Rebecca Aronson’s first book of poetry, Creature, Creature, was the winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Press poetry contest and will be published in winter of 2006. She has poems appearing (now or recently) in Tin House, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Cranky, Rio Grande Review, and others. Currently Rebecca is an Assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, where she also serves as co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.

Advice for young writers:

My best advice for writers is to read and to write and to pay attention to the world around you. Writing is obvious: you aren’t a writer if you only think about writing; you have to do it. Reading is equally important—so much can be learned from what others have done before (hundreds of years before and last week). Writers absorb crucial information about how to write by reading what others have written: information about sound and rhythm, about using metaphor and simile, about line breaks and white space and pacing. All these (and more) are a writer’s tools; practice using them. 

A hundred orange poppies with their crepe-paper wings.

Seed heads full of syrup and germ.

Someone once stayed

who all winter thought about death.

Evidence: the overgrown, un-groomed apple tree blooms first.

When the apple blossoms shrivel and blow away,

the tulips.

When the tulips lose their sleek shells,

a sash of tiny daisies spreads across the yard.

Forsythia. Viburnum. Fiddleheads unrolling…

I know just where Kansas is from here. (We went last weekend

in our green car. We parked on the street in Lawrence.

No stockinged legs protruding from the undercarriage,

though there was a small dog

yelping on its string leash.

None of us expressed a wish for anything.)

The sun is in the garden

making lanterns of the petals.

Storm-seeds sow funnels

in the leaves.