her read, she read poems by Emily Dickinson, Miroslav Valek, Edwin Muir, John Haislip and Laura Riding with an equal number of her own. She believed that poetry, that literature, was a communal endeavor.

—Maxine Scates, recalling her friend the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Uncovering What Is Brave: A Remembrance of Brigit Pegeen Kelly” by Joy Manesiotis and Maxine Scates, Plume #151 March 2024

poet praising poet

I love a good homage poem—a poet praising another poet—knowing how hard it is to write even a few poems that make themselves known and at the same time matter.

too close

If you hew to another’s style, you risk parody when you meant homage.