Writing a Living #1

Writing a Living: with Hal Sundt

Hal Sundt talks poetry, writing, and why it matters, with prizewinning poet and Columbia graduate student Elizabeth Metzger, and she reads a new piece just published on Catch & Release, “Essential Tremor”:

ESSENTIAL TREMOR

—by Elizabeth Metzger

Hell is just the clapper of the bell

that announces you
are no longer the beloved.

The world turns out to be one humid mediocre day.

I take a machete to a tulip.

Where death is something you can fuck up
the broken heart rolls three blank dice.

The psychic says it says a lot.

Everything blushes but my ego
now dumbed down for “sleep.”

A crowd of phenom-hermits
expects a planet to arrive.

I hear in heaven
the angel has a harelip

and she is willing to watch you shake.

Elizabeth Metzger is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University and an instructor in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Her work received the 2013 Narrative Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Narrative, Tupelo Quarterly, H.O.W. Journal, The Common, and The Los Angeles Review. She is an assistant poetry editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Hal Sundt is pursuing his MFA in Nonfiction at Columbia University where he is also an instructor in the Undergraduate Writing Program and a consultant in the Writing Center. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Wilder Voice and Uinterview.com.
Featured Image by Chuck Kuan

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