Quote of the Day from The Poetry of Strangers

Yesterday, I finished reading The Poetry of Strangers: What I learned traveling America with a typewriter by Brian Sonia-Wallace. I mostly enjoyed the book, but I am still sorting out what I really think of the book. I took some notes and hope to organize them into a review in a few days.

Here is one line from Sonia-Wallace's book on what the people he wrote for seemed to expect in a poem when they ordered one.

I developed a little rubric for myself, four elements that I saw crop up again and again in poems that got the best reactions from people. I started to check these off in my poems as I wrote: something beautiful, something surprising, something familiar — and a joke, so that the work didn’t take itself too seriously (kindle location 330).